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17 June, 2019 - 23:00 Dr. Eran Elhaik

Resurrecting the Ancient Israelites From the Valley of Dry Bones

Read Later Print

The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones prophecy is one of the most powerful prophecies of the
prophet Ezekiel. In this vision, Ezekiel finds himself in a valley full of dry human bones of
Israelite origins. He is asked to revive them, bring them hope, and lead them to the land of
Israel.

The hand of the LORD was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me
in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw
a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.… And as I was
prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I
looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no
breath in them… Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel.”
Ezekiel 37

Engraving of “The Vision of The Valley of Dry Bones” by Gustave Doré.

(Opoterser~commonswiki / Public Domain )

Ezekiel’s Vision and Jewish Ancestry

For the past decades, paleogenomics, the field dealing with ancient genomes, has been
fulfilling Ezekiel’s vision by extracting DNA from dry bones and telling their stories with
increasing accuracy. As Ezekiel envisioned, only dry (and cold) bones can tell stories.

Humidity and heat accelerate the degradation of the DNA beyond repair. At times, even the
samples we can use are of poor quality, leading to an inability to put together all the pieces of
the DNA and thus resulting in incomplete stories from the bones, as if told by stuttering
tongueless skeletons. These are only some of the challenges we face in our efforts to
reconstruct the past.

Ezekiel’s prophecies were written in the 6th century after several exiles of the Judeans to
Babylon (601-582 BC). The importance of this vision to the debate on the continuity of the
Jewish people became apparent very quickly. Already in the Talmud, two interpretations were
offered.

The first considered it a complete allegory. The second considered it a reality where the
Babylonian exiles returned to Israel and continued the Judaean bloodline. Zionism, a secular
movement that recruited the Bible to serve its needs whenever necessary, considered the
State of Israel the ultimate fulfilment of Ezekiel prophecies and called to the ingathering of the
exiles.

The question of whether Ezekiel’s vision has been correctly interpreted is not anachronistic
and has offshoots in history, archeology, linguistics, and genetics – the latest battlefield of the
primordialists and constructivists. Did contemporary Jews descend from the ancient Israelites ,
as the primordialists claim? Or did they descend from people who converted to Judaism and
only later on adopted nationalist ideas as the constructivist camp argues?

Of course, one look at Ethiopian, Yemenite, Ashkenazic, and Russian Jews can lend credence to
the constructivist view without digging up a single bone. However, the primordialist camp has
ready-made answers to that question. It criticized the weak diaspora Jews who succumbed to
assimilation and embraced the Jews who remained as authentic Israelites.

Using a “Jewish Type” to Study Jewish Ancestry

It has always been clear that the only way to decide which Jewish communities represent the
ancient Israelites most accurately, is by going back to the source – Israel. Therefore, in the late
19th century a search for the jüdische Typus , the “ Jewish type ” was launched.

Jewish types from Popular Science Monthly 1898. (Ineuw / Public Domain )

Anthropologists explored Palestine, studied the native inhabitants, and compared their
anthropological measures to Jews. The results of these studies were incredibly disappointing,
at least to the Ashkenazic Jews who carried out these studies and craved to see the jüdische
Typus reflected in the mirror. As it turned out, Yemenite Jews held the greatest
anthropological resemblance to the wandering Bedouins, the poster boys of the Patriarchs.
Ashkenazic Jews, by contrast, resembled the Caucasian type more than anything else (Efron
1994).

This was not what Zionist leaders wanted to hear amid the formation of their nationalistic
movement that called Jews to return to their homeland, fight and, maybe, die for it.

The research question had to be rephrased. Abandoning any desire to see a jüdische Typus
specimen ever again, the new research paradigm focused on studying features common to all
contemporary Jews and deriving the characteristics of the jüdische Typus from them (Elhaik
2016). Unfortunately, no biomarker for Jewishness was ever found in a way that excluded Jews
from non-Jews. Yet the question remained: which of all the Jews, who have nothing in
common except religion, best represent the Ancient Israelites. The answer among the
Ashkenazic Jewish researchers was almost unanimous – let us mold the jüdische Typus in our
own image.

To support these claims, geneticists began producing a large body of literature aimed to
support and prove two things: 1) their genetic superiority and 2) their genetic ties to Israel, by
showing their resemblance to Levantine populations (Falk 2017), whose own claims to the land
were later dismissed on account of being “work migrants.” Kirsh (2003) demonstrated how
human geneticists and physicians have consistently manipulated their results and emphasized
the sociological and historical aspects of their research using their work as a vehicle for
establishing a national identity and confirming the Zionist narrative.

The mammoth in the room was the lack of any genetic evidence from the ancient Israelites
that would allow testing the similarity of their DNA to that of modern-day Jews. Since no one
imagined that mammoths would ever come to life, they avoided the problem completely.
It was much easier to pretend that modern-day Jews and Ashkenazic Jews, in particular, are
living replicas of the ancient Israelites who not only were all related to one another but also
resisted the gene flow from non-Jews all this time. Despite the imagined link between modern-
day Jews and the ancient Israelites, the claims of the primordialist camp became well accepted
in the direct-to-consumer industry.

The myth of the “Cohen gene” (Skorecki et al. 1997) or “Four mitochondrial mothers” (Behar
et al. 2004) produced by the members of this camp became the bedrock of the Genetic
Judaism era, where one needs only to order a genetic test from the right company to receive a
Jewishness certificate.

