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The story of Cain and Abel is a familiar one.  Cain tills the earth and Abel tends sheep.  They both prepare offerings to God.  God favors Abel’s sacrifice of his best lamb over Cain’s offering of vegetables.  Cain kills Abel, and God punishes Cain.  He then marks Cain so that no one will kill him for what he did.

The main Creation challenge for Christians in this story is generally lodged toward the end of it, when Cain takes a wife.  Genesis 4:17…

 ¹⁷ Cain lay with his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch. 

Who did he marry?  His sister?  And what’s the point of building a city?  Going back to verse 1, Cain would seem to be Eve’s first child, and Abel her second…

 ¹ Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, “With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man.” ² Later she gave birth to his brother Abel.

Now the quandary presented by a Young Earther’s perspective is that it requires the reader fill in the blanks with information not yet assumed in the first three chapters of Genesis.  This makes the details of chapter 4 incomplete at best, or misleading at worst.

The most common interpretation I have read is that is that verse 1 does not literally require Cain to be Eve’s first child.  True enough.  It is not said how much time passed between the end of Genesis 3 and the beginning of Genesis 4.  This allows for Adam and Eve to have been alive and pro-creating for quite some time before giving birth to Cain.  There is a limit however imposed by Genesis 5:3:

 ³ When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth.

This helps to date the end of events in Genesis 4:

 ²⁵ Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, “God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.” 

In other words, Cain killed Abel and got married less than 130 years after Adam and Eve were created.

Now, it is unclear how long Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, but it does place an upper limit on how many people were alive and old enough to marry Cain.

Supposing Adam had lived all 130 procreating with Eve and Eve alone.  Assuming one baby per year, they could have had about 100 kids by then, and at least 80 of them would have been of age to have kids.  Assuming half of them were male and half femaile, that’s around 40 couples having 40 kids over about 80 years, averaging 40 kids per couple, for a total of 1600 couples having kids over 60 years.  You can keep playing with the numbers however you want, but you will arrive at the possibility of 100s of 1000s of people by the time Cain was ready to take a wife.  So, is this what happened?  Well, old earth or young, the numbers can work.

So, establishing the possibility that there may indeed have been enough people on the earth from Cain could choose a wife in a Young Earth scenario, the next objection for them to overcome is inbreeding… how closely everyone on the earth was related at the time.  Now, it would seem that Cain went to an area where were already enough people to build a city, suggesting he was as many as 5 generations removed.  That is arguably not inbreeding, but regardless, if Adam and Eve started with unmutated DNA, then the assumption is that it would not matter anway, because human DNA was not yet degraded to the point where inbreeding is actually dangerous yet.

Bottom line, I am not as critical of the Young Earth perspective on this as other Old Earthers are.  Given their interpretation of Genesis 1 to 3, the manner in which they answer the challenges of who Cain married and who he built a city with has reasonable answers.  Personally, I am not convinced by the arguments, but the conclusions do follow their premises.

But here’s the thing.

In verse 1, the very first after Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden, it says that Cain was conceived with God’s help.  Why would she need God’s help?  She had been alive long enough to have as many as 100 children… what was so special about this one?

What was special is that Eve needed God’s help.

Who else would need God’s help? Sarai (later Sarah) would need help conceiving Isaac, for she was very old.  Elizabeth would need help conceiving John the Baptist, for she was also very old.  Both women were beyond child-bearing age.  In fact, this was a big enough deal for Eve that after losing Abel, she gave God all the credit when she gave birth to Seth… and we know that Adam was 130 years old at this point.  This strongly implies that like Sarai and Elizabeth, Eve, too was beyond child-bearing age.  This would imply that Eve had gone through menopause, and so potentially ceased having children at around the age of 40 to 50.

Let me correct that.  Eve was created adult.  Supposing her to be biologically 20 at her creation, that would actually give her 20 to 30 years of pro-creation, and nearly  70 years of none before Cain was born… and it would lead to the birth of Seth, through whom Noah would be born… the only surviving male line going back to Adam.

The reason this interpretation seems so likely to me is the consistency of God.  Sarai was beyond child-bearing years when she gave birth to the first child of the Abrahamic covenant.  Elizabeth was beyond child-bearing years when she gave birth to the child who would pave the way for the New Covenenant under Jesus.  It seems only fitting that an old woman give birth to Seth, the child through whom the Adamic Covenant would be passed, and from whom Jesus’ line would eventually come.

So then, what does this imply?  That there were far fewer people alive for Cain to marry than before. Rather than having 100 years of productive child-bearing years, I beleive that Eve had perhaps 30.  Even at 40 kids overall, that would be 20 couples.  Supposing they had 40 kids each, that would be 800 kids for the third generation, or 400 couples.  16,000 kids for generation four, and 320,000 for generation five.  That is still a lot.  So, we would see an explosion between generations four and five, right around the time that Cain was starting a city.  So, for the Young Earther perspective, assuming near-maximum procreation until  a woman’s age of 50, these numbers still work.

And so, I have no real argument against the Young Earth perspective for where Cain got a wife, other than the fact that I do not believe the Earth is young. 

I want to think on this a bit more, but it would seem that whether the earth be old or young, Genesis 4 works for me.

 

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 6th, 2010 at 9:58 am and is filed under Bible Commentary, Creationism, Young Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.