Cain's Wife
Offline I've been listening to podcasts and reading forums on Atheism for about a year now.
In all the various religious debates I've never heard anyone address a question I had when I was a Christian.
Adam & Eve are the first people, and they had two sons, Cain & Abel. Cain gets banished for killing Abel. Cain then goes to the land of Nod and has a Wife and a whole bunch of kids & grand kids.
If the only people in the world are Adam, Eve & Cain where in the hell did Cain's wife come from?
Also When Cain is banished by God he's afraid that some one will murder him so God put's a mark on him so who ever kills Cain will be punished seven fold.
Who's Cain afraid of?
There's only three people on the earth and he's leaving the other two behind.
I hear a lot's of debates about the two Genesis creation stories. Who bloody cares what order things were created. So the author had a brain fart and got the order wrong in the second chapter, big deal.
I want to know who Cain's wife was and where did she come from?
Did Cain marry a monkey? There are no other people.
This is the biggest Bible inconsistency I can think of and I never hear anyone bring it up.
What do the theists say about this?
Is this topic so old and hoary that no one talks about it any more?
It seems way too obvious that I could be the only one to have thought of it.
Next time someone tells me the Bible is the inerrant word of God I'm going to ask them if they can remember Cain's wifes name and walk away snickering.
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I asked this question to one of my former pastors. The answer I got was that Adam and Eve weren't the first ones created but that they were merely the only ones created inside the Garden of Eden. In Genesis 1:26-27 it says that men and women were created and doesn't mention anything about Adam, Eve or the magical garden until the next chapter. While I don't think it's a very convincing explanation it's the most logical one I've heard to explain how we're not all products of incest (though that purpose is kind of defeated when you look at the flood story).
The standard answer I got was Cain married one of his sisters (Adam and Eve had daughters too).
What's interesting is Cain goes wandering in the land of Nod. But Nod means wandering. So Cain became a wanderer in the land of wandering.
There's possibly more, because Adam and Eve had other children. But that's a good question.
The first few chapters of Genesis are a patchwork of various folk tales, so that's why they don't mesh together well.
Let me add another question. It also says that Cain was building a city. Would there be enough people on earth to populate a city?
I've heard a creationist explanation that the genes were more "pure" then, so the incest would not have produced harmful mutations. Just thought I'd throw that out for entertainment value.
At the time of the Cain story the bible only mentions Cain and Abel. There were no other siblings at the time Cain leaves for Nod, so how could he have met and married a sister? Doesn't make much sense does it. I know, don't shoot the messenger.
Here's what I got from a Google search:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/tools/cains_wife.asp
I don't think it's a very good explanation.
Then again, the stuff in AiG (in my opinion) is not written to convince skeptics but to further indoctrinate believers.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
I vaguely remember some lame explanation about "there were actually five groups of people on earth at the time". Cain married someone from one of these tribes.
This explanation was also used to explain why humans had different skin colors.
Even as a child I thought it was lame.
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The scripts aren't telling us everything because when Cain killed Abel, YHWH told him to leave the garden. Cain was scared and said that whoever was out there were going to kill him. That's when YHWH put his mark on him so nothing would touch him. But, on the other hand thoug, that shit crazy because there had to be more people on the planet for him to be bitching about going out there and for him to go out there and have kids. That makes me think about the nephilim, blue bloods, shape shifters, people coming from other planets or some crazy shit like that. Real shit.