A genetic test from the right company can help one claim Jewish ancestry. ( Rospoint / Adobe
Stock)

Using DNA to Study Jewish Ancestry

Paleogenomics changed all that. Thanks to advances in the field, it became possible to extract
DNA from ancient people and identify their mitochondrial haplogroups and even autosomal
DNA. This remarkable progress allowed the unthinkable: A semi-revival of the ancient Israelites
from their dry bones and the recovery of their stories.

The DNA extracted from those bones can tell us who these people were, what they looked like,
what they ate, and what diseases they carried (Nielsen et al. 2017; Prohaska et al. 2019). We
can trace their migration routes to gain a deeper understanding of where we all came from.
Yes, they can also tell us how similar those ancient Israelites were to modern-day people, and
if modern-day Jews are not the lineal descendants of the ancient Israelites, we can find out
who is.

To answer some of these questions, I developed the Primeval DNA test , which allows
comparing the DNA of modern-day people to the ancient DNA extracted from skeletons of
various people including the Ancient Israelites .

The ancient Israelites were obtained from three regions Motza Tachtit at the territory of the
tribe of Benjamin, Peqi’in (Naphtali), and Raqefet Cave (Manasseh), near the valley of the
Raqefet river.

A Paradise Lost: In Search of Eden

This 2,800-Year-Old Stele Tells A Bible Story From A Different Point Of View

The Pros and Cons of the Armory of the Ancient Israelites

The dry bones from Raqefet Cave. (Reuveny / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

The bones still cannot speak, but in their own way, they have a lot to teach us and allow us to
reevaluate our core beliefs.

The answer to the question who is closer to the ancient Israelites rests in the DNA extracted
from some 50 bones of ancient Israelites and Judaeans with many more to come. Are modern-
Jews mostly Middle Easterners (or ancient Israelites) like Ostrer claims? Hardly.
Upon examining the results of 80 Jews from various communities, I could not help noticing the
irony considering how the progress in population genetics validated the findings of the 19th-
century anthropologists who combed the Levant in an honest search for the jüdische Typus
before the repercussions of their findings became clear and their results were deplored on
every stage. The most similar Jews to the ancient Israelites who left their dry bones in the
Raqefet Valley in Israel were Yemenite and Mesopotamian Jews, but that genetic similarity
was less than 15%, on average, in agreement with our previous analyses ascribing less than 5%
ancient Levantine ancestry to Ashkenazic Jews (Das et al. 2017).

Yet, these averages mask the high heterogeneity among all Jewish communities. Some people
may share the highest similarity with Gal (named after Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot), a
young Neolithic woman – only 6200 years old, and other people may find that they are close to
Abraham, a Turkish man (E1b1) who led a group of Anatolians to what he must to have felt
was the promised land.

Due to the many population replacements that the area experienced, we can see a diverse
range of mitochondrial haplogroups that vary over time. Among the most common lineages
are J2, K1a, and T. An analysis of Judaeans from the first century AD confirmed the prevalence
of the T haplogroup (Matheson et al. 2009), found today in less than 10% of Ashkenazic Jews.
Unsurprisingly, not a single skeleton matches the alleged four Ashkenazic Jewish mothers,
whose origin is in prehistoric Europe (Costa et al. 2013). As expected, an exact match with one
of those “mothers” was found in Neolithic Spain (Haak et al. 2015).

Tracing the Origins of Europe, through Goddess Europa, Back to Jeroboam?

Genetic Breakthrough Changes the Way We View Skin Color

A History of the Crusades As Told by Crusaders' DNA

This is the only match from prehistoric times to date, but it is reasonable to expect many more
to come as ancient DNA from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus will be sequenced.
Interestingly, the Y chromosomal haplotypes of the ancient Israelites are typically E1b1 and T1
haplotypes, commonly found today in Africa with lower frequencies in the Middle East and
Europe.

We can expect that future tests covering other regions of the world would be able to explain
the remaining portion of the elusive Jewish ancestry. Only time will say if “Genetic Jewishness”
will evolve onto “Primeval Jewishness” where people define their Jewishness based on their
similarity to ancient Israelites and Jews rather than modern ones.

Think about it the next time that your favorite genetic testing company tells you that you have
some “Ashkenazic Jewish ancestry.”

Top image: Ezekiel’s vision ‘The Valley of Dry Bones”. Source: loswl / CC BY-SA 2.0 .

By Dr Eran Elhaik

References

Section:

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Dr. Eran

Dr. Eran Elhaik completed a Ph.D. in Molecular Evolution in the University of Houston, studying
the evolution of Mammalian Genomes. He completed two post-docs at Johns

Hopkins, working on population genetics and mental disorders. Dr. Elhaik is currently a
lecturer... Read More

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17 June, 2019 - 23:00 Dr. Eran Elhaik

Resurrecting the Ancient Israelites From the Valley of Dry Bones

Read Later Print

The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones prophecy is one of the most powerful prophecies of the
prophet Ezekiel. In this vision, Ezekiel finds himself in a valley full of dry human bones of
Israelite origins. He is asked to revive them, bring them hope, and lead them to the land of
Israel.

The hand of the LORD was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me
in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw
a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.… And as I was
prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I
looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no
breath in them… Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel.”
Ezekiel 37

Engraving of “The Vision of The Valley of Dry Bones” by Gustave Doré.

(Opoterser~commonswiki / Public Domain )

Ezekiel’s Vision and Jewish Ancestry

For the past decades, paleogenomics, the field dealing with ancient genomes, has been
fulfilling Ezekiel’s vision by extracting DNA from dry bones and telling their stories with
increasing accuracy. As Ezekiel envisioned, only dry (and cold) bones can tell stories.

