In The Torah/Old Testament, genealogy is used to establish the lineage of important figures, such as Abraham, Moses, and David. These genealogies also serve to connect these figures to the larger narrative of Yaweh’s plan for humanity, and to establish a sense of continuity and historical progression. The genealogies are often used to illustrate the fulfillment of prophecies or to establish a sense of divine mandate for certain characters.

Genealogy is a story, set in grammars that claim historicity and assert the universality of family structures that are anything but universal. They also create imagined communities out of groups of people with common ancestry who are, for all practical purposes, strangers. Akenson writes:

Biblical genealogies are artistic in nature by virtue of their being a massive metaphor. They account for human life, religious practices, and dynastic and geo-political events “through a metaphor of biological propagation.” Thus, world history necessarily becomes a form of family history. This is a metaphorical framework so strong that the biblical tales could not be told in any other way: if the stories jumped out of the framework of genealogical narrative they would not be biblical. It is as simple as that: the covenant between Yahweh and his people is between an imperious god and an imperial sperm bank. As Yahweh promises Abraham, “I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I will make nations of thee and kings shall come out of thee” (Genesis 17:6). (2007, 292)

Genealogy is a very different mode of history writing than the work of historical geneticists, who create a picture of humanity’s history by investigating the genetic variation that exists within and between populations and how this variation changes over time. In some ways genealogy is like counting individual grains of sand in order to study a beach (and frequently losing count). Such an approach to history does reorient one to the vastness and interconnectedness of humanity, however. Moving through my family tree person-by-person inside my game has also made me realize how little of my ancestry I have any knowledge of or affinity for. I also found in my research just how much of what I knew from family lore contradicted historical records, and inversely how much of the lived experiences of family members was left out of those records.