Of what value is the Bible for anthropological research? Does it contain information that can be used to further our knowledge of ancient Afro-Asiatic and Afro-Arabian peoples? It sure does!
Perhaps the most significant application of anthropology to the Bible is the analysis of the kinship pattern of Abraham's people. This is where my research has focused. I will briefly summarize those findings here.
The first historical persons in the Bible are Kain and his brother Seth. They lived no more than about 10,000 years ago and probably closer to 8,000 years. These are the first rulers mentioned in the Bible and their lines intermarried as evidenced by analysis of the genealogical data in Genesis 4 and 5, which must be taken as a unit. See analysis below.
Kain and Seth married the daughters of a ruler named Enoch. The African name would be Nok. Nok is a person, a prehistoric site in Nigeria, and a sphere of cultural influence. The name is probably anachronistic in that the antecedents of the Nok culture are older than the material evidence indicates at this time. This means that Kain and Seth were NOT the offspring of the first humans, since humans appeared on the surface of the Earth long before the Nok culture and its antecedents.
The lines of Ham and Shem intermarried according to the same pattern as the lines of Kain and Seth, as shown below.
The lines of Abraham and Nahor intermarried according to this same pattern. The pattern is found among these rulers. Each ruler had 2 wives. The wives lived in separate households on a north-south axis. One was a half-sister and the other was either a patrilineal parallel cousin or a niece. (Nieces were considered cousins.) The cousin bride named her first-born son after her father. The cousin bride's naming prerogative is first discovered in Genesis 4 and 5 where we find that Kain and Seth's first-born sons are named Enoch after their wives' father. The pattern is revealed in the data about Lamech (Gen. 4). See below.
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