Humidity and heat accelerate the degradation of the DNA beyond repair. At times, even the
samples we can use are of poor quality, leading to an inability to put together all the pieces of
the DNA and thus resulting in incomplete stories from the bones, as if told by stuttering
tongueless skeletons. These are only some of the challenges we face in our efforts to
reconstruct the past.

Ezekiel’s prophecies were written in the 6th century after several exiles of the Judeans to
Babylon (601-582 BC). The importance of this vision to the debate on the continuity of the
Jewish people became apparent very quickly. Already in the Talmud, two interpretations were
offered.

The first considered it a complete allegory. The second considered it a reality where the
Babylonian exiles returned to Israel and continued the Judaean bloodline. Zionism, a secular
movement that recruited the Bible to serve its needs whenever necessary, considered the
State of Israel the ultimate fulfilment of Ezekiel prophecies and called to the ingathering of the
exiles.

The question of whether Ezekiel’s vision has been correctly interpreted is not anachronistic
and has offshoots in history, archeology, linguistics, and genetics – the latest battlefield of the
primordialists and constructivists. Did contemporary Jews descend from the ancient Israelites ,
as the primordialists claim? Or did they descend from people who converted to Judaism and
only later on adopted nationalist ideas as the constructivist camp argues?
Of course, one look at Ethiopian, Yemenite, Ashkenazic, and Russian Jews can lend credence to
the constructivist view without digging up a single bone. However, the primordialist camp has
ready-made answers to that question. It criticized the weak diaspora Jews who succumbed to
assimilation and embraced the Jews who remained as authentic Israelites.

Using a “Jewish Type” to Study Jewish Ancestry

It has always been clear that the only way to decide which Jewish communities represent the
ancient Israelites most accurately, is by going back to the source – Israel. Therefore, in the late
19th century a search for the jüdische Typus , the “ Jewish type ” was launched.

Jewish types from Popular Science Monthly 1898. (Ineuw / Public Domain )

Anthropologists explored Palestine, studied the native inhabitants, and compared their
anthropological measures to Jews. The results of these studies were incredibly disappointing,
at least to the Ashkenazic Jews who carried out these studies and craved to see the jüdische
Typus reflected in the mirror. As it turned out, Yemenite Jews held the greatest
anthropological resemblance to the wandering Bedouins, the poster boys of the Patriarchs.
Ashkenazic Jews, by contrast, resembled the Caucasian type more than anything else (Efron
1994).

This was not what Zionist leaders wanted to hear amid the formation of their nationalistic
movement that called Jews to return to their homeland, fight and, maybe, die for it.

The research question had to be rephrased. Abandoning any desire to see a jüdische Typus
specimen ever again, the new research paradigm focused on studying features common to all
contemporary Jews and deriving the characteristics of the jüdische Typus from them (Elhaik
2016). Unfortunately, no biomarker for Jewishness was ever found in a way that excluded Jews
from non-Jews. Yet the question remained: which of all the Jews, who have nothing in
common except religion, best represent the Ancient Israelites. The answer among the
Ashkenazic Jewish researchers was almost unanimous – let us mold the jüdische Typus in our
own image.

To support these claims, geneticists began producing a large body of literature aimed to
support and prove two things: 1) their genetic superiority and 2) their genetic ties to Israel, by
showing their resemblance to Levantine populations (Falk 2017), whose own claims to the land
were later dismissed on account of being “work migrants.” Kirsh (2003) demonstrated how
human geneticists and physicians have consistently manipulated their results and emphasized
the sociological and historical aspects of their research using their work as a vehicle for
establishing a national identity and confirming the Zionist narrative.

The mammoth in the room was the lack of any genetic evidence from the ancient Israelites
that would allow testing the similarity of their DNA to that of modern-day Jews. Since no one
imagined that mammoths would ever come to life, they avoided the problem completely.

It was much easier to pretend that modern-day Jews and Ashkenazic Jews, in particular, are
living replicas of the ancient Israelites who not only were all related to one another but also
resisted the gene flow from non-Jews all this time. Despite the imagined link between modern-
day Jews and the ancient Israelites, the claims of the primordialist camp became well accepted
in the direct-to-consumer industry.

The myth of the “Cohen gene” (Skorecki et al. 1997) or “Four mitochondrial mothers” (Behar
et al. 2004) produced by the members of this camp became the bedrock of the Genetic
Judaism era, where one needs only to order a genetic test from the right company to receive a
Jewishness certificate.

A genetic test from the right company can help one claim Jewish ancestry. ( Rospoint / Adobe
Stock)

Using DNA to Study Jewish Ancestry

Paleogenomics changed all that. Thanks to advances in the field, it became possible to extract
DNA from ancient people and identify their mitochondrial haplogroups and even autosomal
DNA. This remarkable progress allowed the unthinkable: A semi-revival of the ancient Israelites
from their dry bones and the recovery of their stories.

The DNA extracted from those bones can tell us who these people were, what they looked like,
what they ate, and what diseases they carried (Nielsen et al. 2017; Prohaska et al. 2019). We
can trace their migration routes to gain a deeper understanding of where we all came from.
Yes, they can also tell us how similar those ancient Israelites were to modern-day people, and
if modern-day Jews are not the lineal descendants of the ancient Israelites, we can find out
who is.

