“Who was Seth’s wife?” is another way the question is sometimes asked. Cain, Abel, and Seth are the three named children
of Adam and Eve in Genesis
chapter 4.[i] The question seems to
trouble skeptics, liberals, and other unbelievers of the Bible. Or, put another
way, skeptics use the question of Cain’s wife to try to discredit the historical
record of the Bible. Perhaps some Bible-believers find it troubling. Perhaps
others just ignore it. In the now-famous Scopes
Trial in Dayton, Tennessee in July of 1925, agnostic lawyer Clarence
Darrow asked William
Jennings Bryan, “Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?” Bryan
replied, “No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt for her.”
In some respects, Bryan’s answer is sufficient.
The Bible does not see fit to go into detail about it. On the other hand, Bryan’s
answer is insufficient – it may be seen as Christians avoiding the issue because they are
unable to defend the teachings of Scripture. The answer comes from simple
deduction of the teachings of Scripture.
The Bible does not specifically address who were
the wives of either Cain or Seth. Those of us who accept the Genesis creation
account as an accurate historical record find the only possible answers are
that Cain (or Seth, as well) married his sister, niece, great-niece, etc.. While
the latter are possibilities, the former (his sister) is most likely.[ii]
This fact cannot be avoided in the sense that at least one pair of male and
female children of Adam and Eve married and produced children (else there would
be no nieces, great-nieces, etc. for any male child to marry).
God created two people by whom he populated the entire
world. “These are the generations of the heavens and of the
earth when they were created…And the Lord God formed
man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life; and man became a living soul…and the rib, which the Lord God
had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man” (Genesis
2:4-22; cf. also 1
Corinthians 15:45). “Eve…was the mother of all living” (Genesis
3:20). God made of one blood all men who dwell on the earth (Acts
17:26). All descend from Adam and Eve and all are related.
All are sinners in Adam, and all die (1
Corinthians 15:22). The fall, “original” sin, depravity, death, are
all rooted in the biblical narrative of God’s creation of one man and one woman
(Romans
5:12; Romans
5:17-18). In the fall of the “first Adam” we sin and we die. In the
triumph of the “last Adam” (1
Corinthians 15:45) we are made alive. Jesus Christ the eternal Word came
into Adam’s race (John
1:1-14) to bear the sin of Adam’s race (2
Corinthians 5:21; Hebrews
2:9–10; Hebrews
10:12; 1
Peter 3:18) in his death on the cross (Philippians
2:8). (Without understanding the fall of man in Genesis, there is no way to understand why Jesus had to do what He did.)
Finally, the inconvenient truth of the marriages
of Cain and Seth disturb some because of what they consider incest.[iii]
This is an anachronism,
reading back into the record as unlawful something that was not unlawful at the
time it occurred. Moses gave the law restricting close intermarriage (Leviticus
18:6, 9-11).
Moses’s law came some 2500 years after the time of Cain and Seth. Even Abraham,
whose calling came about 430 before Moses’s exodus from Egypt (Genesis
15:13), married his half-sister. “[Sarah] is my sister; she is the
daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my
wife” (Genesis
20:12). This would have been illegal under the Law of Moses – “The
nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother…thou
shalt not uncover” – but God called Abraham as the father of the faithful! See Galatians
3:9 and Galatians
3:29.
[i] Adam and Eve had many
other unnamed sons and daughters, Genesis
5:4.
[ii] Cain’s
fear for his life after he killed Abel demonstrates that there were other
descendants of Adam and Eve already living. See Genesis
4:13-15.
[iii] As another argument why
close intermarriage was originally allowed, some teachers point out the
relative “purity” of the genetic code in the early days after creation and the
now “polluted” genetic code after generations and generations of defects
multiplied. This is probably true, but I am not aware that the Bible speaks to
this.
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