From where did the "wives" of Cain and Abel come?

[nPeace]

From where did the "wives" of Cain and Abel come?

Eve's womb.

How were THEY created?

Adam's reproductive seed, finding their way to Eve's "eggs".

 

[Subduction Zone]

Eve's womb.


Adam's reproductive seed, finding their way to Eve's "eggs".

Some people do not realize that this is a myth.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

I know, and how did that Latin speaking mother communicate with her Spanish speaking baby?

An interesting and very relevant observation! Spanish (like Italian, French, Portuguese, etc.) is a "Romance" language, meaning derived from Latin. We can all spot some of the similarities between these modern-day languages, but it is by no means given that today's Spanish speaker is going to get anywhere in a conversation with a native Parisian. And this is the result of only many dozens of generations, not the hundreds and thousands of generations that biological evolution regularly requires.

Thanks for the clever analogy!

 

[nPeace]

From the Blue Letter Bible:

"It seems then that Cain, or one of his brothers, must have married a sister. If the entire human race came from an original pair then this was unavoidable. Does this not present us with the problem of incest? The answer is no. These early intermarriages between brothers and sisters does not violate the commands God later gave in the Book of Leviticus which condemned these relationships."
source
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And why doesn't it "violate the commands God later gave in the Book of Leviticus which condemned these relationships." Because that would be problematic, so we just pretend it doesn't.

Of course this means that during all those years, some 3,500 of them, from the time of A&E to the writing of Leviticus 538-332 BCE (ave.= 430 BCE), people were also freely doing other things that god later decreed to be no-nos in Leviticus. . . . . "Ah, those were the good years. Ay, Martha?"

.

God did allow using the sword in war. Then there came a time he said no.
Our parents allowed us to use the potty, but then there came a time when they said no.
Things may not be all bad, or bad at all, but they may not be appropriate, or 'good', based on circumstances.

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

Some people do not realize that this is a myth.

Really? Who knew!

 

[nPeace]

Everyone likes to speculate don't they?

While it seems somewhat trivial, I never had any concern about such a question when I first read these chapters very long ago, as it clearly isn't addressed in the text, which isn't at all about small details.

Something else is afoot -- not detailed history, but more interesting things.

I never had a distraction to imagine extra ideas such as that notion some have that whatever happened in Genesis chapter 2 was during chapter 1 (sorta an odd idea in my own personal view), and it's interesting to consider here the question: why assume that?

Simpler to read to just read it as it is written, more plainly, thus as a sequence, so that all in chapter 1 finished before anything in chapter 2. That would then mean a variety of humans came into existence in some sense (in chapter 1, just as the text says) before the special situation of the Garden in chapter 2.

In that case, Adam and Eve are the first ever humans with souls: breathed in spirit, thus the forerunners of all of us here in the profound way. In other words, if one wants to speculate as your question does, then one speculation is just that it's a sequence of events, and things are nowhere coincident together, but all is in sequence.

Ergo, then of course in chapter 4 when Cain leaves for good and goes off to this 'land of Nod' which is some already existing group/tribe/place/or nation....he takes a wife there from the already-existing peoples.

That was all merely recounting the text as it is with just the simplest interpretation with the least extra assumptions added.

In a way these kinds of side issues are a red herring though. One wants to read chapter 1, 2, 3 with the intent to actually get the real messages, not the trivial details (which aren't even in the text), such as mere time duration, or even admitted interesting stuff like in the vision of chapter 1 did the sun, moon, stars appear on day 4 first in the vision due to constant clouds on the previous 'days', etc. side issue stuff people invent theories about.

I mean don't miss the forest for the trees. In a way, the reason all those kinds of details are missing is they truly are not the point -- small details are not the point, not even a little.

In other words, forget all the noise, sometime, maybe another day, and just purely read, as if a poem if you need, and try to hear the message, the one that isn't small detail, but deeper.

What if we are missing the real account, because we read it the wrong way. Might it not lead to confusing ourselves and others we exchange with? Mightn't that create problems for both, where faith is concerned?

 

[Sand Dancer]

From where did the "wives" of Cain and Abel come?

