The Adam and Eve thread got me thinking. The only thing I know about the Bible is what I learned in Sunday school. Cain was Adam and Eve’s son, right? He killed his brother and went off to the land of Nod and married, right? So. . .
Who is this woman? As the story was told to me, the only person she could be is Cain’s sister. I remember getting a very unsatisfactory answer in Sunday school that went something like this:
Me: Where did this woman come from?
Teacher: There were heathens to the east.
Me: So God only created Catholics?
Teacher: No God created everyone and everything.
Me: So when He was finished creating Catholics, he went over to the east to create everybody else?
I remember being told to understand the story as it is told, and to shut up. I also remember feeling I was very bad person, morally, to be even asking such questions.
WOW! I didn’t know Adam and Eve were CATHOLICS!?!?! Did they actually teach you that? I went to Jewish sunday school, and they taught us that Abraham was the first Jew. So I guess now we know that Catholicism is an older religion than Judaism. I can just imagine Adam and Eve celebrating Christmas and Easter in their fig leaves.
As for Cain’s wife, it makes as much sense as anything else religious. If you’re smart enough to ask questions, your smart enough not to believe it.
sdimbert Thanks for the link. I wish I’d seen it when it first came around, so I could have asked a few questions myself.
panache45: Yes, in the Beginning there were Catholics. Muslims, Buddists and all non-christian peoples are Satan followers (though unwittingly so) and are going straight to hell. Jews are not followers of Satan. They are a people who had it right for some time, but somewhere along the way picked up some bad habits like eating babies and such. Jews are also going straight to hell.
I was in my 20’s when I realized I was not a Catholic. Our then Cardinal (O’Connor) said publicly that you can’t be a “cafeteria Catholic” picking and choosing the tenents you like and disregarding the rest. When the Cardinal tells me I’m not a Catholic, I listen.
A certain type of narrative focuses on certain things to make points, and isn’t responsible for people asking questions about details it (its tellers) aren’t interested in, in this case questions about where Cain’s wife could have come from since there were only 4 people in the world (not counting the dead Abel). Among other things, the Cain and Abel story was possibly intended to show that God preferred the nomadic way of life to civilization, since the gifts of Cain were those of agriculture, on which civilization depends, whereas the gifts of Abel were those of the nomadic herdsmen. In other words more or less citified people were, as they always do everywhere and everywhen in the world, disgusted with their current life and vaguely remembered they must have had a different kind of past, represented by contemporary nomads. That people always look back to a Golden Age which was the opposite of Now is also found in the story of the deities Tammuz and another whose name I forget wanting to marry the ancient Babylonian goddess Ishtar. Tammuz provides the herdsman type gifts and the other god agricultural gifts. Ishtar prefers the agriculture god first, but then she sees Tammuz and prefers him, ie., his gifts evidently, thus showing that the Babylonian gods also preferred the Golden Age of the Past (herding) life. The ancient Hebrews merely borrowed this tale and one of the Sumerians that goes the same way, but used it to the purpose of demonstrating man’s wickedness and who knows what all else. If you are religious you say that they borrowed and reinterpreted it under Divine inspiration. Other than this most of the Old Testament is actual history instead of myth, although the history is biased. When you get past Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, and the Tower of Babel and a few others and are on Abraham, you have covered the myths of the Bible. The rest is history. See the book WHO WROTE THE BIBLE, by Friedman.
In some of my odd surfing moments this past weekend I linked to a biblical creationist site that has all the “answers” for a literal interpretation of Genesis. Bear in mind that your question is moot unless you believe ina literal interpretation. FWIW I am not a fundie as I don’t believe that literal interpretation is needed for faith.
Their answer was that he married his sister. Ewwww! Prohibitions against such unions didn’t exist then. Since A&E were perfectly created (and presumably genetically identical Eve was a clone - comment mine) they had no genetic defects so no biological reason their children could not take the only mates available, their own siblings.
**don willard]/B] - That’s an interesting insight, I’m going to look for that book.