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Cain and abel twins1/23/2023 ![]() ![]() And some episodes in the early chapters of Genesis circulated separately, probably orally, before they were compiled into a continuous story.īut it is not only modern readers who try to fill in gaps in Genesis. The story of Adam, Eve, and their children is a legend of origins, not a historical chronicle. But these issues may not have troubled the Bible’s earliest writers, who were composing a different kind of literature. Such “continuity problems” in the biblical plot cry out for explanation-if we expect the Bible to read like history in the modern sense. In answer to this, conservative readers point to a later verse, Gen 5:4, which states that Adam had “other sons and daughters,” arguing that Cain’s wife was his sister (or perhaps his niece) and that in the early days of humanity, marriage between brothers and sisters was both necessary and genetically safe. This question even came up in the Scopes trial in 1925: Clarence Darrow asked his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, “Did you ever discover where Cain got his wife?” as a way to question the Bible’s historical reliability. ![]() ![]() Since Adam, Eve, and their sons are the only humans the Bible has mentioned so far, the sudden appearance of Cain’s wife has troubled readers from ancient times to the present. After Cain kills Abel and settles in the land of Nod, we read that “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch” ( Gen 4:17). The book of Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel.
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