Eve's children

[TheHem]

My teenage daughter was asking me how the children/sons of Eve found spouses?

Thanks for your help.

 

[M-Dent]

Here’s a few articles that touch on this subject
From, Jimmy Akin, From Catholic.com.

The way I look at it, it was a very different time, so far removed from our modern societies I just accept we can’t relate to it well. Plus, God’s word about/for man in Leviticus18 was probably given for a good reason. They appeared to live bit differently.

 

[mkarzon]

There were incestuous relationships early on in the human race.

 

[Dan-Man916]

Just a side note:
From Flavius Josephus in his first book of Antiquities, the ancient tradition handed down was that Adam and Eve had 33 sons and 23 daughters.

ccel.org/j/josephus/works/ant-1.htm

 

[drafdog]

Remember that this is a story told to communicate a lesson (or lessons) and is not necessarily historically accurate. There are, indeed, a first man and first woman endowed with a soul. There is no reason not to believe that other creatures biologically related to them could not have born them children who would then have souls like their human parents.
Any way you answer the question is an excercise in conjectural theology and we are not constrained to believe one way or another.

Matthew

 

[1ke]

There is no reason not to believe that other creatures biologically related to them could not have born them children who would then have souls like their human parents.

You are incorrect.

Monogenesis is a required belief of Catholics. See Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humane Generis.

 

[drafdog]

Monogenesis is the idea that we are all decended from first man and first woman. How does my posting imply otherwise?

Matthew

 

[Cor_Jesu]

Remember that this is a story told to communicate a lesson (or lessons) and is not necessarily historically accurate. There are, indeed, a first man and first woman endowed with a soul. There is no reason not to believe that other creatures biologically related to them could not have born them children who would then have souls like their human parents.

Matthew

That would mean that the children of Adam and Eve had sexual relations with creatures without souls. In essence, bestiality.
And why doubt that the book of Genesis is historically accurate?? The view that the Bible is full of stories that aren’t true but just “teach us lessons” is a liberal Protestant view, not a Catholic view.

 

[drafdog]

Beastiality is the proper name for sexual relations with a creature with which we cannot produce off spring. I despute the idea that a biologically similar creature, differing only in that it has no soul, meets this criterion.
Would you prefer to be the product of incest?
Try this: (remember all of this is speculative theology including the idea that they engaged in incest) God provides a soul to each of the spouses of Eve’s children at the time of their first sexual encounter. Problem solved, even for the squeemish.

Matthew

 

[Della]

My teenage daughter was asking me how the children/sons of Eve found spouses?

Thanks for your help.

Since it is your teenage daughter you can simply tell her that the Bible doesn’t tell us that because that wasn’t the main reason why the stories about the origins of man were written.

The Bible isn’t a history book in the modern sense of the word. No one was interested in details about which they either knew when the stories were told or which they did not feel it important to tell (they were written down later, but that’s another whole topic). The focus of the Bible, both OT and NT is God’s dealings with humankind, not who married who, etc, except for how it related to that focus.

We’d love to fill in all the gaps, especially in our times when everything is gone over with a fine toothed comb for “proof” that it is “real,” but the peoples of biblical times didn’t have that understanding of history nor was it relevant to them. What was important to them was their duty towards God and their fellow human beings, which is what religion is primarily concerned with.