| Since the Bible doesn't say that God directly created anyone except Adam and Eve, did Cain and Seth marry their own sisters? |
| Most Christians (including myself) would say that Cain and Seth's wives
were their younger sisters, later children of Adam and Eve (Genesis 5:4 says
they had other children), or perhaps even grandchildren or great-grandchildren.
I'm aware that the Bible speaks out against incest later on, and that incest
often causes birth defects, but also keep in mind that Adam and Eve were
created directly by God and lived for hundreds of years (930 in Adam's case),
so we can assume they were somehow genetically superior to later generations,
so in-breeding among their children would not cause the problems it causes
today. If this was how God set up the first few generations to reproduce,
then He protected them from suffering side-affects from the incest. These
days our genes are inferior to theirs due to how they've been corrupted over
time by the sins of many generations (as well as worse environmental conditions),
so incest is certainly not a good option today. Of course, we then have to
ask why the Bible doesn't specifically say these women are Cain and Seth's
sisters. I think the Bible intended for us to assume this, but didn't say
so directly because it didn't want to set a precedence of encouraging incest,
which God knew would be forbidden by the time the book of Genesis was written.
I've heard some argue that Adam and Eve weren't the only people directly created by God, but that they were merely the first of many, and that the Bible didn't mention the others because it would be redundant to keep repeated the same story of how God made people over and over again. I have problems with this theory, though. The first is that I think it would have said somewhere early in the book of Genesis that God had done this, even a simple, 'And God made other people after Adam and Eve' would have been logical without being redundant. Another problem is that the transgression that turned Adam and Eve into mortals would probably not apply to other people created by God. It does apply to Cain and Seth because they were conceived and born after the transgression, and it would also be passed onto their children as well. But unless God created the additional people after the transgression and made them mortals from the beginning (which doesn't make sense because this would then occur after the days of creation had ended), the original people He created would never have died, so Cain and Seth's wives would still be alive today. There is a more in-depth answer to this question at http://www.tektonics.org/cainwife.html |