Who were Cain and Abel married to?

[buffalo]

Complementary, ok. Simply an expanded version of two verses I wasn’t sure of.

The second account of course includes a sequence too, which differs somewhat from the sequence in the first.

Yes the second account is in order of importance, man being the most important.

 

[jmcrae]

Where does it say in the Bible that Adam and Eve had more children??

We can infer it from the fact that they were commanded to “go forth and multiply, subdue the earth.” There is no indication that they did not do that.

Where does it say incest was permitted??

We know that Abraham was permitted to marry his half-sister, Sarah (they had the same father, but different mothers, and probably grew up in the same family unit).

We know from the Church’s teaching that Adam and Eve were one man and one woman, the common ancestors of all human beings.

If Cain and Abel were the only children they had, then Eve would have been the only human woman on earth. We know that neither Cain nor Abel married Eve, since Abel died before he was married, and Cain was exiled and sent away to the land of Nod, where, we are told, he found a wife.

Therefore, there must have been other human beings, who were living in Nod.

Since we already know that all human beings are descended from Adam and Eve, we must assume that these other human beings must also have been children of Adam and Eve.

That being the case, Cain must have married a sister of his who was living already in the land of Nod.

 

[little_c]

The reason why evolution doesn’t matter (slightly off-topic) to me is because what Scripture doesn’t say.

It doesn’t say that Adam was the first human. What made Adam different from all other humans is that he was the first to be chosen by God (no free will) and filled with the Holy Spirit.(Gen. 2:7).

It is a false claim that everyone is a descendant of Adam & Eve because not every man, woman, and child that ever lived where given the Holy Spirit.

In addition; when Noah and his sons came out of the Ark the Bible says: These three {were} the sons of Noah, and from these the whole earth was populated. (Gen. 9:19).

If Adam and Eve are the very first humans from whom every one else comes from; why doesn’t the Bible say . . .

God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, **‘and from these the whole earth was populated.’ **and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Gen 1:29.

 

[little_c]

We know from the Church’s teaching that Adam and Eve were one man and one woman, the common ancestors of all human beings.

If Cain and Abel were the only children they had, then** Eve would have been the only human woman on earth**.

If you would be so kind as to substantiate your statement by providing ‘the Church’s teaching’, I’d be interested in reading it. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have file your statement into my ‘Conventional Wisdom’ Folder.

 

[japhy]

It doesn’t say that Adam was the first human. What made Adam different from all other humans is that he was the first to be chosen by God (no free will) and filled with the Holy Spirit.(Gen. 2:7).

Why didn’t God just drag one of the humans He’d already made into the garden, then? Why did He create Adam specially? And why did He create Eve from the side of Adam? Why didn’t He call Eve into the garden?

It is a false claim that everyone is a descendant of Adam & Eve because not every man, woman, and child that ever lived where given the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is not passed on genetically.

If Adam and Eve are the very first humans from whom every one else comes from; why doesn’t the Bible say…

I can’t tell you why the Bible doesn’t say what you think it should say.

If you would be so kind as to substantiate your statement by providing ‘the Church’s teaching’, I’d be interested in reading it. Otherwise, I’m afraid I’ll have file your statement into my ‘Conventional Wisdom’ Folder.

I already showed the source of this teaching:

The Church expressly teaches against polygenism, that humanity has more than one set of original parents:
When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own. (Humani Generis 37)

 

[crazzeto]

It has always been my understanding that Adam is representative of the first men, collectively, and Eve is representative of the first women, collectively. The specific points of their familial stories, especially concerning the slaying of Abel and the geneologies, are reference to the specific men and women from whom the Jewish race, God’s chosen people, were descended. Therefore, there is no reason to wrestle over any questions of incest because, more than likely, the first generation of humankind was not having incest.

1. God created man and woman, therefore, he knows how genetics work.
2. Incest has a much higher chance of genetic mutations, sterilization, etc.
3. Continued incest can result in the complete genetic baselining of a community making further procreation impossible.
4. Knowing this, we can safely believe that God would not create man in a situation that would require all future generations to be descended from a single genetic pairing.
5. Therefore, God being God would not have created a single man and a single woman to “be fruitful and multiply.”
6. Finally, we can deduce that God created many men and women and chose a specific lineage from which to derive His chosen people.

As for who Cain married, there is speculation that Adam’s legendary first wife Lilith was also later the wife of Cain. I do not believe this, but it’s there for your consideration. But, apart from a handful of women, women are almost entirely ignored if not completely written out of the Bible, so to answer the OP’s question, it is best not to go searching for an answer but to answer honestly–we don’t know to whom Cain was married, but it probably was not his sister, or his niece, or anyone else that would violate the reason and sanity of God (cf my logical argument above).

This is a problematic understanding which is not supported by the Magisterium. Official teaching is that while what is written in scripture isn’t “history in the usual sense”, i.e. this isn’t an academic athropology paper, that it is still history in a true sense. Adam was one man, Eve was one woman. You really can’t change this in to a collective group of first men, and first women with out all sorts of complexities arising. Which one of the first men ate from the Tree of the Knowlege of Good and Evil? Did they all eat of it? Did they not eat of it? If any of them didn’t eat from it, then do we have people today on earth decendent from those people? If so wouldn’t they have not inhereted original sin?

