Tim Maas Retired Quality Assurance Specialist with the U.S. Army

The fact that the name and ancestry of Cain's wife is not given in Genesis 4:17 is frequently mentioned by skeptics to question the veracity of the Genesis account of creation. (A famous example of this occurred in 1925 during the so-called "monkey trial" in Dayton, Tennessee, when the attorney Clarence Darrow (a self-described agnostic, and one of the lawyers defending teacher John Scopes, who was charged with having taught the theory of evolution to his students, in violation of Tennessee law) was questioning William Jennings Bryan (as a representative of the team prosecuting Scopes) on the Bible and its contents. When Darrow asked Bryan if he knew where Cain's wife had come from, Bryan replied, "No, sir. I leave it to the agnostics to hunt for her.")

However, despite the fact that the Bible mentions only Cain, Abel, and Seth by name as having been born to Adam and Eve, it also states clearly in Genesis 5:4 that Adam had "other sons and daughters". It is not violating or contradicting the accuracy of the information given in Genesis to conclude (from the mention of Cain's wife) that some of those other (unnamed) sons and daughters were born prior to the birth of Seth. They (and their descendants as well) would have been alive at the same time as Cain, and it would have been from among those individuals that Cain found his wife.

In the same way, the Genesis lineage also undoubtedly omits the names of other children born to the descendants of Adam through Seth, because the inspired account was written as an after-the-fact historical document that was not meant to be all-encompassing, but specifically to show the line of descent from Adam to key individuals (especially including Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jacob's twelve sons) from whom the chosen nation of Israel (and ultimately the Messiah whom God had first promised in Genesis 3:15) would come.

August 08 2019 • 0 responses • Vote Up • Share • Report