The purpose of this thread is **not **to slam religion in general or Christianity in particular. I am not–well, no need to name names. Nor is the purpose to debunk or support the Genesis narrative. I think it’s a Bronze Age myth, and any truth in it is only metaphorical and at any rate is generated in the reader’s mind. Many of you think it’s a set of filthy lies, and a few of you would call it received truth, perhaps even literal truth. All three opinions are irrelevant to the thread’s purpose, which is to find out what persons raised Christian or Jewish were taught as children about an oddity of the story.
Alrighty then. To the thread!
I’m sure most of us are familiar with the basics of the Genesis narrative, but just to be anal I’ll recap. The Lord God creates the first man & woman (hight Adam & Eve, respectively), and places them in the Garden of Eden. They commit a sin, the nature of which does not matter to this discussion, and are expelled from Paradise. Afterwards they couple, and Eve bears Cain, who becomes a farmer as an adult, and Abel, who becomes a shepherd; no other children are named at this point in the narrative. Cain, for unclear reasons, grows vexed with his brother and kills him. The Lord God confronts Cain with his crime, as follows:
There seems to be a contradiction here. Who, exactly, is Cain afraid of? For that matter, whom did he marry? In your early religious education, what were you taught about this?
The Biblical characters of that period had lots of children and lived for centuries. Presumably, Cain feared his nephews, great-nephews, and great-great-multi-great nephews. And maybe some of his nieces.
I attended Sunday school at a very conservative Southern Baptist church and was taught the same as Alessan - Cain feared his relatives who were descended from previous unmentioned children that Adam and Eve had been producing for centuries.
If Adam and Eve were the only ancestors of humans, then neither Cain nor Abel could have children without incest, either with sisters unnamed in the Bible, or (worse still) with their mother. So you’ve got to assume that, while Adam and Eve were the first humans, there were some other women around to marry Cain and Abel and have children. Where they came from, I have no idea. But if they existed, then Abel could have married and had children before he died, and his children could be among those seeking vengeance on Cain.
Doesn’t work. Cain and Abel were clearly the first children, because elder ones would have been important and thus mentioned. Second, Seth was specifically mentioned as being a replacement for Abel.
I think the real answer is that the story was taken from another myth thought worthy of inclusion, and ripped out of context. In addition, primitive societies did not use the same rules of story logic we do - logic hadn’t even been invented yet. A long time ago someone posted a large number of flood legends from around the world in talk.origins. In some of them the only survivors of the flood landed their boat or raft or palm tree, only to be met by others walking over a hill.
Perhaps it is a case of Dylan’s “you can be in my myth if I can be in yours.”
I don’t completely agree with this. An elder daughter or daughters would not have necessarily have been mentioned, as clearly, in the eyes of the authors of the myth, only man-children were of consequence.
I’m not saying that to start a Religion is sexist debate; it’s just that I was thinking the same thing, but then it occurred to me that, except for wives and temptresses, women figure little in the torah narrative. Yes, I’m perfectly aware of Deborah, Jael, Ruth, Esther, Dinah, but they are exceptions–and Dinah isn’t much of one.
The Book of Genesis was not written in one time and place as a single narrative. It was a collection of different stories, genealogies, poems, and so forth written at different times and different places and later assembled together. Scholars have been able to identify four main ‘strands’ in the Torah narrative; any decent study Bible will tell you which stories belong to which strands or are combinations from multiple strands. The story of Cain and Abel was probably not written with the intention of being placed immediately after the creation and expulsion from Eden. The ancient Jews were smart enough to see the question being posed here; they most likely assumed that either some other groups of people were created elsewhere or that there was a gap in the narrative.
Actually one of the things that stands out about the Old Testament stories is the attention that they pay to female characters, especially when compared to other works written in the same general time frame. For example, the authors of the Bible cared about the experiences and suffering of the maid Hagar after she was driven out of Abraham’s family. [See Genesis 16] That’s very different from, for instance, the Iliad, where the notion that Agamemnon’s slave girl might have feelings of her own is never considered.
Who ever said God stopped creating people after Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel and Seth. The Bible was not an early form of Twitter with God going “Just cr3ated platypus. WTF!!!11111ONEONEONE. : p The wolv3r!n3 will b so l33t.” about everything he did.
It’s written that Adam and Eve were created directly and were the first humans, but nowhere does it say that there weren’t other directly-created humans after them. God could have formed spouses for the Adam family out of clay or ribs or whatever, too.
As for what I was actually taught growing up, the Catholic position is that the Eden story is metaphorical anyway, so details like who they married aren’t worth worrying about.
I’ve always assumed that many of the the pre-abrahamic types were marrying close relatives. You can assume otherwise for Cain & Abel, but it’s impossible to think otherwise for the first few generations after Noah. Also, Elie Wiesel, among others, specifically mentions competition for the affections of either Eve or an unnamed sister as possible motives for Cain’s crime.
ITR champion and others, I am quite aware of the scholarly answers. I was looking for what people were taught as children, particularly those from fundamentalist or evangelical backgrounds.
Alternatively, he might have been afraid of strangers. Does the Genesis narrative definitely state that Adam and Eve are the only humans made by god? They’re the only ones who matter (from the primitive proto-Hebrew perspective) because they’re the ancestors of said proto-Hebrews. From there, it’s possible that Cain was afraid to wander among strangers because killing strangers was the way things were done.
You are, of course, jesting. But I don’t think we’re meant to take it that incest was prohibited until Moses’s time. No opprobrium is voiced against Lot for what he does with his daughters, though there is an implicit criticism of the idea in the way the story is told–blaming the girls in such a way that makes no sense whatsoever, even in mythic terms.
Well, God does condone genocide to further his purposes in the bible. Besides, we have the story of Lot and his daughters, which is sort of a parallel to this. Sodom is destroyed, Lot and his daughters are in a cave in the wilderness, they’re convinced that they’re the only surviving people in the world, so Lot’s daughters get him drunk and seduce him, and they have children.
Of course, if we were to take the Genesis story literally (and as an atheist, I obviously don’t, but it’s a fun thought experiment), it’s possible that incest wouldn’t have necessarily been a problem for the first few generations, or first hundred generations, post-Genesis. At least, I think so - I’m not a geneticist, but as I understand it, incest is problematic because it increases the odds that recessive adverse traits will be expressed in the offspring. However, brand-new-from-Genesis homo sapiens wouldn’t have had sufficient time for random mutations to create much in the way of harmful recessive genes, right? Thus, incest would not have been harmful (though still oogy).
I have heard fundamentalists explain the problem with incest in a similar, though more stupid, way: that after the Fall, humans slowly became corrupt not merely morally but genetically. In other words, the sickle cell gene and so forth did not exist in Adam & Eve, and probably not until long after Noah.
Growing up in Sunday School, I was taught that Adam and Eve (living as they did for hundreds of years) had many, many children, who inter-married. A&E were genetically perfect, so the lack of genetic diversity carried little risk and the taboo of sibling incest had not yet been established.
Cain would have feared retribution from his siblings and their descendants.