Sheba

180
THE ARK OF THE COVENANT AND ISRAELITE INFLUENCES
Zadokite prestige in Judah. In later years the Jurhum showed that an ousted
priesthood could reassert its prestige elsewhere. The Zadokites must have
had a center where they regrouped and eventually returned to power. One
clue that this may have been in Ethiopia or southwestern Arabia comes
from DNA testing undertaken in the late 1990’s on the Lemba, a 40,000
strong southern African people (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique,
and Malawi), with seemingly pagan-Hebraic customs that include a kosher
diet, circumcision and ritual purity. Jewish hereditary priests, the kohenin,
are traditionally believed to be direct descendants of Aaron, the brother of
Moses. DNA testing has revealed that members of the kohenin do indeed
have a high percentage of common ancestry, since 45 per cent of Ashkenazi
(European Jews) priests and 56 per cent of Sephardic (Iberian, North
African, Middle Eastern and Arabian Jews) priests share the same Y
chromosome, exclusively passed down the male line. This Y chromosome
has only a 3 - 5 per cent occurrence in Jewish populations in general and is
rare or absent in other groups. Based on the study of DNA generational
mutations, their common ancestor would have lived between 2,650 to 3,180
years ago (ca. 1180 – 650 B.C.E.). It is therefore more likely that the
kohenin are descendants, not of Aaron (ca. 1400-1200 B.C.E.), but of a
member of the priestly House of Zadok. 9 per cent of Lemba men carry the
kohenin chromosome, but it also occurs in 53 per cent of the members of
their priestly clan, the Buba. 3 A Lemba tradition states that their ancestors
were from a place called Senna, which may be Senna in Yemen, near Tarim,
the ancient capital of the Hadramawt Kingdom, and the port of Sayhut. 4
While the Lemba priestly clan appears indubitably linked to the
Israelite priesthood, their traditional customs and religious beliefs indicate
that, if their culture is Hebraic in origin, it is very weak. Legends pre-dating
the colonial era connect Menelik with volcanoes in Tanzania (where a
legend says he died on Kilimanjaro) and the Comoros Islands (where he
fled with Solomon’s throne). Hebraic practices have been recorded on the
Kenyan coast among the Wakilindi; and the Malagasy language of
Madagascar appears to contain elements of a Semitic language that one
researcher linked to Hebrew. 5 However, the Lemba have neither Old
Testament oral traditions nor pre-colonial written records, and in the past
were mainly regarded as a metal working artisan caste. While claiming a
link with the medieval kingdoms of Mapungubwe, which flourished just
south of the Limpopo river in South Africa ca. A.D. 950 – 1270; and its
successor, Great Zimbabwe, ca. 1270 – 1600, the Lemba kohenin do not
appear to have played a significant role in the administration or religion of