To answer some of these questions, I developed the Primeval DNA test , which allows
comparing the DNA of modern-day people to the ancient DNA extracted from skeletons of
various people including the Ancient Israelites .

The ancient Israelites were obtained from three regions Motza Tachtit at the territory of the
tribe of Benjamin, Peqi’in (Naphtali), and Raqefet Cave (Manasseh), near the valley of the
Raqefet river.

A Paradise Lost: In Search of Eden

This 2,800-Year-Old Stele Tells A Bible Story From A Different Point Of View

The Pros and Cons of the Armory of the Ancient Israelites

The dry bones from Raqefet Cave. (Reuveny / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

The bones still cannot speak, but in their own way, they have a lot to teach us and allow us to
reevaluate our core beliefs.

The answer to the question who is closer to the ancient Israelites rests in the DNA extracted
from some 50 bones of ancient Israelites and Judaeans with many more to come. Are modern-
Jews mostly Middle Easterners (or ancient Israelites) like Ostrer claims? Hardly.

Upon examining the results of 80 Jews from various communities, I could not help noticing the
irony considering how the progress in population genetics validated the findings of the 19th-
century anthropologists who combed the Levant in an honest search for the jüdische Typus
before the repercussions of their findings became clear and their results were deplored on
every stage. The most similar Jews to the ancient Israelites who left their dry bones in the
Raqefet Valley in Israel were Yemenite and Mesopotamian Jews, but that genetic similarity
was less than 15%, on average, in agreement with our previous analyses ascribing less than 5%
ancient Levantine ancestry to Ashkenazic Jews (Das et al. 2017).

Yet, these averages mask the high heterogeneity among all Jewish communities. Some people
may share the highest similarity with Gal (named after Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot), a
young Neolithic woman – only 6200 years old, and other people may find that they are close to
Abraham, a Turkish man (E1b1) who led a group of Anatolians to what he must to have felt
was the promised land.

Due to the many population replacements that the area experienced, we can see a diverse
range of mitochondrial haplogroups that vary over time. Among the most common lineages
are J2, K1a, and T. An analysis of Judaeans from the first century AD confirmed the prevalence
of the T haplogroup (Matheson et al. 2009), found today in less than 10% of Ashkenazic Jews.
Unsurprisingly, not a single skeleton matches the alleged four Ashkenazic Jewish mothers,
whose origin is in prehistoric Europe (Costa et al. 2013). As expected, an exact match with one
of those “mothers” was found in Neolithic Spain (Haak et al. 2015).

Tracing the Origins of Europe, through Goddess Europa, Back to Jeroboam?

Genetic Breakthrough Changes the Way We View Skin Color

A History of the Crusades As Told by Crusaders' DNA

This is the only match from prehistoric times to date, but it is reasonable to expect many more
to come as ancient DNA from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus will be sequenced.
Interestingly, the Y chromosomal haplotypes of the ancient Israelites are typically E1b1 and T1
haplotypes, commonly found today in Africa with lower frequencies in the Middle East and
Europe.

We can expect that future tests covering other regions of the world would be able to explain
the remaining portion of the elusive Jewish ancestry. Only time will say if “Genetic Jewishness”
will evolve onto “Primeval Jewishness” where people define their Jewishness based on their
similarity to ancient Israelites and Jews rather than modern ones.

Think about it the next time that your favorite genetic testing company tells you that you have
some “Ashkenazic Jewish ancestry.”

Top image: Ezekiel’s vision ‘The Valley of Dry Bones”. Source: loswl / CC BY-SA 2.0 .

By Dr Eran Elhaik

References

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Dr. Eran

Dr. Eran Elhaik completed a Ph.D. in Molecular Evolution in the University of Houston, studying
the evolution of Mammalian Genomes. He completed two post-docs at Johns

Hopkins, working on population genetics and mental disorders. Dr. Elhaik is currently a
lecturer... Read More

