Language Studies

Difficult Sayings

Where did Cain get his wife from?
Genesis 4:17

"And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch^F1 " (Genesis 4:17, the creation scientist, has calculated that by Cain's death the earth must have been populated by a minimum of 120,000 people, nevertheless somebody had to start the ball rolling by marrying a sister in a bible-literal schema.

This was neither a genetic problem in early generations before most genetic variations had set in nor a moral one for it was not made unlawful till Moses' day to marry a sister. Leviticus 18:6-20:27 and its codes against incest date from two and a half millennia later on a literal timescale and for non-literalists are irrelevant for if Adam is a mere story then so too were Cain and Abel's wives. Indeed, Abraham, only a few hundred years before Mosaic Law, also married his half-sister (Genesis 20:12).

Accepting a literal account and chronology we read later that Adam lived 930 years, a little longer than the average today. Only this week the oldest living person at 114 years old died. In that time Adam was active producing Cain, Abel and Seth, besides other sons and daughters.

"And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and begot a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. ⁴ After he begot Seth, the days of Adam were eight hundred years; and he had sons and daughters." (Genesis 5:3-4)

Josephus^F3 records that according to the oldest Jewish traditions Adam had thirty-three sons and twenty-three daughters. The early pre-Christian Jewish Book of Jubilees also contains an oral tradition regarding the numbers of Adam and Eve's children (nine sons after Seth, apart from daughters; Jubilees, 4.10), and recounts that:

"Cain took 'Âwân his sister to be his wife" (The Book of Jubilees, 4.8)

Philo offers a different name for Cain's wife, Themech. Other Jewish traditions^F4 mention that Cain and Abel were born with twin sisters and that Cain's twin sister^F5 was not that beautiful and that this was part of the dispute between Cain and Abel, who had a prettier wife/twin sister. An Arabic tradition^F6 records exactly the opposite rivalry.

Taken literally, Jewish traditional commentaries such as Jubilees had no initial problem with giving Cain a wife from among his sisters. If it wasn't a problem for the people of the Law it shouldn't be one for us.

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FOOTNOTES:
F1: Not the Enoch of the same name who "walked with God and was not".
F2: Morris, H., The Genesis Record, Baker, 1990, p.143
F3: Josephus, Antiquities, l.1. c. 1. footnote to point 3
F4: Pirke Eliezer, c. 21
F5: See the Talmudic references to the twin sisters of Cain and Abel, e.g., Sanhedrin 58b, Yebhamoth 62a and Rashi on Leviticus 20:17.
F6: See Gill's note on Genesis 4:17; Abulpharag. Hist. Dynast. p. 4. Patricides apud Selden, de Jure Nat. & Gent. l. 3. c. 2. & l. 5. c.

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KJ Went has taught biblical Hebrew, hermeneutics and Jewish background to early Christianity. The "Biblical Hebrew made easy" course can be found at www.biblicalhebrew.com.

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