And then we get into the question of Eugenics, which is based on this very idea of multiple points of human evolution. If we’re not all decendant from the same first parents then, could one group of humans be better than another? You see where this line of thinking goes?

I realise we tend to want to “rationalize” what we know of God because well, we look at the world around us full of technological innovation and think “well there must be a rational scientific explanation for all this”. But consider if you truely believe in God, then you have to truely believe this God is the Omnipitant, Omnipresent and Omnesant creater of all of heaven and earth! Couldn’t this God have created a single Adam and Eve? And when Adam and Eve were booted from Paradise, couldn’t this same God have seen to it that the human race lived long enough to make it to salvation? Particularly given the promise to redeem man in his eyes made at the very point Adam and Eve were being expelled from the garden?

 

[juliamajor]

much ado about nothing.mrs cain and abel weren’t mentioned because they are unimportant to the story.There are many incidents in Genesis were a story starts, you think it’s going some where- then it ends.or an aside is made and nothing comes of it.there are two possible reasons.The original stories could have belonged to a much bigger oral corpus that had to be whittled down to fit into written form.second no details were put in because they were unknown or unimportant to the totality the “moral” of the story.Speculation is useless and unimportant to the full meaning of Genesis.The Creation stories in Genesis actually are a tiny bit of Genesis.The really important stuff starts with Abraham and the patriarchs.The making of a Chosen People and a ChosenLand.

 

[japhy]

The Creation stories in Genesis actually are a tiny bit of Genesis. The really important stuff starts with Abraham and the patriarchs.

The infancy narratives are actually a tiny bit of the Gospels.
The Last Supper is actually a tiny bit of the Gospels.
(etc.)

I disagree that the Creation and the Fall are not “really important”.

 

[juliamajor]

The infancy narratives are actually a tiny bit of the Gospels.
The Last Supper is actually a tiny bit of the Gospels.
(etc.)

I disagree that the Creation and the Fall are not “really important”.

Let me clarify-to the inspired author,who does not spend a heck of a lot of time on Creation stories, he did not find these eitiological stories as important as the patriarchal stories.Creation stories are usually enormous,complex a large part of a nation’s cultural understanding of it’s self.These weren’t as compelling to the Israelites because they as a people did not exist ,they were yet to be chosen.Israelite life begins with God’s choice of them.The cultural identity the very being of Israel is tied to YHWH.
l
Last supper is atiny bit but the gospels are made of tiny bits.there is so much that points to and surrounds the Last Supper that it’s importance is glaringly obvious.The author was very cognizant of it’s importance and did not minimalize it in any way.The same intensity is missing in early Genesis.The stories of Creation are not fleshed out-they are abrupt and truncated-from Abrahamic Gen.on the stories are fleshed out-the characters have identities-we don’t see that earlier.The very writing style,syntax and verbiage point to the importance of the patriarchal stories over the creation stories

 

[PursuingLogos20]

I’d LIKE to say because Adam and Eve broke away from God, they saw fit to “be fruitful and multiply” by having interfamilial relations…gross I know, but for the large gene pool of today’s population, it most certainly is LOGICAL to assume so…HOWEVER, I do not fully trust that I am speaking in TRUTH.

Besides, unless you’re responded to by a knowledgable theologian from the site, I don’t really think you can fully profess what’s being said by many of the members, honest as they are…

I’d suggest asking a priest you trust, finding a reputable book, and/or picking up the Bible to see if the answer is there. Priest is the way to go, however: it’s their office to shepherd their flock

 

[asker42]

I have posted this before and I do not know if it is heretical or not and if possible I would like to write about this in the future but I think that Adam and Eve may have existed in the Garden as the first two people and due to their sin they brought about evolution which in effect lead to the creation of all people, paradoxically Adam and Eve as well ata later time. And through this Creation all people inherited Original Sin even though they were not born directly of Adam and Eve in a biological sense but descended from them in a spiritual sense in that they were created in effect of what Adam and Eve did.

 

[jmcrae]

I have posted this before and I do not know if it is heretical or not and if possible I would like to write about this in the future but I think that Adam and Eve may have existed in the Garden as the first two people and due to their sin they brought about evolution which in effect lead to the creation of all people, paradoxically Adam and Eve as well ata later time. And through this Creation all people inherited Original Sin even though they were not born directly of Adam and Eve in a biological sense but descended from them in a spiritual sense in that they were created in effect of what Adam and Eve did.

Um, yes, that would be a heresy.

1. If evolution were the means of Creation, it began with the first living cell - not with human beings. (We can choose to believe in evolution, if that’s what makes sense to us.)
2. It is the firm teaching of the Church that we are all members of the same family, physically descended from the same father and mother, whom we call Adam and Eve. (We don’t know what, if anything, they called each other.)

 

[asker42]

I don’t deny either of those things in what I said though