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topics artifact found unknown time frame Cubit Numerology Please introduce yourself The
Paracas Skulls The Healing Stones Bible origins More Suggested Books PARTNERS 17 June,
2019 - 23:00 Dr. Eran Elhaik Resurrecting the Ancient Israelites From the Valley of Dry Bones
Read Later Print The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones prophecy is one of the most powerful
prophecies of the prophet Ezekiel. In this vision, Ezekiel finds himself in a valley full of dry
human bones of Israelite origins. He is asked to revive them, bring them hope, and lead them
to the land of Israel. The hand of the LORD was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of
the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth
among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very
dry.… And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came
together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered
them, but there was no breath in them… Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the
people of Israel.” Ezekiel 37 Engraving of “The Vision of The Valley of Dry Bones” by Gustave
Doré. (Opoterser~commonswiki / Public Domain ) Ezekiel’s Vision and Jewish Ancestry For the
past decades, paleogenomics, the field dealing with ancient genomes, has been fulfilling
Ezekiel’s vision by extracting DNA from dry bones and telling their stories with increasing
accuracy. As Ezekiel envisioned, only dry (and cold) bones can tell stories. Humidity and heat
accelerate the degradation of the DNA beyond repair. At times, even the samples we can use
are of poor quality, leading to an inability to put together all the pieces of the DNA and thus
resulting in incomplete stories from the bones, as if told by stuttering tongueless skeletons.
These are only some of the challenges we face in our efforts to reconstruct the past. Ezekiel’s
prophecies were written in the 6th century after several exiles of the Judeans to Babylon (601-
582 BC). The importance of this vision to the debate on the continuity of the Jewish people
became apparent very quickly. Already in the Talmud, two interpretations were offered. The
first considered it a complete allegory. The second considered it a reality where the Babylonian
exiles returned to Israel and continued the Judaean bloodline. Zionism, a secular movement
that recruited the Bible to serve its needs whenever necessary, considered the State of Israel
the ultimate fulfilment of Ezekiel prophecies and called to the ingathering of the exiles. The
question of whether Ezekiel’s vision has been correctly interpreted is not anachronistic and has
offshoots in history, archeology, linguistics, and genetics – the latest battlefield of the
primordialists and constructivists. Did contemporary Jews descend from the ancient Israelites ,
as the primordialists claim? Or did they descend from people who converted to Judaism and
only later on adopted nationalist ideas as the constructivist camp argues? Of course, one look
at Ethiopian, Yemenite, Ashkenazic, and Russian Jews can lend credence to the constructivist
view without digging up a single bone. However, the primordialist camp has ready-made
answers to that question. It criticized the weak diaspora Jews who succumbed to assimilation
and embraced the Jews who remained as authentic Israelites. Using a “Jewish Type” to Study
Jewish Ancestry It has always been clear that the only way to decide which Jewish
communities represent the ancient Israelites most accurately, is by going back to the source –
Israel. Therefore, in the late 19th century a search for the jüdische Typus , the “ Jewish type ”
was launched. Jewish types from Popular Science Monthly 1898. (Ineuw / Public Domain )
Anthropologists explored Palestine, studied the native inhabitants, and compared their
anthropological measures to Jews. The results of these studies were incredibly disappointing,
at least to the Ashkenazic Jews who carried out these studies and craved to see the jüdische
Typus reflected in the mirror. As it turned out, Yemenite Jews held the greatest
anthropological resemblance to the wandering Bedouins, the poster boys of the Patriarchs.
Ashkenazic Jews, by contrast, resembled the Caucasian type more than anything else (Efron
1994). This was not what Zionist leaders wanted to hear amid the formation of their
nationalistic movement that called Jews to return to their homeland, fight and, maybe, die for
it. The research question had to be rephrased. Abandoning any desire to see a jüdische Typus
specimen ever again, the new research paradigm focused on studying features common to all
contemporary Jews and deriving the characteristics of the jüdische Typus from them (Elhaik
2016). Unfortunately, no biomarker for Jewishness was ever found in a way that excluded Jews
from non-Jews. Yet the question remained: which of all the Jews, who have nothing in
common except religion, best represent the Ancient Israelites. The answer among the
Ashkenazic Jewish researchers was almost unanimous – let us mold the jüdische Typus in our
own image. To support these claims, geneticists began producing a large body of literature
aimed to support and prove two things: 1) their genetic superiority and 2) their genetic ties to
Israel, by showing their resemblance to Levantine populations (Falk 2017), whose own claims
to the land were later dismissed on account of being “work migrants.” Kirsh (2003)
demonstrated how human geneticists and physicians have consistently manipulated their
results and emphasized the sociological and historical aspects of their research using their
work as a vehicle for establishing a national identity and confirming the Zionist narrative. The
mammoth in the room was the lack of any genetic evidence from the ancient Israelites that
would allow testing the similarity of their DNA to that of modern-day Jews. Since no one
imagined that mammoths would ever come to life, they avoided the problem completely. It
was much easier to pretend that modern-day Jews and Ashkenazic Jews, in particular, are
living replicas of the ancient Israelites who not only were all related to one another but also
resisted the gene flow from non-Jews all this time. Despite the imagined link between modern-
day Jews and the ancient Israelites, the claims of the primordialist camp became well accepted
in the direct-to-consumer industry. The myth of the “Cohen gene” (Skorecki et al. 1997) or
“Four mitochondrial mothers” (Behar et al. 2004) produced by the members of this camp
became the bedrock of the Genetic Judaism era, where one needs only to order a genetic test
from the right company to receive a Jewishness certificate. A genetic test from the right
