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This is a touchy subject; but touchy or not, it’s time we understood it. Let me state up front that if you think that any of the races are not children of God and don’t have an equal status in God’s eyes if they act in the same manner, read my article on “Satan’s Seed”. Otherwise, this scripture sums it up:

Acts 10:34-35 Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.

That said, there are black people and white people and yellow people and red people; tall people, short people, skinny people, fat people; blue eyes and brown, blonds and redheads, people with receding foreheads and people with jutting foreheads. People with male pattern baldness and people with hereditary allergies to Fava beans. So where did they all come from?

There are two prevailing schools of thought on this; one, the more radical, believes that God made Adam and Eve white; but Eve and the Devil sort of… you know… and so the other races came into being then. Seth and Abel were sons of Adam, as was Noah and his wife, being of pure stock, and so of course their sons were as well; but the wives of Ham and Japheth were children with impure bloodlines descended from Cain and therefore from the Devil. Shem married a woman of pure race and so a pure white race has descended from Adam all the way down through Abraham and on down to whoever is telling the story; strangely, they are always white. Go figure.

Anyway, that school of thought is thoroughly debunked in my aforementioned article on “Satan’s Seed.” The other and far more common school of thought in secular Christianity is that all the races are pretty much the same; the Chinese because of their environment have more fatty tissue under their eyes resulting in their characteristic facial features, and the blacks being from Africa developed more melanin in their skin while the Danes, living far from the equator’s intense sunlight lost their melanin. According to this idea, these are all acquired characteristics and if a group of Danes was to live in Africa for a few dozen generations, their descendants would turn black without any racial mixing.

I don’t really like this explanation either – for one, it ignores several scientific facts and tacitly accepts Lamarck’s idea that acquired characteristics (in this case, skin tone) can be inherited, which even evolutionists admit isn’t true.For another, dutch Afrikaaners have lived in South Africa among blacks for nearly 400 years; for the most part, they strictly avoided intermarriage. They are as white today as the day they arrived (except a bit more tanned than their northern dutch relatives!). So if there is no change over 400 years, there probably hasn’t been in the amount of time involved in settling Europe and Africa; not to mention the fact that many Eskimo tribes are quite dark, and live near the arctic where the sun’s rays are never very intense; or the relatively pale South American tribes who live in the same latitudes as the blacks of Africa but never developed their skin color. So it is for this explanation that I would like to offer a more scientifically accurate alternative.

(Of course, the world believes that we evolved from monkeys and ultimately from goo. But that’s another article altogether.)

So before we can tackle this problem, we have to first lay some ground work in Genetics. Genetics was largely pioneered by a man named Gregor Mendel about a hundred and fifty years ago. He is most famous for his research with pea plants. For those of you who were awake during this class in high school, I am about to make some oversimplifications for the sake of time and to make it easier to understand, so bear with me.

In a nutshell, what he discovered was that each parent had two genes that controlled a given characteristic, let us say height for example. And that when these genes combined to form an offspring, the offspring received one gene from each parent. This means that if the mother plant was short, and the father plant was tall, that if they were bred and had 4 plants as offspring, that one would be tall, one would be short, and two would be average sized.

In the example in this picture, the common “4 O’clock” flower, which I grow in my own yard, has many varieties with different blossom colors, among them red and white. In this picture, which I borrowed from Wikipedia, if a plant with white blossoms is crossed with a plant with red blossoms, the resulting seeds will in the first generation primarily be pink; the second generation however will result in genetic differences appearing; in a 1:2:1 ratio. In other words, in the second generation 25% will be white like the mother plant, 25% red like the father plant, and 50% will be pink as a cross between the two.

If then the pure white ones are bred to the pure white ones, you will get a very large percentage of white plants with a few of each of the other possibilities. If those radicals are then removed from the gene pool, it is possible to eventually restore a pure white strain.

Another example is the history of the white tiger. The white tiger was hunted to extinction half a century ago, largely because of the legends of its magical powers. In 1951 a hunting party found a tigress with 4 cubs, one of which was white; the rest of the litter and the mother was shot and the white cub was brought into captivity by the maharaja. He was named Mohan, which means “enchanter” (one of the names of the deity Krishna). In 1957 the last known white tiger in the wild was shot.

So now Mohan was the only white tiger in the world. Hoping to save the white gene, Mohan was bred several times to an ordinary yellow tigress. After producing many normal yellow cubs, finally a single white female cub was born. The only answer to perpetuating the species seemed to be inbreeding, so Mohan was bred to his daughter and since her genes in this area nearly duplicated his, the chances of white cubs was drastically increased producing mostly white offspring. All white tigers today descended from this mating. In order to reproduce white tigers, whites are bred with whites and so they are one of the most heavily inbred bloodlines of any species in the world.

The obvious downside is that this inbreeding or “hybridization” has perpetuated genetic weaknesses and most white tigers are born with genetic defects; bad eyesight, lameness, crooked spines, etc. This is because creatures were designed so that by mating, a species would find other bloodlines with stronger characteristics in some areas and weaker in others; but if no new blood is found, then genetic weaknesses persist and get worse. To offset this, white tigers are occasionally bred to yellow tigers which weakens the white genes but brings in badly needed genetic material from outside the gene pool.

That, aside from being an interesting story, will help us explain the answer to our question; where did races come from? And what color was Adam?

Genesis 2:7 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 soul.

Here we see that man was formed from the dust of the ground. The Hebrew word translated “dust” there is believed by most commentators to signify clay, or a dry precursor to clay, as when Christ made clay of the dry ground:

John 9:6 When he had thus spoken, he spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay,

But whether it was the hard clay we’re familiar with or a dry powdered clay, that it is clay we can be fairly sure from this quote from Job:

Job 33:6 Behold, I am according to thy wish in God’s stead: I also am formed out of the clay.

