Eucharistic Minister of the Roman Catholic Church Joe Issa is fascinated by a discovery that appears to disprove a passage in the Bible, stating that if it is true, it is one of the fascinating developments of the 21st century.
“I am fascinated by such discoveries. To think that DNA can be preserved for so long and help crack a 4,000-year-old case is beyond imagination.
“You often hear of people being charged with a severe crime many years after it was committed because of new DNA evidence.
“But going back 4,000 years to prove the bible wrong is really pushing the envelop,” Issa said, of a study which found that “the ancient Canaanites, who lived 3,000 – 4,000 years ago were not wiped out, as the Bible suggests, but went on to become modern-day Lebanese,” a revelation that attracted over 4,000 comments on The Telegraph article.
It cited a passage in Deuteronomy, in which God had ordered the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites: “You shall not leave alive anything that breathes. However, you shall utterly destroy them so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods.”
However, it seems they did not destroy them all, the research said. By comparing the DNA of the ancient and modern inhabitants, the scientists found over 90 percent of the ancestry of modern-day Lebanese derived from the Canaanites.
“The Bible reports the destruction of the Canaanite cities and the annihilation of its people; if true, the Canaanites could not have directly contributed genetically to present-day populations,” the article quoted researchers in the American Journal of Human Genetics as saying.
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Moreover, the widespread destruction of Canaanite cities between the Bronze and Iron Ages is not supported by any archaeological evidence found, citing, for example, cities on the Levant coast such as Sidon and Tyre which show the continuity of occupation until the present day.
“We show that present-day Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age,” the researchers were quoted as saying.
They compared five whole genomes, obtained from the base of skulls from ancient remains found in the area of Sidon, with those of 99 Lebanese living in the region today, before coming to their conclusion, the article reported.
“One of the most exciting parts of the research was to get DNA out of the specimens,” one of the researchers, Chris Tyler-Smith, was quoted as telling ABC.
The modern-day Lebanese are “likely to be direct descendants of the Canaanites, but they have in addition a small proportion of Eurasian ancestry that may have arrived via conquests by distant populations such as the Assyrians, Persians, or Macedonians,” Dr Marc Haber, of The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, was quoted as telling the Independent.
Joseph Issa, Jamaica, Sea, Sand and Sun 