company can help one claim Jewish ancestry. ( Rospoint / Adobe Stock) Using DNA to Study
Jewish Ancestry Paleogenomics changed all that. Thanks to advances in the field, it became
possible to extract DNA from ancient people and identify their mitochondrial haplogroups and
even autosomal DNA. This remarkable progress allowed the unthinkable: A semi-revival of the
ancient Israelites from their dry bones and the recovery of their stories. The DNA extracted
from those bones can tell us who these people were, what they looked like, what they ate, and
what diseases they carried (Nielsen et al. 2017; Prohaska et al. 2019). We can trace their
migration routes to gain a deeper understanding of where we all came from. Yes, they can also
tell us how similar those ancient Israelites were to modern-day people, and if modern-day
Jews are not the lineal descendants of the ancient Israelites, we can find out who is. To answer
some of these questions, I developed the Primeval DNA test , which allows comparing the DNA
of modern-day people to the ancient DNA extracted from skeletons of various people including
the Ancient Israelites . The ancient Israelites were obtained from three regions Motza Tachtit
at the territory of the tribe of Benjamin, Peqi’in (Naphtali), and Raqefet Cave (Manasseh), near
the valley of the Raqefet river. A Paradise Lost: In Search of Eden This 2,800-Year-Old Stele
Tells A Bible Story From A Different Point Of View The Pros and Cons of the Armory of the
Ancient Israelites The dry bones from Raqefet Cave. (Reuveny / CC BY-SA 3.0 ) The bones still
cannot speak, but in their own way, they have a lot to teach us and allow us to reevaluate our
core beliefs. The answer to the question who is closer to the ancient Israelites rests in the DNA
extracted from some 50 bones of ancient Israelites and Judaeans with many more to come.
Are modern-Jews mostly Middle Easterners (or ancient Israelites) like Ostrer claims? Hardly.
Upon examining the results of 80 Jews from various communities, I could not help noticing the
irony considering how the progress in population genetics validated the findings of the 19th-
century anthropologists who combed the Levant in an honest search for the jüdische Typus
before the repercussions of their findings became clear and their results were deplored on
every stage. The most similar Jews to the ancient Israelites who left their dry bones in the
Raqefet Valley in Israel were Yemenite and Mesopotamian Jews, but that genetic similarity
was less than 15%, on average, in agreement with our previous analyses ascribing less than 5%
ancient Levantine ancestry to Ashkenazic Jews (Das et al. 2017). Yet, these averages mask the
high heterogeneity among all Jewish communities. Some people may share the highest
similarity with Gal (named after Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot), a young Neolithic woman
– only 6200 years old, and other people may find that they are close to Abraham, a Turkish
man (E1b1) who led a group of Anatolians to what he must to have felt was the promised land.
Due to the many population replacements that the area experienced, we can see a diverse
range of mitochondrial haplogroups that vary over time. Among the most common lineages
are J2, K1a, and T. An analysis of Judaeans from the first century AD confirmed the prevalence
of the T haplogroup (Matheson et al. 2009), found today in less than 10% of Ashkenazic Jews.
Unsurprisingly, not a single skeleton matches the alleged four Ashkenazic Jewish mothers,
whose origin is in prehistoric Europe (Costa et al. 2013). As expected, an exact match with one
of those “mothers” was found in Neolithic Spain (Haak et al. 2015). Tracing the Origins of
Europe, through Goddess Europa, Back to Jeroboam? Genetic Breakthrough Changes the Way
We View Skin Color A History of the Crusades As Told by Crusaders' DNA This is the only match
from prehistoric times to date, but it is reasonable to expect many more to come as ancient
DNA from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus will be sequenced. Interestingly, the Y
chromosomal haplotypes of the ancient Israelites are typically E1b1 and T1 haplotypes,
commonly found today in Africa with lower frequencies in the Middle East and Europe. We can
expect that future tests covering other regions of the world would be able to explain the
remaining portion of the elusive Jewish ancestry. Only time will say if “Genetic Jewishness” will
evolve onto “Primeval Jewishness” where people define their Jewishness based on their
similarity to ancient Israelites and Jews rather than modern ones. Think about it the next time
that your favorite genetic testing company tells you that you have some “Ashkenazic Jewish
ancestry.” Top image: Ezekiel’s vision ‘The Valley of Dry Bones”. Source: loswl / CC BY-SA 2.0 .
By Dr Eran Elhaik References Section: NewsHuman OriginsReligions Tags:
EzekielbibleisraelDNAprophecyJewishZionismIsraelitesdescendantsancestry Read the
Comments (2 Comments) Sponsored Content This Device May End… daily-gadget-deals.com
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‘New Evidence’… Dr. Eran Dr. Eran Elhaik completed a Ph.D. in Molecular Evolution in the
University of Houston, studying the evolution of Mammalian Genomes. He completed two
post-docs at JohnsHopkins, working on population genetics and mental disorders. Dr. Elhaik is
currently a lecturer... Read More Related Articles on Ancient-Origins 5 March, 2016 - 14:44
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Sightings? A curious circular object shown on a French counter that was minted between 1656
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High-Tech Stonework of the Ancients: Unsolved Mysteries of Master Engineers There are many
stone artifacts from the ancient world made from the hardest stone on the planet such as
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Colors They’re Alive! Megalithic Sites Are More than Just Stone The revolutionary invention of
the wheel The Great Pyramid at Giza and Noah’s Ark: Are we coming closer to an
understanding of the Ancient Mind? Part I Ancient Places The Anomaly of King Orry’s 5000-
Year-Old Grave The Isle of Man is a small, beautiful island in the Irish Sea and is a self-
governing British Crown dependency. This island has a rich history as it is associated with the
Vikings and has many important archaeological sites. Why Isn’t This Map in the History Books?
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Sacred California Mountain Mount Shasta, located near the Oregon border in northern
California, holds the distinction of being one of the world’s preeminent sacred mountains. It is
recognized as an eligible Native American... Mysterious Worlds: Travels to the Faerie and
Shamanic Realms Pharaoh Akhenaten: An Alternative View of the Heretic King Changing Colors