This word is used in connection with potters and there can be little doubt that this is referring to the clay we are all familiar with. So we know that it was clay; but what sort?

The word Adam is a direct copy of a Hebrew word (Strongs #0120, which is nearly identical to its root word #0119) which means “to be red.” With this information, it seems obvious that Adam was not white; nor black, as some have said; but rather, he was formed from the type of red clay found in Alabama and Georgia (although those places have little else in common with Eden!). God calls things what they are – and He called Adam, Adam. Red.

Job 4:19 How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?

But if Adam was red, how then do we have all the races we see among us today? To answer that clearly we need to study a similar case that is a little less close-to-home. The dog. Originally, God created two dogs – a male and a female. These dogs, being made directly by God, would have had a perfect genetic code, with sufficient genetic information to produce all of the incredible variety of dogs we see around us today, from the Great Dane to the Chihuahua. But how did this variety happen?

Well, as these perfect dogs (which probably were something like a wolf or a dingo in appearance) mated, over a few generations their genes randomly combined to make slight variations in hair color, eye color, size, etc. Each dog inherited a portion of the genetic code slightly different from each other. As they inbred each recombined portions of the perfect DNA and so no deformities or defects appeared. Then as they spread out over the earth, some went north where it was cold; here, the pups who were hairless had a smaller chance of surviving than those who were more “husky” in appearance. As a result, the short haired genes disappeared from the northern dogs.

Note that they didn’t evolve! No new material was added – in fact, genetic material (the gene that allowed adaptation to warm weather) was lost! Of course, at the same time the dogs who had traveled south who had long hair stifled in the heat and were more prone to ill health, sickness, and death; not to mention being unable to hunt as well. So natural selection (yes, natural selection is a biological fact!) weeded them out. Now we had a short-haired breed of dog. So here too, genetic material was LOST! For if these dogs traveled north, they could not suddenly sprout hair again because the gene to create long hair had been irreversibly bred out of the species!

But now let’s say that those two “races” of dogs – the long and short hair – were bred together for a few generations in a neutral climate. Each race has the genetic material which is missing from the other. So the offspring would gradually stir the gene pool back together and restore a perfect, strong race which would be able to adapt to new environments again. But of course, that didn’t happen.

In fact, the process of adaptation and loss of genetic material resulted in the genetically strong original dog stock being turned into a genetically narrow “hybrid” stock that composes all purebred domesticated dogs today. The upside of this genetic narrowness is a great diversity among dogs; the downside is that inbreeding which in the beginning would have had no ill effects, now would produce the same defects that the white tiger has.

Today, while the original Chihuahua was bred from those wolf-like ancestors by selecting the smallest pups from each litter, while the reverse was done for the Great Dane, it is impossible to reverse that process; selective breeding of the largest Chihuahua pups will never be able to create a Great Dane – the genetic material simply isn’t there. The body wouldn’t know how to do it if its life depended on it, so to speak, because unlike the hypothetical two races a moment ago, many bloodlines of dogs have died out, taking with them their unique genetic material. So it is now quite impossible to restore a perfect, strong genetic base for dogs.

And now at last we are ready to talk about people. When God formed Adam he was no doubt genetically perfect. Eve, as his wife and formed from his rib (and therefore his DNA), was also perfect and presumably a copy of Adam’s genetic makeup. Inherent in them both would be the genes for white and black skin, tall and short children, green eyes and brown eyes, and all the other variations we see amongst us today.

Due to preferences among the children of Adam and Eve, some married one person and some another; producing second generation recombinations of the genetic variety produced in the first generation. These combinations were based on the same principles as the peas mentioned earlier – for each trait that was strong in one parent and weak in another, one child would be strong, one weak, and two would be average.

Since like tends to seek out like in species, as variety in skin color emerged from the red color that Adam and Eve had, gradually the peoples of the world tended to marry people that looked similar to them; as they did so, the genetic tendency of that particular bloodline took on that particular color. Which would have led to a wide diversity by the time of Noah. But God had a plan…

As we discussed with the dogs a moment ago, if the genetic information was carefully guarded and as each diversity took place it was balanced by a marriage that infused both of those traits back into the family tree, it is possible to produce a line of genetics where no genetic loss had taken place.

Genesis 6:9 These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.

God is no dummy; He knew from the beginning that He would probably have to bring the flood on the Earth. It was part of the plan. And so He carefully shepherded the bloodline of Noah to make him “perfect in his generations”, or “perfect in his ancestry” or “perfect in his genetics.” In order for Noah to repopulate the Earth and have his grandchildren intermarry without risk of genetic defects for nearly a thousand years until God made rules against incest, Noah had to have all, or nearly all, of the genetic information of Adam. Mendelian genetics show how that is possible.

So then, if Noah had all the genetic information of Adam, he would have been red skinned as well. We know little about his wife. But it would seem logical that her purpose as mother of all living would have been shepherded as well. Their children, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, were then born white with European features (such as large forehead, blue eyes, blond hair, etc.), black with African features (curly hair, brown eyes, tall, etc.), and Oriental (short in stature, straight black hair, etc.). We have very little information about their wives, so not much can be said about them.

But whatever happened, the grandchildren of Noah intermarried and when the children of Ham intermarried with the children of Shem, the lighter brown peoples like the Egyptians and Caananites were created; intermarriages with Ham and Japheth probably created the East Indians; Japheth and Shem perhaps created the Mongols, etc. We don’t know the details of what percentage of genetic makeup of each son of Noah created all the different races we see today, from the New Zealand Mauri to the Alaskan Eskimo…

But we do know one thing. Adam… was red.