Where did Cain and Abel's wives come from?

It’s a question that I have asked for years. The Bible very clearly states that, at that point in time, there are only three living humans: Adam, Eve and Cain. So where did the wife come from?

Could you point out where it very clearly states that? True we only have three surviving named humans by Genesis 4:16. But unless my various bibles are missing verses, there is nothing in there that explicitly says that there are only three. Of course it also doesn’t say that they eat, excrete, or sleep either. But I think that we as readers are supposed to fill in some of the gaps ourselves.

As they say absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I don’t know what bible you’ve been reading, but the NIV not only does not clearly state what you say it does, it implies quite the contrary:

Gen 4:13 Cain said to the LORD, "My punishment is more than I can bear.

14 Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."

15 But the LORD said to him, “Not so; if anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.

16 So Cain went out from the LORD’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden.

17 Cain lay with his wife …
Clearly, Earth has plenty of people and Cain fears retribution from them - so much so that God specifically protects Cain from them.
Where did these people come from? Well, there are plenty of places in this chapter where years (or even centuries) could have passed. Seth is Eve’s third child, but he wasn’t the last. Really, I don’t understand the need to make this out to be some kind of mystery.

Ah, that makes the most sense then. So Eve could have dropped a few hundred kids, those kids would have in-breeded like crazy (possibly with Adam and Eve’s help,) and then one of them could have married Cain.

Yeah, Cain screwing his sister would have been sick.

The bible claims epic life spans for the first few generations of the Bible. Seth lives 800 years, so if Cain survived a similar amount of time, thats enough for some 40 generations, enough time for Cain to see the World go from just he his parents and sibilings to a pretty well populated Earth, easily enough to find a wife and populate a city.

Well, somebody either screwed a sister (or possibly Adam screwed his daughters, so Adam’s sons could screw their nieces) at some point.

Thousand year old tradition is that Cain and Abel were each born with a twin sister and each was to marry the twin of his brother. Their names were (spellings vary widely) were Aclima (the twin of Cain) and Jamila (the twin of Abel), though Cain was in love with his own twin who was betrothed to his brother. (Lord Byron changed the names to Adah and Zillah but used other parts of the legend.) Cain, who also according to some apocryphal but ancient variants and commentaries was not the son of Adam but son of Eve and the serpent/demon Sammael- hence the rejection by God- slew Abel because he envied Aclima and to spite God for his rejection.

A page on some of the variants.

We haven’t found the text yet, but after God rested on the seventh day he created a few more individuals on the eighth day.

Including the Hobbits and, by some accounts, the Smurfs.

Yes. And he built it on Rock and Roll.

I don’t know if you actually support this position or not, but it really irritates me when Christians (not all of them do this, btw) try to make the argument that A&E and co were ‘genetically perfect’.

The concept makes no sense biologically speaking and it’s simply an attempt to make the explanation sound scientific, when the reality is, it isn’t.

The attempts of many modern biblical literalists to reconcile an ancient mythos with established scientific principles are doomed to fail because these two mental models are orthogonal to one another.
I am not a Christian, but if I were, I’d be more than a bit irritated at the diminished nature of the Creator that is implied by the requirement for Him/Her/It to conform to a literal interpretation of the texts described by some humans as Holy Writ.
In other words, an entity capable of Creating an entire Cosmos by fiat should not be constrained by the limited imagination of a few self-appointed spokespeople.
Doing so seems somehow hubrical to me.

As obscure as the apocryphal “Cain was the son of the serpent” variant is, incidentally, it has found its way into the mythology of some white supremacists.

Lines I’ve never understood how biblical literalists get around is the descendants of Cain. His g-g-g-grandson Lamech is said to have had two wives and with his first wife

Now, the entire population of the world is washed away in the Great Flood with the exception of Noah and his sons and daughters-in-law. How then can Jabal be the ancestor of tent dwelling shepherds and Jubal be the ancestor of all musicians? While certainly it’s possible Noah was a descendant of these people, then that would mean that all tent dwellers and musicians and craftsmen and dancers and farmers and one-eyed drag queens for that matter are descendants fo Noah. If Noah’s sons married girls who descended from these- well, within a generation or two the Shemites and Japhethites and Hamites were completely intermarried as well so thereagain it’s not like descent from Jabal or Jubal is any distinction- everybody would be a descendant of them both.

Of course I was told not to worry about this in elementary school (I went to a religious academy). The same school told us that the descendants of Ham went down to Africa and turned black and that’s why we say “hambone” today (which I think actually is true in the etymology of hambone but it’s a bit odd for the rest).

As Ray Stevens didn’t sing:

Guitar-Cain
Made yourself a pain
Built a city on a plain
And made yourself a name
Guitar-Cain

So he wandered for centuries in the wilderness with no women or nothing? No wonder he could populate a city after he got married - he was probably horny as hell.

So he only wondered about people after the sons of Seth (and later children of Adam and Eve) grew up? Talk about holding a grudge. Not to mention that at this point every person on earth was either a child, a brother or a niece of nephew. That must have been a family that made the Corleones look like sweethearts.

Reminds me of Anna Russell’s version of the Ring, where she points out that for most of his life every woman Siegfried ever knew was an aunt.