and Scampering Across the Night Sky: What Did the Ancients Say about Sirius? Cracking the
Code to Discover Ancient Tarot Symbolism and Forgotten Universal Knowledge The Secret
Strategic Plans of Darius the Great Our Mission At Ancient Origins, we believe that one of the
most important fields of knowledge we can pursue as human beings is our beginnings. And
while some people may seem content with the story as it stands, our view is that there exists
countless mysteries, scientific anomalies and surprising artifacts that have yet to be discovered
and explained.The goal of Ancient Origins is to highlight recent archaeological discoveries,
peer-reviewed academic research and evidence, as well as offering alternative viewpoints and
explanations of science, archaeology, mythology, religion and history around the globe.We’re
the only Pop Archaeology site combining scientific research with out-of-the-box
perspectives.By bringing together top experts and authors, this archaeology website explores
lost civilizations, examines sacred writings, tours ancient places, investigates ancient
discoveries and questions mysterious happenings. Our open community is dedicated to digging
into the origins of our species on planet earth, and question wherever the discoveries might
take us. We seek to retell the story of our beginnings. Ancient Image Galleries Ancient Origins
© 2013 - 2019Disclaimer - Terms of Publication - Privacy Policy & Cookies - Advertising Policy -
Submissions - We Give Back - Contact us A project of Stella Novus - Development and
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frame Cubit Numerology Please introduce yourself The Paracas Skulls The Healing Stones Bible
origins More Suggested Books PARTNERS 17 June, 2019 - 23:00 Dr. Eran Elhaik Resurrecting
the Ancient Israelites From the Valley of Dry Bones Read Later Print The Vision of the Valley of
Dry Bones prophecy is one of the most powerful prophecies of the prophet Ezekiel. In this
vision, Ezekiel finds himself in a valley full of dry human bones of Israelite origins. He is asked
to revive them, bring them hope, and lead them to the land of Israel. The hand of the LORD
was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a
valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many
bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry.… And as I was prophesying, there
was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and
tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in
them… Then he said to me: “Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel.” Ezekiel 37
Engraving of “The Vision of The Valley of Dry Bones” by Gustave Doré.
(Opoterser~commonswiki / Public Domain ) Ezekiel’s Vision and Jewish Ancestry For the past
decades, paleogenomics, the field dealing with ancient genomes, has been fulfilling Ezekiel’s
vision by extracting DNA from dry bones and telling their stories with increasing accuracy. As
Ezekiel envisioned, only dry (and cold) bones can tell stories. Humidity and heat accelerate the
degradation of the DNA beyond repair. At times, even the samples we can use are of poor
quality, leading to an inability to put together all the pieces of the DNA and thus resulting in
incomplete stories from the bones, as if told by stuttering tongueless skeletons. These are only
some of the challenges we face in our efforts to reconstruct the past. Ezekiel’s prophecies
were written in the 6th century after several exiles of the Judeans to Babylon (601-582 BC).
The importance of this vision to the debate on the continuity of the Jewish people became
apparent very quickly. Already in the Talmud, two interpretations were offered. The first
considered it a complete allegory. The second considered it a reality where the Babylonian
exiles returned to Israel and continued the Judaean bloodline. Zionism, a secular movement
that recruited the Bible to serve its needs whenever necessary, considered the State of Israel
the ultimate fulfilment of Ezekiel prophecies and called to the ingathering of the exiles. The
question of whether Ezekiel’s vision has been correctly interpreted is not anachronistic and has
offshoots in history, archeology, linguistics, and genetics – the latest battlefield of the
primordialists and constructivists. Did contemporary Jews descend from the ancient Israelites ,
as the primordialists claim? Or did they descend from people who converted to Judaism and
only later on adopted nationalist ideas as the constructivist camp argues? Of course, one look
at Ethiopian, Yemenite, Ashkenazic, and Russian Jews can lend credence to the constructivist
view without digging up a single bone. However, the primordialist camp has ready-made
answers to that question. It criticized the weak diaspora Jews who succumbed to assimilation
and embraced the Jews who remained as authentic Israelites. Using a “Jewish Type” to Study
Jewish Ancestry It has always been clear that the only way to decide which Jewish
communities represent the ancient Israelites most accurately, is by going back to the source –
Israel. Therefore, in the late 19th century a search for the jüdische Typus , the “ Jewish type ”
was launched. Jewish types from Popular Science Monthly 1898. (Ineuw / Public Domain )
Anthropologists explored Palestine, studied the native inhabitants, and compared their
anthropological measures to Jews. The results of these studies were incredibly disappointing,
at least to the Ashkenazic Jews who carried out these studies and craved to see the jüdische
Typus reflected in the mirror. As it turned out, Yemenite Jews held the greatest
anthropological resemblance to the wandering Bedouins, the poster boys of the Patriarchs.
Ashkenazic Jews, by contrast, resembled the Caucasian type more than anything else (Efron
1994). This was not what Zionist leaders wanted to hear amid the formation of their
nationalistic movement that called Jews to return to their homeland, fight and, maybe, die for
it. The research question had to be rephrased. Abandoning any desire to see a jüdische Typus
specimen ever again, the new research paradigm focused on studying features common to all
contemporary Jews and deriving the characteristics of the jüdische Typus from them (Elhaik
2016). Unfortunately, no biomarker for Jewishness was ever found in a way that excluded Jews
from non-Jews. Yet the question remained: which of all the Jews, who have nothing in
common except religion, best represent the Ancient Israelites. The answer among the
Ashkenazic Jewish researchers was almost unanimous – let us mold the jüdische Typus in our
own image. To support these claims, geneticists began producing a large body of literature
aimed to support and prove two things: 1) their genetic superiority and 2) their genetic ties to
