The Wife
If we now work totally from Scripture, without any personal prejudices or other extra-biblical ideas, then back at the beginning, when there was only the first generation, brothers would have had to have married sisters or there would be no more generations!
We are not told when
Cain married or any of the details of other marriages and children, but we can say for certain that some brothers had to marry their sisters at the beginning of human history.
But what about God's Laws? Many people immediately reject the conclusion that Adam and Eve's sons and daughters married each other by appealing to the law against brother-sister intermarriage. Some say that you cannot marry your relation. Actually, if you don't marry your relation, you don't marry a human! A wife is related to her husband even before they marry because all people are descendants of Adam and Eve -- all are of "
one blood." The law forbidding marriage between close relatives was not given until the time of Moses (
Leviticus 18-20). Provided marriage was one man to one woman for life (based on
Genesis 1 and
2), there was no disobedience to God's law originally when close relatives (even brothers and sisters) married each other.
Remember that Abraham married his half-sister (
Genesis 20:12). God blessed this union to produce the Hebrew people through Isaac and Jacob. It was not until some 400 years later that God gave Moses laws that forbade such marriages.
Biological Deformities
Today, brothers and sisters (and half-brothers and half-sisters, etc.) are not permitted by law to marry because their children have an unacceptably high risk of being deformed. The more closely the parents are related, the more likely it is that any offspring will be deformed.
There is a very sound genetic reason for such laws that is easy to understand. Every person has two sets of genes, there being some 130,000 pairs that specify how a person is put together and functions. Each person inherits one gene of each pair from each parent. Unfortunately, genes today contain many mistakes (because of sin and the Curse), and these mistakes show up in a variety of ways. For instance, some people let their hair grow over their ears to hide the fact that one ear is lower than the other -- or perhaps someone's nose is not quite in the middle of his or her face, or someone's jaw is a little out of shape -- and so on. Let's face it, the main reason we call each other normal is because of our common agreement to do so!
The more distantly related parents are, the more likely it is that they will have different mistakes in their genes. Children, inheriting one set of genes from each parent, are likely to end up with pairs of genes containing a maximum of one bad gene in each pair. The good gene tends to override the bad so that a deformity (a serious one, anyway) does not occur. Instead of having totally deformed ears, for instance, a person may only have crooked ones! (Overall, though, the human race is slowly degenerating as mistakes accumulate, generation after generation.)
However, the more closely related two people are, the more likely it is that they will have similar mistakes in their genes, since these have been inherited from the same parents. Therefore, a brother and a sister are more likely to have similar mistakes in their genes. A child of a union between such siblings could inherit the same bad gene on the same gene pair from both, resulting in two bad copies of the gene and serious defects.
Adam and Eve did not have accumulated genetic mistakes. When the first two people were created, they were physically perfect. Everything God made was "very good" (
Genesis 1:31), so their genes were perfect -- no mistakes! But, when sin entered the world (because of Adam --
Genesis 3:6,
Romans 5:12), God cursed the world so that the perfect creation then began to degenerate, that is, suffer death and decay (
Romans 8:22). Over thousands of years, this degeneration has produced all sorts of genetic mistakes in living things.
Cain was in the first generation of children ever born. He (as well as his brothers and sisters) would have have received virtually no imperfect genes from Adam or Eve, since the effects of sin and the Curse would have been minimal to start with (it takes time for these copying errors to accumulate). In that situation, brother and sister could have married with God's approval, without any potential to produce deformed offspring.
By the time of Moses (a few thousand years later), degenerative mistakes would have built up in the human race to such an extent that it was necessary for God to forbid brother-sister (and close relative) marriage (
Leviticus 18-20).
[12] (Also, there were plenty of people on the earth by then, and there was no reason for close relations to marry.)
Cain and the Land of Nod
Some claim that the passage in
Genesis 4:16-17 means that Cain went to the land of Nod and found a wife. Thus, they can conclude there must have been another race of people on the earth, who were not descendants of Adam, who produced Cain's wife.
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And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of
Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bore
Enoch: and he built a city, and he called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.
From what has been stated previously, it is clear that all humans, Cain's wife included, are descendants of Adam. However, this passage does not say that Cain went to the land of
Nod and found a wife. John Calvin, commenting on these verses, states:
From the context we may gather that Cain, before he slew his brother, had married a wife; otherwise Moses would now have related something respecting his marriage.
[13]
Cain was married before he went to the land of
Nod. He didn't find a wife there, but "knew" (had sexual relations with) his wife.
[14]
Others have argued that because Cain built a "city" in the land of Nod, there must have been a lot of people there. However, the Hebrew word translated as "city" need not mean what we might imagine from the connotations of "city" today. The word meant a "walled town" or a protected encampment.
[15] Even a hundred people would be plenty for such a "city." Nevertheless, there could have been many descendants of Adam on the earth by the time of
Abel's death (see below).
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Who Was Cain Fearful Of? (
Genesis 4:14)
Some claim that there had to be lots of people on earth other than Adam and Eve's descendants, otherwise Cain would not have been fearful of people wanting to slay him for killing Abel.
First of all, in the days before civil government was instituted to punish murderers (
Genesis 9:6), someone would want to harm Cain for killing Abel only if they were closely related to Abel! Strangers could hardly have cared. So the people Cain was afraid of could not have been another race of people.
Second, Cain and
Abel were born quite some time before Abel's death.
Genesis 4:3 states:
And in the course of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering to the Lord.
Note the phrase "in the course of time." We know that
Seth was born when Adam was 130 years old (
Genesis 5:3), and Eve saw him as a "replacement" for Abel (
Genesis 4:25). Therefore, the period from Cain's birth to Abel's death may have been 100 years or more -- allowing plenty of time for other children of Adam and Eve to marry and have children and grandchildren. By the time Abel was killed, there could well have been a considerable number of descendants of Adam and Eve, involving several generations.
Where Did the Technology Come From?
Some claim that for Cain to go to the land of
Nod and build a city he would have required a lot of technology that must have already been in that land, presumably developed by other "races."
However, Adam and Eve's descendants were very intelligent people.
Jubal made
musical instruments such as the harp and organ (
Genesis 4:21), and
Tubal-Cain worked with
brass and
iron (
Genesis 4:22).
Because of intense evolutionary indoctrination, many people today think that our generation is the most intelligent that has ever lived on this planet. But just because we have jet airplanes and computers, it does not mean that we are the most intelligent. Modern technology results from the accumulation of knowledge. We stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us.
Our brains have suffered from 6,000 years of the
Curse (since Adam). We are greatly degenerated compared with people many generations ago. We may now be nowhere near as intelligent or inventive as Adam and Eve's children. Scripture gives us a glimpse of what appears to be great inventiveness from the beginning.
[16]
Conclusion
Many Christians cannot answer the question about Cain's wife because they focus on today's world (and the problems associated with close relations marrying), and do not understand the clear historical record God has given to us.
They try to interpret Genesis from our present situation, rather than understand the true biblical history of the world and the changes that have occurred because of sin. Because they are not building their world view on Scripture, but taking a secular way of thinking to the Bible, they are blinded to the simple answers. Genesis is the record of the God who was there as history happened. It is the word of One who knows everything, and who is a reliable witness from the past. Thus, when we use Genesis as a basis for understanding history, we can make sense of questions that would otherwise be a mystery.
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