Q&A: Are Everyone Descendants of Noah?
Are Everyone Descendants of Noah?
Question
Have a good week,
I tried to check whether everyone really is descended from Noah, or whether this applies mainly to most people concentrated in the continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe. If everyone is descended from Noah, that would mean everyone has to begin from one person in the Fertile Crescent less than 4,500 years ago, so how did they get to America and Australia, for example?
Their history is also continuous and completely disconnected from what Noah could have known in his time, and there are also ancient cultures in Asia and Africa.
Answer
I didn’t really understand your claim. Are you asking whether all human beings in the world descended from Noah? I’m not sure about that. But beyond that, geographic dispersal proves nothing. There are various theories about how plants and animals got from one continent to another.
Discussion on Answer
Did you see the follow-up?
Are there other Jewish sources besides the Torah, for example midrashim, that state explicitly that everyone is descended from Noah or not?
For example, there are the seven Noahide commandments, so if not everyone is descended from Noah, are they all still obligated in them?
According to the information about the migration of Homo sapiens, it’s much more than 4,500 years—and more than 6,000 years altogether.
So is it possible that Noah really lived in a much earlier period, or is it simply that not everyone is his descendant?
The whole point is that according to science humanity has continued for much more than 6,000 years, and already all over the world, and their history and culture remained continuous despite the biblical flood (which itself is documented in various places, but in a much more local way).
The question of the reliability of the traditional dating has been discussed here in several places. Search the site. Basically, there is no necessity to view it as a factual claim.
I tried searching for the phrase “the reliability of the traditional dating.” Is there something organized on this, aside from the missing years of the Persian period and what there was since the Exodus from Egypt?
I’m referring to the Middle Stone Age and the New Stone Age up to the period of our forefather Abraham.
I don’t remember. M dealt with this here more than once.
Indeed, the more precise question is whether all human beings today are descended from Noah. See the spread of humans around the world here:
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%A0%D7%93%D7%99%D7%93%D7%AA_%D7%94%D7%90%D7%93%D7%9D_%D7%94%D7%A7%D7%93%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%9F
There’s also the map they made based on this here:
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%92%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%9D_%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%98%D7%95%D7%9B%D7%95%D7%A0%D7%93%D7%A8%D7%99
If there was a global flood that wiped out humanity less than 4,500 years ago—that is, if everyone is descended from Noah, who lived at that time—then there shouldn’t be any genomic traces left from beyond 4,500 years ago (mutation gaps and the like).