BLOOD LINES
WHEN the Lord founded His Servant Nation of Israel, He was most careful to choose and keep the selected blood lines pure. Nowadays, scholars, experts and theologians have imbibed Satan’s false doctrine of miscegenation or mixture of races. They no longer see the necessity of keeping racial types separate and distinct, but think that all should be embraced in brotherly (and other sorts of) love, resulting in a uniform khaki colour for the human race.
However, God called out a people to be separated and sanctified to His purpose, and the Bible emphasises this fact time and again. This is not to propound a ‘Master Race’ doctrine, nor to decry our duty to love and help our fellow men of all races and creeds. Israel’s mission was ultimately to bring blessing to all people, but only if they did it in God’s way. They were to be the Servant Nation, specially organised to carry out His purposes for the world. They were given certain privileges, such as being the custodians of His Word and Law, but their responsibilities were correspondingly great, and they fell short of God’s standards many a time. Thus they were fallible, and therefore clearly not a ‘Master Race”. Those who breed animals and plants will understand God’s intentions in requiring these people to be separate.
Believers in miscegenation have picked on certain instances throughout the Bible where they feel that God has relaxed His rules, but they have not studied the subject in sufficient depth to search out the truth of the matter, having taken only those parts which seem to support their theories. For instance, they love to quote from Acts 17:26:
‘And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;’
At first glance this does appear to support their case, but if we compare other translations we can see that in this instance, the King James’ Bible has not translated the verse particularly well. The New International Version says:
‘From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live’.
This is clearer, for it makes it plain that the verse means that all mankind is descended from Adam.
Moffatt says:
‘All nations He has created from a common origin’
and Ferrar Fenton:
‘He made by one every race of men’
This makes it quite clear that God was not referring to Israel, but to mankind generally, and we know from the study of blood groups and DNA that there is no one particular blood group or type of DNA which distinguishes one nation from another. Perhaps, one day, there may be some genetic factor which distinguishes true Israelites from other races, but not in the present state of the art. God’s distinction is by His personal election of the people of Israel’s stock to do a specific work for Him in the world.
Noah
The Patriarchs of the Old Testament were of the line of Noah, from his son Shem, which is why they are called Shemites, or Semites. Nowadays, few people really know what the true Shemitic type is, thinking that they are the dark haired and darker skinned people who call themselves Arabs and Jews. In fact, this term is not applicable to their race, but to their languages, for the races have become very intermingled with those of non-Shemitic stock.
In Genesis 6:8 we read:
‘These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God’.
Notice that the Scripture says that Noah ‘was perfect in his generations.’ This means that his blood lines were kept pure directly from his ancestor Seth, and free from contamination by the descendants of Cain, who was banished for the murder of his brother.
As to the racial type of the Semites, we have the opinion of several experts in the field, and quote some of their findings below. The Amorites who are mentioned in the quotation were Semitic tribes who had come from the Mesopotamian area, and who had pushed westwards to settle on the western coast of Palestine. The name ‘Amorite’ means ‘Westerner’.
Professor A. H. Sayce wrote in 1925 in his publication, The Hittites:
‘The Hittites and Amorites therefore mingled together in the mountains of Palestine, like the two races which ethnologists tell us go to form the modern Kelt. But the Egyptian monuments teach us that they were of very different origin and character. The Hittites were a people with yellow skins and “Mongoloid “features, whose receding foreheads, oblique eyes and protruding upper jaws are represented as faithfully on their own monuments as they are on those of Egypt, so that we cannot accuse the Egyptian artists of caricaturing their enemies. If the Egyptians have made the Hittites ugly, it was because they were so in reality. The Amorites, on the contrary, were a tall and handsome people. They are depicted with white skins, blue eyes and reddish hair, all the characteristics, in fact, of the white race. Professor Petrie points out their resemblance to the Dardanians of Asia Minor, who form an intermediate link between the white-skinned tribes of the Greek Seas, and the fair complexioned Libyans of North Africa.
Professor Sayce also states, in Higher Criticism and the Monuments (1894):
‘The blond Amorite race was widely spread … in short, the mountainous country of Palestine was largely in the hands of Amorite tribes’.
