Reply To: Whom did the shevatim marry?

Okay, so I’d forgotten about this one until it hit the top of the page again. (The cholent came out great, incidentally, thanks for asking. The secret is a lot of BBQ sauce. DON’T SAY ANYTHING- it works.)

Basically, the reason why I asked is because I was reading this whole article (Jewish) about mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is only passed from mother to children and is therefore a relatively reliable way to track matrilineal descent (as is the Y chromosome for patrilineal descent, the difference being that you can track a man’s matrilineal descent but not a woman’s patrilineal descent). So this article mentioned that in studies of Ashkenazi mtDNA (we Ashkenazim seem to interest scientists a lot- should we be flattered? 🙂 ) they discovered that there are four types of mtDNA found in Ashkenazim. The article hypothesized that these four are the imahos.

That didn’t make sense to me, first of all because it’s matrilineal, so the mtDNA would actually be that of whomever the shevatim married and not their mothers. So if they really did marry their sisters or something, that wouldn’t be a problem, except that a) there have been geirim (both male and female) who would contribute their own mtDNA and b) Rachel and Leah were sisters (same mother) so they would have the same mtDNA- Bilhah and Zilpah had the same father but not necessarily the same mother so they could possibly have different mtDNA.

Anyone have any insights of how this should work or does this theory go definitely into the trash can?