spotlight wrote:huckelberry wrote:
Hi Huckleberry,
Much of the online material about Jewish DNA tends to be motivated by various agendas. But the question raised is an interesting one regardless of the motivation. Is there any DNA evidence that the Jews were slaves in Egypt? If when they entered Egypt per the Biblical account they were few in number and subsequently grew before being freed by Moses then there ought to be some DNA evidence to support that history. From what I can find online that doesn't seem to be the case. If we go to wikipedia (hopefully without bias or agenda) we find only the following:
These (Jewish) populations showed a high degree of endogamy and were part of a larger Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish group. By principal component analysis, these North African groups were orthogonal to contemporary populations from North and South Morocco, Western Sahara, Tunisia, Libya, and
Egypt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews
I'll return to this later if I come across a better source that addresses this question.
Spotlight, I read a bunch of the wikipedia link,it was interesting and certainly appears to me to be much more reliable material. I could not see anything that attempted to clarify Hebrew and Egyptian intermarriage in the second millennium bc. however. Distinctions discussed were relationships of Jewish people's middle eastern background with their admixture of genetic backgrouund of populations in the areas of the diaspora.
It may be worth considering the solid historical details for the time period,second millennium bc. Hypothetically considering no Moses and no bondage in Egypt, Israeal is still a group of Canaanite people with some other fertile crescent peoples living in the area. Consider, these people live adjacent to Egypt. Egypt conquers and militarily occupies this area in some of this time period. There would have been trade. Would you expect anybody to believe it is even remotely possible that there was no genetic intermixture in those conditions in those times?
During Biblical times, first millennium relationship trade, tribute, war etc continued. There was even a Jewish temple built in Egypt. The opportunities for mixture are so extensive that I would think any study failing to find mixture must be, until very extensive confirmation, be viewed as mistaken, perhaps unable to see the relevant detail.