I specifically mentioned the character of Samson as portrayed in the series; Samson's parents were Israelites from the tribe of Dan. They were not black Africans with dreadlocks; they were Jews with olive skin and dark hair. Whether or not the true "cast" of the Bible was diverse (and yes, it was), given Downey's gushing protestations of love for Obama, along with the miscasting of Samson, it seems diversity might have been uppermost in her mind. Even over accuracy.
"I’d say you were the PC one, where every image of the Bible is north European"
Well, actually, if I had put forth such a view, it would be the opposite of PC, wouldn't it? Besides, I never put forth any such foolish opinion, so why are you trying to attribute it to me?
After all, the Egyptian empire of the day included well into the Sudan, and, they were in Egypt for 400 years.
Lots can happen.
Group in Africa Has Jewish Roots, DNA indicates
By NICHOLAS WADE
The Lemba, a Bantu-speaking people of southern Africa, have a tradition that they were led out of Judea by a man named Buba. They practice circumcision, keep one day a week holy and avoid eating pork or piglike animals, such as the hippopotamus.Several groups around the world practice Judaic rites or claim to be descended from Biblical tribes without having any ancestral Jewish connection. And there is no Buba in the records of Jewish history.
But the remarkable thing about the Lemba tradition is that it may be exactly right. A team of geneticists has found that many Lemba men carry in their male chromosome a set of DNA sequences that is distinctive of the cohanim, the Jewish priests believed to be the descendants of Aaron. The priestly genetic signature is particularly common among Lemba men who belong to the senior of their 12 groups, known as the Buba clan. The discovery of the Lemba's Jewish ancestry has come about through the intertwining of two unusual strands of inquiry. One was developed by geneticists in the United States, Israel and England who wondered what truth there might be to the Jewish tradition that priests are the descendants of Aaron, the elder brother of Moses.
The other strand was provided by Dr. Tudor Parfitt, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Parfitt, who has done research among the Lemba for 10 years, believes that he has discovered Senna, the mysterious northern city from which Lemba tradition maintains they came, and that he can retrace their steps from Senna to Africa, maybe a thousand years ago.
The genetic side of the story began when Dr. Karl Skorecki, a kidney expert at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, was sitting in a synagogue in Toronto. Skorecki, who is a priest, wondered if a fellow cohen who was being called to attend the first Torah reading might be distantly related to him, as the tradition of priestly descent from Aaron implied.
He called Dr. Michael F. Hammer of the University of Arizona, an expert who studies the genetics of human populations through the male or Y chromosome. Unlike the other chromosomes, the genetic material on the Y chromosome is not shuffled every generation, obscuring the lines of individual descent. Y chromosomes are bequeathed from father to son, more or less unchanged apart from the occasional mutation.
The mutations are particularly helpful for reconstructing population history because each lineage of men has its own distinctive pattern of mutations. It was a Y chromosome study last year that confirmed the oral tradition among the descendants of the slave Sally Hemings that their ancestor was Thomas Jefferson, the nation's third President.
Hammer, Skorecki and their colleagues reported in 1997 that they had analyzed the Y chromosomes of priests and lay Jews (priests, a hereditary caste, are different from rabbis and also from Levites). They found that a particular pattern of DNA changes was much more common among the priests than among laymen. The pattern was equally recognizable in Ashkenazic and Sephardic priests, even though these two branches of the Jewish population have long been geographically separated.
The one for certain bloodline we know of in The Bible is pure according to the laws is that of Christ and His bloodline as related to both Mary and Joseph. Matthew gives Joseph's family and Luke gives Mary's with both sides traced to Jesse.
My apologies to you. I think I cast a generalization of some Freepers attitude to you.
You are most likely correct in the Samson issue, but I think splitting hairs gets Christians no where when it comes to making most people aware of the Bible as a story of PEOPLE. That most don’t identify with and maybe with this ‘diverse’ cast... CAN IDENTIFY WITH.
All modern Egyptians are pretty dark.