Israel, by showing their resemblance to Levantine populations (Falk 2017), whose own claims
to the land were later dismissed on account of being “work migrants.” Kirsh (2003)
demonstrated how human geneticists and physicians have consistently manipulated their
results and emphasized the sociological and historical aspects of their research using their
work as a vehicle for establishing a national identity and confirming the Zionist narrative. The
mammoth in the room was the lack of any genetic evidence from the ancient Israelites that
would allow testing the similarity of their DNA to that of modern-day Jews. Since no one
imagined that mammoths would ever come to life, they avoided the problem completely. It
was much easier to pretend that modern-day Jews and Ashkenazic Jews, in particular, are
living replicas of the ancient Israelites who not only were all related to one another but also
resisted the gene flow from non-Jews all this time. Despite the imagined link between modern-
day Jews and the ancient Israelites, the claims of the primordialist camp became well accepted
in the direct-to-consumer industry. The myth of the “Cohen gene” (Skorecki et al. 1997) or
“Four mitochondrial mothers” (Behar et al. 2004) produced by the members of this camp
became the bedrock of the Genetic Judaism era, where one needs only to order a genetic test
from the right company to receive a Jewishness certificate. A genetic test from the right
company can help one claim Jewish ancestry. ( Rospoint / Adobe Stock) Using DNA to Study
Jewish Ancestry Paleogenomics changed all that. Thanks to advances in the field, it became
possible to extract DNA from ancient people and identify their mitochondrial haplogroups and
even autosomal DNA. This remarkable progress allowed the unthinkable: A semi-revival of the
ancient Israelites from their dry bones and the recovery of their stories. The DNA extracted
from those bones can tell us who these people were, what they looked like, what they ate, and
what diseases they carried (Nielsen et al. 2017; Prohaska et al. 2019). We can trace their
migration routes to gain a deeper understanding of where we all came from. Yes, they can also
tell us how similar those ancient Israelites were to modern-day people, and if modern-day
Jews are not the lineal descendants of the ancient Israelites, we can find out who is. To answer
some of these questions, I developed the Primeval DNA test , which allows comparing the DNA
of modern-day people to the ancient DNA extracted from skeletons of various people including
the Ancient Israelites . The ancient Israelites were obtained from three regions Motza Tachtit
at the territory of the tribe of Benjamin, Peqi’in (Naphtali), and Raqefet Cave (Manasseh), near
the valley of the Raqefet river. A Paradise Lost: In Search of Eden This 2,800-Year-Old Stele
Tells A Bible Story From A Different Point Of View The Pros and Cons of the Armory of the
Ancient Israelites The dry bones from Raqefet Cave. (Reuveny / CC BY-SA 3.0 ) The bones still
cannot speak, but in their own way, they have a lot to teach us and allow us to reevaluate our
core beliefs. The answer to the question who is closer to the ancient Israelites rests in the DNA
extracted from some 50 bones of ancient Israelites and Judaeans with many more to come.
Are modern-Jews mostly Middle Easterners (or ancient Israelites) like Ostrer claims? Hardly.
Upon examining the results of 80 Jews from various communities, I could not help noticing the
irony considering how the progress in population genetics validated the findings of the 19th-
century anthropologists who combed the Levant in an honest search for the jüdische Typus
before the repercussions of their findings became clear and their results were deplored on
every stage. The most similar Jews to the ancient Israelites who left their dry bones in the
Raqefet Valley in Israel were Yemenite and Mesopotamian Jews, but that genetic similarity
was less than 15%, on average, in agreement with our previous analyses ascribing less than 5%
ancient Levantine ancestry to Ashkenazic Jews (Das et al. 2017). Yet, these averages mask the
high heterogeneity among all Jewish communities. Some people may share the highest
similarity with Gal (named after Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot), a young Neolithic woman
– only 6200 years old, and other people may find that they are close to Abraham, a Turkish
man (E1b1) who led a group of Anatolians to what he must to have felt was the promised land.
Due to the many population replacements that the area experienced, we can see a diverse
range of mitochondrial haplogroups that vary over time. Among the most common lineages
are J2, K1a, and T. An analysis of Judaeans from the first century AD confirmed the prevalence
of the T haplogroup (Matheson et al. 2009), found today in less than 10% of Ashkenazic Jews.
Unsurprisingly, not a single skeleton matches the alleged four Ashkenazic Jewish mothers,
whose origin is in prehistoric Europe (Costa et al. 2013). As expected, an exact match with one
of those “mothers” was found in Neolithic Spain (Haak et al. 2015). Tracing the Origins of
Europe, through Goddess Europa, Back to Jeroboam? Genetic Breakthrough Changes the Way
We View Skin Color A History of the Crusades As Told by Crusaders' DNA This is the only match
from prehistoric times to date, but it is reasonable to expect many more to come as ancient
DNA from Eastern Europe and the Caucasus will be sequenced. Interestingly, the Y
chromosomal haplotypes of the ancient Israelites are typically E1b1 and T1 haplotypes,
commonly found today in Africa with lower frequencies in the Middle East and Europe. We can
expect that future tests covering other regions of the world would be able to explain the
remaining portion of the elusive Jewish ancestry. Only time will say if “Genetic Jewishness” will
evolve onto “Primeval Jewishness” where people define their Jewishness based on their
similarity to ancient Israelites and Jews rather than modern ones. Think about it the next time
that your favorite genetic testing company tells you that you have some “Ashkenazic Jewish
ancestry.” Top image: Ezekiel’s vision ‘The Valley of Dry Bones”. Source: loswl / CC BY-SA 2.0 .
By Dr Eran Elhaik References Section: NewsHuman OriginsReligions Tags:
EzekielbibleisraelDNAprophecyJewishZionismIsraelitesdescendantsancestry Read the
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‘New Evidence’… Dr. Eran Dr. Eran Elhaik completed a Ph.D. in Molecular Evolution in the
University of Houston, studying the evolution of Mammalian Genomes. He completed two
post-docs at JohnsHopkins, working on population genetics and mental disorders. Dr. Elhaik is
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