Hi cecil and crew, love your coloumn, I like how you give in depth ansewers. I have a big Burning question, I hope you can help me. ??? Has anyone ever ben able to definitively explain the probale issue of incest between the children of Adam&Eve. How could this be?I can t get any resonable explanation from ministers or scholars. Looking for ansewers, One of Gods children, Donnie Fitch Cinti Ohio thanks
What is there to explain? When the only women on Earth are your mother and your sisters, you don’t have a lot of options for dating.
Presumably, the taboo against incest developed later, when the human population became large enough that you find someone who was not a close relative.
The traditional answer in Judaism is that, yes, Adam’s children slept with each other.
Zev Steinhardt
ROFL. Simple logic. My ex-wife was a first cousin. Several people were shocked by this. At the time a quarter of states in US allowed first cousins to marry. In Africa, this is all kinds of normal.
Apparently, they weren’t the only folks in the neighborhood.
Cain, after all, is afraid that others would come upon him and kill him, even though he’s doomed to wander the earth as a fugitive (so it’s not his family who would run into him). Cain’s son builds a city – not just a couple of huts, but a city – apparently there were folks to live there.
Maybe, maybe not.
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Adam and Eve had other children. And there is no date on the Cain & Abel story.
Adam has other daughters (in fact, Jewish tradition maintains that daughters were born with Cain and Abel and that was one of the things they were arguing about). Cain kills Abel. He may have been afraid of Adam, Eve, other children of Adam’s or even animals (another possibility suggested by Jewish tradition) taking revenge for Abel. He leaves with his wife (and maybe even some of Adam’s other children…) It can also be assumed that he (along with his other siblings) had lots of children. And lastly, a “city” back then was not the metropolis we know today. A city such as Troy, for example, in the Greek legends, would probably count as a small town today. The term “city” is very subjective.
Zev Steinhardt
This question (and a couple of closely related questions) have always been popular on the SDMB:
Who had Cain and Abel’s babies?
Where did Cains wife emerge from?
Cain: I now pronounce you man and… Huh?
Polycarp,incest, morality “liberal christianity” (Note the discussion of the Law beginning in post #13.)
And don’t forget how long they lived.
[sub]disclaimer - it’s just a story, folks![/sub]
:: slides down the bench, just beyond lightning-bolt fallout range from kniz ::
So you’re willing to accept the existence of a God who:
-creates a whole world in DAYS.
-makes people out of CLAY and BONES.
-creates a TREE, eating the FRUIT of which gives you instant KNOWLEDGE.
-can alter biology on such an immediate and fundamental level as to spontaneously create MENSTRUATION and PAIN in CHILDBIRTH…
yet, you’re not willing to accept that He can “tweak” the chromosomal roulette wheel to maximize generational diversity?
Your religion is funny.
And your response is not.
The OP is a legitimate GQ question and no one based their answer on either an unswavering literalist or dismissive literary declaration on the factual accuracy of Genesis.
We have no need of commentary in GQ regarding what other people may or may not believe.
My apologies.
Please interpret my above posting to mean:
“In keeping with a literal interpretation of Genesis, it is plausible that an all-powerful God might take as active a hand in procreation as He did in creation.”
I was out of line. No offense meant.
I realize that Judaism has traditions that expand on what is in the Testaments, but does this mean a literal acceptance?
Well played! Would that all our members receive a chastening so well yet turn it around so gracefully.
In this case, simply logic dictates it. There was no one else, so it is logical to assume that Adam’s children married one another. This idea is confirmed in later commentaries.
Zev Steinhardt
I must not have made myself clear. I was asking if Judaism takes the entire story of Adam & Eve as actually having happened? Do some believe it literally true and others as symbolic? I’ve heard that when Jesus told parables that he was following the Jewish tradition and that Christianity takes many things in the Old Testament as true, which are in the same tradition. 
Judaism (speaking from the Orthodox perspective) does take the story of Adam and Eve literally. They were the first two human beings created by God and we are all descended from them.
Zev Steinhardt
A book a few years back, called The Unauthorized Version explored the Bible both from a point of view of internal consistency and consistency with known external history.
In it, the author examined the pre-flood chapters of Genesis and concluded that the onbly way for the whole thing to be internally consistent was if the story in the first chapter of Genesis dealt with the creation of the world as a whole, and the alternate version of the story referred to a “special creation” of the line of Adam (leading to Jacob, Moses, David, etc.) in the Garden.
Thus, when, Cain is banished, he takes his wife from the people created in Chapter 1.
Mind you, Fox did not claim the Bible was written with this in mind (he subscribes to the standard two sources theory), only that if you’re going to insist that the Bible is consistent cover to cover, this is the only interpretation that even hopes to stand up to scrutiny.
Thanks for clearing that up for me. Actually it is probably the Orthodox perspective that I am interested in since it most closely reflects the beliefs of the writers.