From these Semitic people came the family of Abraham, who lived in Ur of the Chaldees, or Mesopotamia. They were named Hebrews, after their ancestor Eber or Heber, and they were akin to the Amorites, as we can see from the researches of Professor C. S Coon, an anthropologist who wrote in The Races of Europe (published in 1939) as follows:
‘It can be shown that the Sumerians, who lived over five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia are almost identical in skull and face form with living Englishmen, and that pre-dynastic Egyptian skulls can be matched in a seventeenth century plague Pit.’
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, to whom Professor Sayce referred, was an English Egyptologist, and the following quotation is from his Sources of Human History (1922):
‘The Semitic Amorites seem to have been akin to the Hyksos migration, which streamed down from Syria into Egypt…’
Sir Leonard Woolley, in Ur of the Chaldees (1929) remarks:
‘I have already said that we do not quite know who the Sumerians are; tradition would make them come from the East; the study of their bones and skulls shows that they were a branch of the Indo-European stock of the human race resembling what is called a Caucasian man, a people who in stature and appearance might pass as modern Europeans rather than as Orientals’.
Sumerians and Hyksos
From these passages we may infer that the Semites, later Sumerians, Arnorites, Hebrews and Hyksos were from the same stock, and this explains why Abraham was favourably received by the kings who were in residence in Palestine when he passed through, and why the Hyksos Pharaohs of Egypt were hospitable to him and his family, and later, to the descendants of Jacob, his grandson.
Joseph
‘And Pharaoh called Joseph’s name Zaphnathpaaneah; and he gave him to wife Asenath the daughter of Potipherah priest of On. And Joseph went out over all the land of Egypt.’ (Genesis 41:45)
From this passage it appears that Joseph, who was respected by the reigning Pharaoh and had been given high office by him, married an Egyptian woman, Asenath. However, she would have been a member of the Hyksos, who had settled in Goshen, in the Nile Delta. Potiphera, her father, was a priest in the city of On. This was in northern Egypt, and the ruins are located nowadays in the suburbs of modern Cairo. On was called Heliopolis in Greek, meaning the city of the sun, which points to the worship of Ra, the sun god. Ra is the Egyptian equivalent of the One True God, manifested through His spectacular creation, the sun. However, as the dwellers in that region were the Hyksos at that time of Egyptian history, the religion was probably closely akin to the original Hebrew religion. The ancient city was famous for its obelisks, and two of them survive today amongst the descendants of the Israelites, – one on the Embankment in London, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, and the other in New York’s Central Park. It was, according to Harper’s Bible Dictionary, one of the five cities in Egypt where Hebrew speaking people would worship, so there was obviously no clash in their religions. Potiphera probably practised the old religion of Melchizedek. Therefore, Joseph did not marry an Egyptian woman of a different race or religion. The question of a mixed marriage does not refer to Joseph, nor could it, if God’s purposes were to be carried out, for Joseph inherited the Israel birthright. His children had to be of the chosen seed.
Moses
After the Hyksos kings were overthrown by Egyptians from the Southern kingdom, the Hebrews who had been living comfortably in the Land of Goshen, on the Nile Delta, began to be oppressed, until, after a sojourn of 400 years, they rebelled against their rulers, and departed for the wilderness of Sinai and the Promised Land. Their leader was Moses, who had been reared in the royal palace. He had had to spend time in the wilderness himself, and whilst he was there he met and married a Midianite girl, the daughter of a priest of Midian. Here the advocates of mixed races will rub their hands with glee and cry that Moses had married someone of a different race. This is not so, for the Midianites were distant kin of the Israelites, and of the same Indo-European stock, for after Sarah’s death, Abraham took Keturah as his concubine. She was a princess of Midian. One of her sons was called Midian, so the Midianites, or at least, members of their ruling classes, were Hebrews. The Midianites are sometimes known as Kenites in the Old Testament:
‘And he looked on the Kenites, and took up his parable, and said, Strong is thy dwelling place, and thou puttest thy nest in a rock.’ (Nurnbers 24:2 1)
The name means a ‘coppersmith’, and there is a word in Arabic which is of the same derivation ‘quain’, which means a ‘smith’. Thus, the Midianites were skilled workmen, not simply nomadic herdsmen. The mountains of their area were rich in copper. The Midianite territory was mainly east of the Gulf of Aqabah, and it was mountainous.
