A: The Bible never prohibits marriage between races on a continental scale. The Israelites were forbidden to intermarry with pagans they were to dispossess from Canaan (Deut. 7:3-4), but this was a matter of compromising the faith, not ethnic purity. Likewise in the New Testament (2 Corinthians 6:14) Christians are told not to be "unequally yoked together with unbelievers." This has nothing to do with race. Non-Israelites who genuinely embraced the God of Israel were to be welcomed. (Leviticus 19:34) A prime example of this is Ruth the Moabitess, who became the grandmother of David, and thereby an ancestor of the Messiah.

According to the Bible, all human beings are descended from one couple. In fact, the Hebrew word for "human being" literally means "son of Adam." Since all but Noah's family were destroyed in the great flood, all the peoples of the earth today must be descended from Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. In the genealogies given in Genesis 10, the names of certain people are identical with the Hebrew names of certain countries. Mitzraim, for example, is Egypt. Javan is Greece. The Israelites themselves are descended from Shem, as are the Arabs, Aramaeans, and others of that region, giving rise to the notion that Europe was settled by descendants of Japheth, Africa by descendants of Ham, and Asia by descendants of Shem. There are exceptions, however. The original Canaanites are said to come form Ham, but the land of Canaan is in Asia.

There is no mention of any distinguishing physical characteristics among these various peoples by which we could equate them with the modern concept of "race." The Bible doesn't say anything about putting different races on different continents. Just as there are family resemblances within any large clan, such as "the Family Nose", fiery red hair, or whatever, it stands to reason that when a certain segment of the population is separated from another for hundreds or thousands of years, these family resemblances will be intensified and become especially noticeable when they come face to face with another branch of the family where a different set of characteristics has come out. Modern Jews run the full range of colors available to the human race.