THE CONUNDRUM OF CAIN'S WIFE--WHO ARE CAIN'S IN-LAWS?
As you may know, Dianne and I travel quite a lot, and we stay in many hotels. One thing common to hotels, at least in the U.S. is that all hotel rooms have a Holy Bible in the drawer. Occasionally, I even get an opportunity to read passages from it.
One story that always intrigues me is that of Adam, Eve and the kids. Shortly after Adam and Eve were created, they "knew" each other and conceived Cain, and later Abel. After Cain killed Abel, they knew each other again and conceived Seth as a replacement for Abel. Adam was 130 years old at the time. People lived longer in those days, before hospitals. The pertinent passages are in Genesis 4:1 through 5:5.
One must consider, of course, whether all this stuff is the gospel truth--well I guess it's that. But is it true from a historical standpoint? Archaeologists have some interesting answers to many Biblical stories that were once thought to be legends but are now considered historical fact.
Back to our story: shortly after Abel's death, Cain went away to live in the Land of Nod where he "knew" his wife and they had a son, Enoch. So the question is, who is Cain's wife and where did she come from? And who, if anyone, lived in the Land of Nod, and if they did, where did they come from? The Bible doesn't give us enough information, at least in the King James Version.
But it does say that Cain built a city there and named it after his son. Did he build the city by himself or did someone help him? Did he hire contractors? Who made the bricks? Who issued the permits, if any? And, by definition, if there's a city, there must be people to populate that city. Were they all related?
Another problem here is that unless God created other people besides Adam and Eve, it appears that Cain married his sister, which, of course is prohibited in Leviticus 18-20.
Over the millenia, there has been much discussion of these questions which were often used by skeptics to discredit Judeo-Christsian teachings by showing that the Bible as a historical record cannot be defended. For example in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, as shown in the movie, Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy, the attorney Clarence Darrow asked the fundamentalist prosecutor William Jennings Bryan--who was defending the faith against evolution--the question of Cain's wife. Bryan, supposedly a Biblical scholar, had no answer. The same question was raised in Carl Sagan's book Contact, later made into a movie with Jodie Foster, to illustrate that the Bible should not be read literally.
Actually, the answers are compatible, if one thinks about it, and as a practical matter, the Theory of Evolution and that of Intelligent Design are not mutually exclusive. While I don't presume to know any more about God's intent than do the scholars, certainly evolution is a way to describe God's organization of the development of the various species. First God starts with invertebrates, moves on to vertebrates, and builds from there, eventually moving on to more complex animals like humans.
In Genesis 2:2, just before the creation of Eve, we learn that Adam, after looking over the animal kingdom and maybe the Neanderthals also, could not find a mate of his kind. This indicates to scholars that no other people existed. Therefore, our modern faiths are based on the fact that Adam and Eve were the first, and everyone in the world is descended from them. Actually the study of mitrachondral DNA has shown that we're all descended from one woman--in Africa.
Fortunately, the scholars have given us food for thought about those questions. In Genesis 5:4, it is written that Adam and Eve did have other sons and daughters, over the next 800 years after Seth, but their names are not recorded, at least not in the Bible. The Bible is ambiguous, and some of them (Cain's wife?) could have been born in the 130 years before Seth was born. It does say, "And he fathered sons and daughters." But it doesn't say when. One scholar, the famed historian Josephus determined that they had 33 sons and 23 daughters. Obviously A & E "knew" each other very well. But then they lived to be over 900 years old. The descendants of those 56 kids can add up to a lot of people over several generations.
If no other people were created, then Mrs. Cain would have to have been Cain's sister, or perhaps his niece. That was OK at the time because the prohibition against marrying close relatives was not instituted until Moses' time, perhaps a couple thousand years later. Because there were so few people in the world at the time, there would not have been mutated genes which could cause birth defects. (According to the Bible, God's creation was perfect, but degenerated later.) A millenium or two later, after the human race had time to develop and proliferate, that prohibition made good sense. Incidentally, Abraham married Sarah, who was his half-sister, the daughter of his father, but not his mother. (Genesis 20:12)
In any event, after Cain killed Abel, he realized that he was a marked man who feared that others would try to kill him. God marked him to protect him from the others. Who were those others? If there were no other people, whom would Cain be afraid of? Well, it would have been his other brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, etc. because presumably they would exact revenge for the killing of Abel, their close relative.
The first book of the Bible has some other interesting stuff, such as "Giants" or "Nephilim" described in Genesis 6:4, who drop in from heaven and mate with humans, thus producing children who became "men of renown". Hmmmm. Maybe the Weekly World News isn't so far out after all.