In Moses’ day, the Midianites controlled the Sinai peninsula. Seeing that Moses probably knew his way around Sinai, and that the Midianites were descended from Abraham, and probably of a Sumerian stock originally, it is natural that he sought refuge in their territory, for he would have been under sentence of death in Egypt. Moses met up with a priest of Midian named Reuel or Jethro, who would have been a patriarch or a priest-king. His name of Reuel is significant, in that it incorporates the element ‘El’, the name of the triune God in the early chapters of Genesis. ‘Elohim’ is the plural lsingular God, as it is a plural word. In the first place it referred to the Creator. Jesus cried ‘Eloi, Eloi’ when He was on the cross, and this was calling God as the Father, but ‘Elohim’ is the plural form, and embodies the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Right at the beginning of Scripture we are introduced to this concept of a Trinity.
Reuel, or Jethro would have had a knowledge of the ancient religion revealed to his ancestors, and he and Moses would have recognised their physical and religious kinship. Moses later married Jethro’s daughter, Zipporah thus keeping the racial lines pure. They had two sons, Gershom and Eliezer. It is important to realise that this was not a ‘mixed marriage’, although I have heard it cited in favour of the modern creed of miscegenation.
After the terrible plagues of Egypt, Moses led his people out of Egypt on their long journey to the Promised Land of Palestine, and the multitude which entered the wilderness of Sinai did not wholly consist of Israelites, for we are told in Exodus 12:36-38:
‘And the Lord gave the people favour in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they lent unto them such things as they required. And they spoiled the Egyptians. And the children of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot that were men, beside children. And a mixed multitude went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, even very much cattle.’
This shows that many Egyptians, scared by the recent catastrophic events in their country, had allied themselves with the Children of Israel, and joined them on their trek. These people could not have failed to influence the Israelites with their culture and beliefs, which probably accounted for the construction and worship of the golden calf whilst Moses was in the Mount, receiving the Law. When he came down from the mountain, he was exceedingly angry, as he might well have been, and he set about cleansing the people, especially the Levites, from mixed marriages and idolatry.
The Lord had allowed the sojourn and enslavement in Egypt to teach the Israelites the meaning of freedom, which was one of the lessons which really went home, for to this day their descendants have a dread of being ruled over by alien powers. This does not mean that their own rulers will not be so misguided as to take steps to hand over their authority in order to further their own ends and aggrandisement, but the rank and file of the people are deeply disturbed and unhappy under alien rule, and eventually rise up to take their liberties back again.
Ruth
Another point which the miscegenationists like to raise is that King David was descended from a Moabitess. The Moabites were people who descended from an incestuous relationship by Lot with one of his daughters, and they settled to the east of the Dead Sea. They were therefore anathema in God’s eyes, and incurred severe condemnation in the Book of Deuteronomy. This, at first sight, again looks as though God has gone against His own precepts, but if we examine the case carefully, we shall see that this is not the case. The story is told in the Book of Ruth, and is familiar to Bible students, for it teaches a valuable lesson about loyalty. However, this is not all the story. God had earmarked the family from which He wanted the rulers of Israel to come. The prophecy went as far back as the time of Jacob, for God had appointed the royal tribe to be Judah, as we are told in Genesis 49:10,
‘The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be’.
In this verse the Lord is saying that the royal house must always contain Judahite blood lines, but although the rulers or governors were to be of Judah, the kings and princes were to be specifically of the line of David, a descendant of Judah. Saul had been chosen as king by the people after they had rejected theocracy, or rule by God. The Lord had known that they would do this, and He allowed it to happen. Although Saul was not of the tribe of Judah, but of the tribe of Benjamin, the Lord allowed him to be crowned so that the people might learn by their mistakes, and be guided by His word from the prophets. When Saul proved to be unsatisfactory, God sent His prophet to crown the chosen king. David seemed an unlikely choice, for he was the youngest of a family of brothers, and a mere lad. The people would have expected a seasoned warrior king. David did not disappoint in his high office, not even in his ancestry, which would have had to be scrutinised carefully by the priests and scribes of Levi, who were versed in these matters. It is not feasible that they would let another king take office whose lineage was suspect. Therefore, the fact that his ancestress was called a Moabitess would have been thoroughly investigated.