How were THEY created?

Sssh, you're not supposed to think about stuff like that. Just believe it point blank.

 

[Salvador]

'twaz god magic of course

Human genetic diversity is too great for there to have ever been a human population size that consisted of much less than ca. 10,000 individuals. Pairwise Sequentially Markovian Coalescent (PSMC) analysis confirms a population bottleneck in humans that consisted of no fewer than probably ca. 10,000 individuals. (Li, Heng and Durbin, Richard ) "Inference of Human Population History from Individual Whole-Genome Sequences" Nature International Weekly Journal of Science 28 July 2001 http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v47...10231.html

If there were the most severe population bottle-necking such as one breeding pair that is portrayed in the case of the Biblical Adam and Eve, then there would be a maximum of 4 alleles passed on by Adam and Eve to their children. Furthermore, the subsequent inbreeding would cause some loss of alleles due to genetic drifting. There would not have been genetic diversity in the small group of Adam, Eve and their children who would've had to commit incest among each other for the procreation of their inbred children. A lack of genetic diversity would have persisted for thousands of generations until genetic mutations could cause the genetic diversity of today's population. Based on the number of different alleles there are for the number of genes within the current population and the known rate of mutations per nucleotide sites in humans, geneticists can calculate the minimum number of people needed to create the current amount of genetic diversity. Numerous genetic studies suggest that there were several thousands of people more than two people during the most severe population bottleneck which ever occurred in human history.

DNA segments (Alu repeats ) insert themselves at various chromosomal locations. There are various forms of Alu sequences and several thousand families of Alu. One well-studied family of Alu is called Ya5, which has been inserted into human chromosomes at 57 mapped locations. If we were to have descended from a single pair of ancestors such as Adam and Eve, then we all would have each of the 57 elements inserted at the same location points of our chromosomes. "However, the human population consists of groups of people who share some insertion points but not others. The multiple shared categories make it clear that although a human population bottleneck occurred, it was definitely never as small as two. In fact, this line of evidence also indicates that there were at least several thousand people when the population was at its smallest". ( Venema, Dennis and Falk, Darrel ) " Does genetics Point to a Single Primal Couple?" 5 April 2001 http://biologos.org/blog/does-genetics-p...mal-couple
Coalescent theory analysis of single nucleotide polymorphism and linkage disequilibrium indicates the mean effective population size for hominid lineage is 100,000 individuals over the course of the last 30 million years. "The effective population size estimated from linkage disequilibrium is a minimum of ca, 10,000 followed by an expansion in the last 20,000 years." ( Tenesa, Albert, Navarro, Paul, Hayes, Ben J., Duffy, David L., Clarke, Geraldine, Goodard, Mike E. and Visscher, Peter M. ) " Recent Human Effective Population Size Estimated from Linkage Disequilibrium" Genome Research 17 April 2007 Ancestral Population Genomics: The Coalescent Hidden Markov Model Approach

Indeed, there is ample genetic evidence that the Biblical Adam and Eve never actually existed.

If there were such a thing as "god magic", then this would've come from a trickster god, I'm not so sure such a being could be entirely trustworthy.

 

[Deeje]

From where did the "wives" of Cain and Abel come?

How were THEY created?

The simple answer is that since Eve was to be "the mother of everyone living", that her sons married either sisters or nieces. If you read Genesis ch 4 you will see no time frames mentioned as to how old Cain and Abel were at the time of their presenting their sacrifices to God. And since there is no family line from Abel he apparently died childless, so maybe.

Genesis ch 5 simply says....
"Adam lived for 130 years and then became father to a son in his likeness, in his image, and he named him Seth. 4 After becoming father to Seth, Adam lived for 800 years. And he became father to sons and daughters. 5 So all the days of Adam’s life amounted to 930 years, and then he died."

So Adam was 130 when Seth was born. Again, there is no timeframe between the death of Abel and the birth of Seth. And since Adam was 130 years old when Seth was born, it doesn't mention any sisters, but they may have been born without naming them prior to Seth's birth. How many children can be produced in 130 years?

