How did the different races come about?
Question:
I've read over some of your answers on race. Is there any way to know just when different races did come about? Do you think that Adam and Eve would have had to have been a different nationality?
Answer:
In our modern terminology, Eve was a clone of Adam, with some modifications. "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. ... And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place. Then the rib which the LORD God had taken from man He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. And Adam said: 'This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.'" (Genesis 2:7, 21-23). We preserve this in our language to this day. Both the words "woman" and "female" means "from man." Since Eve came from Adam, they could not have been different nationalities. In fact, since they were the only two people in the world at that time, there couldn't have been any nations for them to be from different nationalities.
The idea of race doesn't exist in the Bible. All of mankind descends from Adam and Eve. Paul told the Athenians, "And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth" (Acts 17:26). Instead, the Bible talks about different nationalities. The nations arose after God scatters mankind when they attempted to build the tower of Babel by confusing everyone's language. "So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth" (Genesis 11:8-9). People then divided "according to their families, according to their languages, in their lands, according to their nations" (Genesis 10:31).
As people isolated themselves in various regions the mixing of genes stopped and each region began to show variations that predominated in the isolated populations. It is those variations that we incorrectly refer to as "race."
People sometimes wonder how we can gain such a diverse set of looks from one set of parents. The answer is found in genetics. I would recommend the article "The Origin of 'Races'" by Dr. Bert Thompson, for a good explanation of how this came to be. Since our genes are made up of pairs. The simple explanation is that Adam and Eve would have had a blend of every possible pair. In scientific terms, they would have been heterozygous. From them, they would have had children of a wide variety of colors and characteristics. As families became isolated due to the language barrier, certain characteristics became dominant in each family. Today we label these variations as "races," but in reality, they are stagnated characteristics caused by regional inbreeding. Hence Adam could not have been black-skinned because all of mankind would have been black. Nor could Adam have been white-skinned because all of mankind would have been white. Adam and Eve's skin color would have been somewhere in the middle.
