In the Bible God commands Adam and Eve to multiply the earth. That would
mean eventually there would be incest in order to multiply.
Incest.
(a) A person commits incest if he marries or engages in sexual intercourse
with a person he knows to be, either legitimately or illegitimately:
(1) His ancestor or descendant by blood or adoption; or
(2) His brother or sister of the whole or half-blood or by adoption; or
(3) His stepchild or stepparent, while the marriage creating the
relationship exists; or
(4) His aunt, uncle, nephew or niece of the whole or half-blood.
What was God thinking? How could this have been acceptable?
Leviticus 18 lists all forbidden sexual relationships. Cousin relationships
are not included
Wouldn’t being cousins fall under #1 by today’s guidelines?
God commanded many cousins to marry, including Zelophehad’s 5 daughters,
Eleazar’s daughters, Jacob (who married both Rachel and Leah, first
cousins), and Isaac and Rebekkah (first cousins once removed). All were
ancestors of Jesus Christ
Today you can date your first cousin, but if you are considering marriage,
laws vary by state and country. Twenty-four states legally forbid first
cousins from marrying, and another seven require genetic counseling before
legal union can take place. Did you know Albert Einstein married his first
cousin. and so did Charles Darwin?
Could the laws in biblical times be so different then the law of the land
today?
Why all the “adoption” stuff? I know that the situation would be socially awkward, but I don’t really think that sexual relations with someone only related to you by adoption should count as incest.
All you have to do is read Leviticus to answer that one.
If God doesn’t want me to commit Incest, then why did he make my sister so hot?
Seriously, while Seth, Cain et al. must have committed incest, this doesn’t make a biblical injunction against incest invalid. The rules were simply different back then. Many mythologies forbid incest in one verse, and then describe their Gods performing it. When deities or men (or even a special family of men) descend from a common source, its hard to avoid.
Do cousins count as incest? The Bible says no. Modern American opinion says yes. It should not be surprising that the two differ, as the boundaries of incest are subjective. Do cousins count? Second cousins? Adopted siblings? Your uncle’s wife’s adopted daughter from a previous marriage?
(a) Depending on your school of “orthodox” Biblical interpretations, the various penal/social/ritual laws of Leviticus did NOT all apply before being revealed, or may not have applied at all.
(b) IIRC, the terminology specifically used in the Torah (and I’ll appreciate any of our Dopers more learned in the matter to jump in here) points to that certain fo these marriage/mating practices were “exceptional grants” from God.
(d)…which is why the “adoption” language. Laws in general – civil and criminal – have been amended over the 20th Century in most of the world to clarify that adoption makes you 100% just as much family as bloodline (or you’d risk having entire categories of second-class relative becoming “fair game” to get the short end of the stick). The historical basis for the law against incest is NOT genetic effects – though in the past, those would have likely been seen as God’s wrath – but damage to family integrity.
(e) Unions between cousins do NOT fulfill condition #1. Cousins are neither your ancestors nor your descendants, they are collateral relatives. The definition you quote is summed as “ancestors, descendants, and other relatives up to the third degree”. First cousins are of the fourth degree of consanguinity.
(How you calculate steps: add the generations between each and the last common ancestor.)
(f) In the particular case of the ancient Israelites, cousins were OK. Endogamous unions were even encouraged. (there have been earlier threads in which we’ve discussed whether generalized squickiness about cousin-cousin unions is more a phenomenon of the development of urban society than something deeply ancestral)
(g) Do a search for the “Book of Jubillees”, an Apocryphal/Pseudoepigraphical companion to Genesis that is still used by the Ethiopian churches: it is absolutely frank about how the children and grandchildren of Adam would have carried on…
All of the first-generation siblings married each other in order to populate the earth. At that time there was no law against incest. But as the population grew large enough, and as the risk of genetic problems increased because of sin’s curse, God outlawed marriage between siblings.
The story of Adam and Eve isn’t where the incest in the bible is, though. People say we all came from Adam and Eve, but this can’t be true, even if we believe that God created Adam and Eve. Let’s think about Genesis. Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Able, right? And once Able is killed:
Only then do they have the third child, right? No other children of theirs are mentioned between Cain and Able and Seth.
However, if you go back to the conversation between Cain and God about his punishment this is said:
Which means there are already other people besides him and his parents. Otherwise, who would be finding him and slaying him? Who would the mark protect him against? The question then becomes, where were the other people? We find out quickly.
God may have created Adam and Eve first, but it’s obvious that he did not create them only.
Now, if you really wanted to talk about God condoning incest, there’s a better story for that…even more twisted than marrying your cousin!
When King Henry VIII wanted to divorce Catherine of Aragon, he used the reasoning that his marriage to her was incestuous because she had been married to his brother, making her, in a way, his “sister.”
Before he married Anne Boleyn, he requested a dispensation from the Pope, because he had slept with her sister Mary. The sexual union with Mary made Anne Henry’s “sister.”
When it came to royalty, the incest laws were very lax indeed. There are many examples of cousin marriage, as well as niece-uncle marriages, and, in the case of the ancient Egyptians, brother-sister marriage.
Given how many people in that book are only mentioned as being “begetted” (or is it begotten?) don’t you think they would have at least been named? They couldn’t be any less thematically important than the others who are only named…
Ok I don’t have my facts down on this thought so don’t flame me! But just thinking out loud…
Don’t we have to forget Adam and Eve and go to the story of Noah and see that only 8 people survived the entire planet?Which would mean we were desendants of Noah and his family?
(sure still indirectly Adam and Eve)
Now let me ask a gross question, why is incest wrong? Now don’t get me wrong, I know why I believe it to be so, and I am in no way promoting it, but I’m curious as to why it’s against the law…and yes, I am going somewhere with it.
Why is it against the law? Because our ancestors believed in a strict moral code that some things were absolutely wrong and should be punished: like miscegenation, birth control, and shopping on Sunday.
As to what makes incest wrong, I think it’s a case of one of those things that might not be absolutely invariably wrong, but is so easy to abuse that one’s very motives for wanting to do it have to be suspect. Sort of like asking, “couldn’t people use heroin as a recreational drug if they just didn’t abuse it?”
Probably our mixed feelings about incest come from our evolutionary past where:
1.It’s preferable to have children by anyone other than a close relative;
2. But rather than die childless, it’s preferable to mate with a relative.
Most of the people who are only named are eponymous ancestors of tribes and groups the ancient Israelites would have had contact with, so their naming has a purpose. It fits these tribes into the world, and suggests ties between them and Israel. So, for example, an Israelite knows that an Amorite is his enemy, because the Amorites are descended from Canaan, who was cursed by Noah to be a servant of the descendents of Shem, and he knows that the other sons of Ham, like the Egyptians and the Assyrians are his enemies.
