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Orogeny
Guest
I must have missed that in the previous chapters of Genesis. Can you point that out for me?
Peace
Tim
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Peace
Tim
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CentralFLJames
Guest
Do you really think a Christian Book would be so explicit to give details about doing it upright vs. laying down?buffalo:
I must have missed that in the previous chapters of Genesis. Can you point that out for me?
Peace
Tim
Ooops, I forgot, this was a Jewish book.
Good point.
James
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Valke2
Guest
Cain, being one of the first people on earth, didnāt know a lot of things. Many commentaries explain that the reason God does not simply kill Cain and actually protects him from others, is because murder was not known and Cain did not understand the finality of his act. To assume that Cain was worried about a future population explosion looks very much like mental gymnasitics to explain a glaring problem in taking the text historically.
How many girls would Adam and Eve had over the next two hundred years, or their children and grandchildren would have had? Your math seems to assume that the women would be able to bear children until they were in their late hundreds. This assumption ignores two things that we find in Genesis. First, Sarah giving birth at a hundred is clearly a miraculous event that no one expects. Second is that there are no accounts in Genesis of how old any woman was when she died. (Does it say old Eve was). But all this presupposes that Cain, freshly after murdering Able, at a time when there are only 3 people on the entire planet, is worried about people in a population that will kill him on site.
To believe so requires ignoring the plain meaning of the text. Genesis clearly states that Cain settles in the land of Nod and then "Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch, He became a city builderā¦
It then goes on to say who Cainās children married. And then and only then it says in 4:25:
Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Sethā¦
And then 5:4: And the days of Adam after begetting Seth were 800, and he begot sons and daughters."
The text seems clear. Adam begot additional sons and daughters after he begot Seth.
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Valke2
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cpayne
Guest
In my neck of the woods, we call these ācousins.ā
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CentralFLJames
Guest
I think you presume too much from your modernistic perspective to have āa clueā to project with presumption that you and modern man are more knowledgeable than Cain. This is a presumption that is arbitrary and at face value not superior to any I have made. What makes your opinion any better?
The clear message of the OT is the progressive decline in moral values metaphorically if not actually portrayed with the ever declining life spans of Adamās successors conflated with the escalating graveness in moral offense. A moral leprosy has infected humanity and it effects everything - even creation. There are even spurious works that tell us that Adam in his exile used to converse regularly with the Angel Gabriel and God too. Thus, I presume the exact opposite to your thesis that you have superior intellect and insight than Cain. If they were able to look forward in time to see how their descendants looked they would probably recoil in horror to see the degradation in physical beauty, moral uprightness and loss of common sense. Adam was created as a pure human being and had original grace we lack. It is therefor an affront to common sense to assume the progressively diseased offspring of Adam is superior in any way to the first parent and their initial offspring. Only after Christ returns is humanity and creation radically reconfigured to align toward Him as new Adam. But the transformational effects only operate in those who repent and cooperate with that new re-creative divinizing grace. Modern world knowledge and science is in now way superior to original divine wisdom imparted from God to Man in Adam.
Bottom Line - Adam & Eve and Cain too would both laugh at your thesis and weep in pity at how their sin has infected so many.
Again - the moral decline of humanity is manifest through reduction in average life time and the first generations of females would have lived close to the same age of Adam - which was about 930 years. We can safely assume the women were similarly long lived. My assumptions are thus more than reasonable.
How so? How do you not know that Cain took with him a sister? The evidence of Nod and an assumption of a populace (that you make) immediately tells us that the bible accounts do not tell us all the author knows. It is more probable to me that the writer (who is wring from far into the future to create a preamble to give a lead-in to and historical continuity to the Jewish Torah) is simply establishing a distinct genealogy showing two branches from which good and evil lineage are divided. The Jews are simply trying to prove that they are āthe chosen peopleā from a preferred lineage and the other lineage is āmarkedā by God (and as we later learn in the NT God will offer restoration even to these to reunite all peoples and nations).
Again, I think this is only a literary mechanism to focus the Torah on a preferred descendency and the story is not intended to be a complete reckoning of all the actual descendants that are seen in the combined real with metaphorical story.
So, it seems to me your presumptions and thesis in his matter leave the population of Nod to arrive through Darwinian gymnastics as apes swinging down from the trees waiting for Cain to arrive and establish an inferior human species - a crossbreed of a morally deranged murderer with a carnal-natural humanoid race (gentiles?
). Is this an accurate portrayal of what you want to counter-illume?? 
James
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