Since the law on incest had not been written, and genetically there was no problem with what we call "inbreeding", it was always God's intention to have humans marry their close relatives until there were sufficient numbers to broaden the gene pool.

That would be my understanding.....

 

[Salvador]

The simple answer is that since Eve was to be "the mother of everyone living", that her sons married either sisters or nieces. If you read Genesis ch 4 you will see no time frames mentioned as to how old Cain and Abel were at the time of their presenting their sacrifices to God. And since there is no family line from Abel he apparently died childless, so maybe.

Genesis ch 5 simply says....
"Adam lived for 130 years and then became father to a son in his likeness, in his image, and he named him Seth. 4 After becoming father to Seth, Adam lived for 800 years. And he became father to sons and daughters. 5 So all the days of Adam’s life amounted to 930 years, and then he died."

So Adam was 130 when Seth was born. Again, there is no timeframe between the death of Abel and the birth of Seth. And since Adam was 130 years old when Seth was born, it doesn't mention any sisters, but they may have been born without naming them prior to Seth's birth. How many children can be produced in 130 years?

Since the law on incest had not been written, and genetically there was no problem with what we call "inbreeding", it was always God's intention to have humans marry their close relatives until there were sufficient numbers to broaden the gene pool.

That would be my understanding.....

Based on the various genetic traits: shapes, sizes and races of people, there couldn't possibly have really been a human bottleneck population of merely some few persons within the last few thousand generations.

"Effective population size (Ne) determines the amount of genetic variation, genetic drift, and linkage disequilibrium (LD) in populations. Here, we present the first genome-wide estimates of human effective population size from LD data. Chromosome-specific effective population size was estimated for all autosomes and the X chromosome from estimated LD between SNP pairs <100 kb apart. We account for variation in recombination rate by using coalescent-based estimates of fine-scale recombination rate from one sample and correlating these with LD in an independent sample. Phase I of the HapMap project produced between 18 and 22 million SNP pairs in samples from four populations: Yoruba from Ibadan (YRI), Nigeria; Japanese from Tokyo (JPT); Han Chinese from Beijing (HCB); and residents from Utah with ancestry from northern and western Europe (CEU). For CEU, JPT, and HCB, the estimate of effective population size, adjusted for SNP ascertainment bias, was ∼3100,whereas the estimate for the YRI was ∼7500, consistent with the out-of-Africa theory of ancestral human population expansion and concurrent bottlenecks."

Recent human effective population size estimated from linkage disequilibrium

Logo of genores
Genome Res. 2007 Apr; 17(4): 520–526.
doi: 10.1101/gr.6023607
PMCID: PMC1832099
PMID: 17351134
Recent human effective population size estimated from linkage disequilibrium
Albert Tenesa, Pau Navarro, Ben J. Hayes, David L. Duffy, Geraldine M. Clarke, Mike E. Goddard, and Peter M. Visscher3,

Apparently, the effective population size is some few thousand persons far greater than the one primordial couple as portrayed in the biblical mythology of Adam and Eve.

Recent human effective population size estimated from linkage disequilib...
Effective population size (N[e] ) determines the amount of genetic variation, genetic drift, and linkage disequi...

 

[Salvador]

Some people do not realize that this is a myth.

Perhaps, if these people would have a better understanding of genetics, then they'd realize there's no way all of humankind's genetic diversity could have actually been spawned by one primordial couple from less than some few thousand generations ago.

 

[Subduction Zone]

An interesting and very relevant observation! Spanish (like Italian, French, Portuguese, etc.) is a "Romance" language, meaning derived from Latin. We can all spot some of the similarities between these modern-day languages, but it is by no means given that today's Spanish speaker is going to get anywhere in a conversation with a native Parisian. And this is the result of only many dozens of generations, not the hundreds and thousands of generations that biological evolution regularly requires.

Thanks for the clever analogy!

i did not come up with it, but there are quite a few similarities between the evolution of species and the evolution of languages.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Perhaps, if these people would have a better understanding of genetics, then they'd realize there's no way all of humankind's genetic diversity could have actually been spawned by one primordial couple from less than some few thousand generations ago.

i like to use what I call the lesson of the cheetahs. About ten thousand years ago they got about as close to extinction as possible. It is thought that there were less than ten breeding individuals. As a result all cheetahs today are more closely related to each other than you are to your brothers or sisters. Organ transplants are not a problem for them.

