A Sidebar

Sidebar for a challenging week

This week will prove to be a very busy one, running the gamut of mandatory events that will challenge the effectiveness of social distancing – voting in person, a much-delayed funeral and a very anticipated wedding. We will return to the ‘is the Christian faith reasonable?’ line of questioning next week after a quick note on one of those ‘can you explain this?’ specific questions: where did Cain’s wife come from?

If either the seeker is a believer with an inquisitive mind or a skeptic questioning the validity of the bible, this is one of those, whaaaaaaaaat? questions commonly asked. Whichever one you are, here are a few conclusions about the Genesis account we can make about where Cain got his wife when no one else was mentioned besides Adam, Eve and Abel: 

First and foremost, there was no race of humans before Adam and Eve – scripture says that he was the first man, and she was the mother of all the living. Even if you are an unbeliever, scientific evidence continues to point to the theory of intelligent design as the one to hold onto. The theory of evolution continues to collapse in on itself with the great strides being made in the study of genetics. Don’t even entertain the argument of ‘pre-Adam’ humans. That way lies a morass of inconclusive drek.

Secondly, Scripture does not recognize any siblings born before Cain and Abel so there couldn’t have been any nieces hanging around for Cain to take as a wife.

The bible doesn’t say how old Cain was when he murdered Abel, just that the maximum age of both is 130 so they could have been pretty mature by then with plenty of offspring.  

Scripture does not mention specifically how many children Adam and Eve had, just that they had many, possibly dozens, but we do know that Adam lived 930 years.  Genesis 5 records that some of Adam’s descendants had long life spans as well and they procreated generously. Extrapolating the information, there were possibly as many as 32,000 people living at the time Cain killed Abel. With a 50-50 chance of 50% of them being female, that is plenty enough women to choose from for Cain to marry and until the Law of Moses, the matter of intermarrying was not Scripturally forbidden. Moses was given the prohibition about blood relatives marrying to protect the family unit and the health of the Hebrew Nation. Even after the Fall, Adam and Eve were perfect in their physical makeup. They had uncorrupted genetic material for their offspring to inherit so the children born of blood relatives would not suffer the consequences of generational degeneration that we find even as early in history as the time of Moses. It is useless to apply the term ‘incest,’ as it was known even in Moses’ time, to an earlier state of humanity that does not, nor will ever again, exist.

So, there you go. There were more than enough females on the earth for Cain to find a wife! Have a blessed week, all.