If we study the Book of Ruth we find that the family of Elimelech had been driven to take refuge in the land of Moab because of a famine in their homeland of Bethlehem-Judah. They settled there, and the sons married wives from the resident people. Moab lay to the east of the Dead Sea, and if we look at a map, we shall see that Moab was a fairly short distance from Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and that the Israelites could have journeyed round the top of the Dead Sea in order to reach Moab, without having to cross any water apart from the river Jordan, which drains into the north of the Dead Sea. This was probably not the first time that people from Israel had settled in Moab, and it is highly likely that there was an enclave of Israelites there, especially at a time of famine, when many would have gone to seek a better living there. The sons of Elimelech and Naomi married women of the area, and after the sons and Elimelech died, Naomi wished to return to Bethlehem, which must have recovered from the famine by that time. One of her daughters-in-law wanted to go with her, rather than remain in Moab. I will quote the lovely passage in which Ruth declares her loyalty to her widowed mother-in-law, because it is one of the beautiful passages of the Old Testament, and strikes a chord in our hearts:
‘And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, 1 will go; and where thou lodgest, 1 will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will 1 die, and there will 1 be buried.. the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.’ (Ruth 1:16-17)
Once settled in Bethlehem, Naomi and Ruth were poor, being widows, but the law of Israel allowed for charity to the poor, and they were allowed to glean the fields of a kinsman, Boaz, after the barley had been reaped. Ruth came to the notice of Boaz, who was a wealthy man, and he later married her, as the elders pointed out to him that it was his duty to marry his kinsman’s widow and raise children to inherit Elimelech’s property. He did this, and thus became the great grandfather of David. The fact that the elders had advised Boaz to marry Ruth proves that they did not consider her to be an alien, so they must have known that she was of Israelitish stock. Boaz’ obligation to raise children for his dead kinsman reflects the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38, verse 6 onwards. So it was quite within God’s will that Ruth should be David’s ancestress:
‘And Salmon begat Boaz, and Boaz begat Obed, And Obed begat Jesse, and Jesse begat David.’ – (Ruth 4:21-22)
Where the Israelites transgressed against this law of keeping the blood lines pure, the descendants were excluded from taking full part in the nation’s life. In the Ten Commandments we are reminded of this Law, in Exodus 20:5-6:
‘… for 1 the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments’.
This Law is reinforced by Deuteronomy 23:2-3, in which we are told that this ban could extend as far as the tenth generation:
‘A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the Lord. An Ammonite or Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord, even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the Lord for ever:’
This referred to worship in the Temple, so it is plain that Ruth could not have been of Moabite stock, otherwise her great grandson could never have become king of Israel. This is a scripture often quoted to suggest that God had relaxed His laws by that time – but He said ‘forever’ Whom do we believe, God or the opinion of mankind?
The present day Jews are, as we have pointed out, a very mixed race, for they were intermarrying extensively with the neighbouring peoples, and had also done so when they were in captivity in Babylon. On the return of the remnant to rebuild Jerusalem and Judah, Ezra tells that there was a purge of those who had made mixed marriages:
‘And Shechaniah the son of Jehiel, one of the sons of Elam, answered and said unto Ezra, We have trespassed against our God, and have taken strange wives of the people of the land: yet now there is hope in Israel concerning this thing. Now therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives, and such as are born of them, according to the counsel of my lord, and of those that tremble at the commandment of our God, and let it be done according to the law.’ – (Ezra 10:2-3)
In New Testament Times
At the time of Our Lord the people of Edom had greatly infiltrated the land, and their ruler, Herod, was of this race. These were the people who were referred to in Revelation as the ‘synagogue of Satan’.
‘1 know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and 1 know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.’ – (Revelation 2:9)
These are among the people who call themselves Israel nowadays, and we have been warned, again in Revelation:
‘And 1 heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.’ – (Revelation 18:4-5)
This is a severe condemnation, but the Edomites, although descended from Abraham by Hagar, were not of the Birthright, and their subsequent history proves that they were often a thorn in Israel’s side. They became idolaters, and sought to lead their brethren astray, for it rankled with them that their ancestor and his mother had been turned out into the Wilderness by Abraham, and they resented the fact that Isaac inherited the Promises.
We should be as careful as were the Israelites of old to keep our blood lines as pure as we can. It is a biological fact that people of mixed blood can produce a ‘throw- back’, so that white parents have been known to produce a child of a differnt colour, and vice versa. God’s Laws may seem harsh or outdated to us in these modern times with our humanist ideas, but He gave them to us for our own good, and we flout them at our peril.