KENNETH SUSKIN
One story that always intrigues me is that of Adam, Eve and the kids. Shortly after Adam and Eve were created, they "knew" each other and conceived Cain, and later Abel. After Cain killed Abel, they knew each other again and conceived Seth as a replacement for Abel. Adam was 130 years old at the time. People lived longer in those days, before hospitals. The pertinent passages are in Genesis 4:1 through 5:5.
One must consider, of course, whether all this stuff is the gospel truth--well I guess it's that. But is it true from a historical standpoint? Archaeologists have some interesting answers to many Biblical stories that were once thought to be legends but are now considered historical fact.
Back to our story: shortly after Abel's death, Cain went away to live in the Land of Nod where he "knew" his wife and they had a son, Enoch. So the question is, who is Cain's wife and where did she come from? And who, if anyone, lived in the Land of Nod, and if they did, where did they come from? The Bible doesn't give us enough information, at least in the King James Version.
But it does say that Cain built a city there and named it after his son. Did he build the city by himself or did someone help him? Did he hire contractors? Who made the bricks? Who issued the permits, if any? And, by definition, if there's a city, there must be people to populate that city. Were they all related?
Another problem here is that unless God created other people besides Adam and Eve, it appears that Cain married his sister, which, of course is prohibited in Leviticus 18-20.
Over the millenia, there has been much discussion of these questions which were often used by skeptics to discredit Judeo-Christsian teachings by showing that the Bible as a historical record cannot be defended. For example in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, as shown in the movie, Inherit the Wind, starring Spencer Tracy, the attorney Clarence Darrow asked the fundamentalist prosecutor William Jennings Bryan--who was defending the faith against evolution--the question of Cain's wife. Bryan, supposedly a Biblical scholar, had no answer. The same question was raised in Carl Sagan's book Contact, later made into a movie with Jodie Foster, to illustrate that the Bible should not be read literally.
Actually, the answers are compatible, if one thinks about it, and as a practical matter, the Theory of Evolution and that of Intelligent Design are not mutually exclusive. While I don't presume to know any more about God's intent than do the scholars, certainly evolution is a way to describe God's organization of the development of the various species. First God starts with invertebrates, moves on to vertebrates, and builds from there, eventually moving on to more complex animals like humans.
In Genesis 2:2, just before the creation of Eve, we learn that Adam, after looking over the animal kingdom and maybe the Neanderthals also, could not find a mate of his kind. This indicates to scholars that no other people existed. Therefore, our modern faiths are based on the fact that Adam and Eve were the first, and everyone in the world is descended from them. Actually the study of mitrachondral DNA has shown that we're all descended from one woman--in Africa.
Fortunately, the scholars have given us food for thought about those questions. In Genesis 5:4, it is written that Adam and Eve did have other sons and daughters, over the next 800 years after Seth, but their names are not recorded, at least not in the Bible. The Bible is ambiguous, and some of them (Cain's wife?) could have been born in the 130 years before Seth was born. It does say, "And he fathered sons and daughters." But it doesn't say when. One scholar, the famed historian Josephus determined that they had 33 sons and 23 daughters. Obviously A & E "knew" each other very well. But then they lived to be over 900 years old. The descendants of those 56 kids can add up to a lot of people over several generations.
If no other people were created, then Mrs. Cain would have to have been Cain's sister, or perhaps his niece. That was OK at the time because the prohibition against marrying close relatives was not instituted until Moses' time, perhaps a couple thousand years later. Because there were so few people in the world at the time, there would not have been mutated genes which could cause birth defects. (According to the Bible, God's creation was perfect, but degenerated later.) A millenium or two later, after the human race had time to develop and proliferate, that prohibition made good sense. Incidentally, Abraham married Sarah, who was his half-sister, the daughter of his father, but not his mother. (Genesis 20:12)
In any event, after Cain killed Abel, he realized that he was a marked man who feared that others would try to kill him. God marked him to protect him from the others. Who were those others? If there were no other people, whom would Cain be afraid of? Well, it would have been his other brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, etc. because presumably they would exact revenge for the killing of Abel, their close relative.
The first book of the Bible has some other interesting stuff, such as "Giants" or "Nephilim" described in Genesis 6:4, who drop in from heaven and mate with humans, thus producing children who became "men of renown". Hmmmm. Maybe the Weekly World News isn't so far out after all.
KENNETH SUSKIN
Labels: Bible
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