 

[Deeje]

I though this was interesting.....Talks about Mitochondrial Eve....

Adam Eve: Fact or Fiction?

 

[MonkeyFire]

the circle of life. God had a father in a never ending, repetitive cycle of chicken and egg for all eternity alpha and omega. So it was, thus it is. Dust to dust, ash to ash.

 

[Skwim]

Etiological tales are not intended as history, your sophomoric pissing-match with Jewish scripture notwithstanding.

Ah, the cherry picker has arrived.

.

 

[Skwim]

God did allow using the sword in war. Then there came a time he said no.

Never heard of this. Curious. Where doe's he say swords are no longer allowed in war?

.

 

[The Anointed]

From where did the "wives" of Cain and Abel come?

How were THEY created?

The Book of Jubilees [Chapter 4]

1 And in the third week in the second jubilee she gave birth to Cain, and in the fourth she gave birth to Abel, and in the fifth she gave birth to her daughter Awan. And in the first (year) of the third jubilee, Cain slew Abel because (God) accepted the sacrifice of Abel, and did not accept 3 the offering of Cain. And he slew him in the field: and his blood cried from the ground to heaven, 4 complaining because he had slain him. And the Lord reproved Cain because of Abel, because he had slain him, and he made him a fugitive on the earth because of the blood of his brother, and he 5 cursed him upon the earth. And on this account it is written on the heavenly tables, ’Cursed is, he who smites his neighbour treacherously, and let all who have seen and heard say, So be it; and 6 the man who has seen and not declared (it), let him be accursed as the other.’

And for this reason we announce when we come before the Lord our God all the sin which is committed in heaven and 7 on earth, and in light and in darkness, and everywhere. And Adam and his wife mourned for Abel four weeks of years, [99-127 A.M] and in the fourth year of the fifth week [130 A.M.] they became joyful, and Adam knew his wife again, and she bare him a son, and he called his name Seth; for he said ’GOD has 8 raised up a second seed unto us on the earth instead of Abel; for Cain slew him.’ And in the sixth 9 week [134-40 A.M.] he begat his daughter Azura. And Cain took Awan his sister to be his wife and she bare him Enoch at the close of the fourth jubilee. [190-196 A.M.] And in the first year of the first week of the fifth jubilee, [197 A.M.] houses were built on the earth, and Cain built a city, and called its name after the name of 10, 11 his son Enoch. And Adam knew Eve his wife and she bare yet nine sons. And in the fifth week of the fifth jubilee [225-31 A.M.] Seth took Azura his sister to be his wife, and in the fourth (year of the sixth 12,13 week) [235 A.M.] she bare him Enos. He began to call on the name of the Lord on the earth.

Cain took Awan his sister to be his wife, and Seth took Azura his sister to be his wife. Happy now mate?

 

[Thief]

From where did the "wives" of Cain and Abel come?

How were THEY created?

Adam was not the first man to walk this earth
he was the first to walk with God

he was a CHOSEN son of God
and placed into ideal living conditions to extend his life
during which time his mind and body were altered
cloned
tested
and released into the environment

Cain saw the difference upfront
having been tossed out into the world

Man was a species on Day Six
male and female
no names
no garden
no law

THEN Chapter Two

 

[Jonathan Bailey]

An interesting and very relevant observation! Spanish (like Italian, French, Portuguese, etc.) is a "Romance" language, meaning derived from Latin. We can all spot some of the similarities between these modern-day languages, but it is by no means given that today's Spanish speaker is going to get anywhere in a conversation with a native Parisian. And this is the result of only many dozens of generations, not the hundreds and thousands of generations that biological evolution regularly requires.

Thanks for the clever analogy!

English, German, Dutch and Swedish likewise are in their own family of European languages: Germanic.

We English speakers easily recognize "willkommen".

German has "Telefonnummer" and we have "telephone number" but both those terms come from a combination of Latin and Greek roots.