USPTactical45

Do you guys think it's possible that Arabs and Jews are related from a single "forefather" Abraham? What does the genetic evidence say?

If your unfamiliar Abraham had 2 sons who were to lead great peoples/empires. Isaac was the father of the Jews and Ishmael father of the Arabs and both were sons of Abraham.

Salam

Arabs are from two branches; Adnan, and Qahtan. The Qahtanis are originally from Yemen (south of arabia). They existed way before Abraham took Ishmael and Hagar to Mecca.

When Hagar and her son Ishmael settled in Mecca, some Arab bedouins (Qahtans) joined them. Then Ishmael married one of their women, and from him the Adnanis came.

Sorry for not posting references, I'm in a bit of a hurry. Will post them with more details later.

OneInFundieville

Any two populations of organisms have shared descent.

The Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) would be the latest point at which all individuals in the overall population have a common ancestor.

Estimates vary when this may have been but humanity's MRCA could have ranged from the "3rd millennium BC to 1st millennium AD."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_re...ommon_ancestor

For a localized Middle Eastern population, one could assume it would have been more recent.

Stepping back from the MRCA is the All Common Ancestors (ACA) point or the Identical Ancestors Point (IAP). The IAP is the "point in a given population's past where each individual alive turned out to be either the ancestor of every individual alive now, or to have no living descendants at all."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_ancestors_point

The difficult to date, the IAP for all humans globally has been estimated to between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago.

What this is saying is that every human alive at the IAP in ancient times would either be a) an ancestor of every living human today, or b) an ancestor of no living humans today (such as the childless or their "genes eventually dying out.")

Again, for a localized Middle Eastern population, the IAP would likely be significantly more recent than that.

If a historical Abraham is put at 2000 BCE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham), would make statistical sense that all Arabs and Jews are descended from him.

But...

Reaching back that far into a population's history anybody that is an ancestor for anybody is getting close to being an ancestor for everybody. Quite likely there are many individuals from 4,000 years ago from which every living human is descended.

And there's also the other issue of tying this to any specific historical personage.

judge

Well according to the hebrew bible the jews were not from a single forefather.
Abraham had 318 fighting men, who were all circumcised, according to Genesis 14-17, so presumably most of the jews were immediately descendents of one of these fighting men and not Abraham.

Robert Byers

Yes Jews and Arabs are from the same stock. While some other peoples did assimulate into the Arab gang still they come from Ismael.
In fact , i believe, the reason for the arabs being rich and protected by their wealth is the promise by God, if i remember, to protect even this offspring of abraham.
Robert Byers

Dlx2

The patriarchs and their siblings were basically a means to explain the relationships between various Semitic tribes and nations. The Israelites explained the nomadism of the Arabs by invoking the "curse" of Ishmael. The Israelites explained relationships with the various Canaanite tribes via the mythological figure of Esau and his children. Relationships between the various tribes of Israel and the character of each tribe was explained according to the twelve sons of Yakov.

You see similar myths describing the relationships of cities or tribes in many other myths/legends (e.g. The Iliad, The Odyssey, the epic of Sundjata, the epic of Gil-Gamesh, the Aeneid, etc). There is no reason to believe that the descent of the Patriarchs in Bereshit doesn't follow the same general pattern.