- Series:Creation, History, Humans, Transcript English
Genesis 4:17
“And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.”
A scientific paper, published in December 2019, appears to have proved conclusively that the Habsburg Jaw was caused by dangerous inbreeding within the House of Habsburg.
The Habsburg family ruled many parts of Europe for many centuries. Habsburgs ruled the Holy Roman Empire from Frederick III in 1452 to Charles VI in 1740 – although the related but mixed Habsburg-Lorraine family then took over. They also ruled Spain from Emperor Charles V in 1516 to King Charles II of Spain. Inheritance practices could easily have resulted in portions of these fragile European lands passing to other families, so it became the norm for both branches of the Habsburgs – and smaller branches in Bohemia (now Czechia) and Croatia – to choose spouses from among their own family.
This caused concentration of genetic defects; the most visible of this was the famous elongated jaw – properly called Mandibular prognathism – which prevented some family members from closing their mouths. Less visibly, it was genetic defects that caused Charles II of Spain to be infertile, and his early, childless death led to the dreadful War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714).
So, if the Habsburg’s close intermarriages caused such problems, how could Cain marry his sister? The answer is simple – in that second generation of humans on earth, harmful genetic mutations had not sufficiently multiplied to cause danger. So the biblical position makes complete sense, as usual, and the Mosaic law against such intermarriage was not given for over 2,500 years.
Prayer: Lord, when we read Your word in the Bible, we have complete confidence that we are reading the truth. Thank You, Lord. Amen.
Author: Paul F. Taylor
Ref: Román Vilas, Francisco C. Ceballos, Laila Al-Soufi, Raúl González-García, Carlos Moreno, Manuel Moreno, Laura Villanueva, Luis Ruiz, Jesús Mateos, David González, Jennifer Ruiz, Aitor Cinza, Florencio Monje & Gonzalo Álvarez (2019) Is the “Habsburg jaw” related to inbreeding?, Annals of Human Biology, DOI: 10.1080/03014460.2019.1687752. Image: Charles II of Spain, by Juan Carreño de Miranda (1614–1685), Public Domain.
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