I’ll Take Two (or Useless Bible Trivia)
Brothers and sisters, take out your bibles if you have them and follow along with me, please. Sorry, I’m slipping into familiar phrases.
So after God spares Cain of the death penalty and gives him ‘life’, he leaves to settle in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Next verse, “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch.” What? Who is his wife? Where did she come from? I can here the author of this part of Genesis say, “Yeah, so maybe I forgot to mention that part. Oh, well.”
So when did all these people appear? What if they were created right after Adam and Eve, but they were made to live outside of Eden? Or right after the first family gets the boot, God zaps several thousand people into place at various ages? Who knows? As the fundamentalist say, “If God wanted to reveal that information, he most certainly would have. Now eat your pudding!”
I think they came from outerspace. The bible is silent on the matter. (I’m kidding, of course.)
So years go by and finally Cain’s great, great, great-grandson, Lamech comes along. And Lamech is the first of many men to have more than two wives. This is a recurring theme, especially early on. (It is scriptural!) We haven’t even finished with Genesis 4.
Lamech also kills someone. Actually, two someones. A man and a lad.
Lamech did ’settle down’ and had two sons named Jabal and Jubal. Isn’t that great? “Jubal was the ancestor of all who play the lyre and the pipe.”
And to round out our series of twos, Adam knows Eve again and has Seth, the replacement son. That is basically what his name literally means.
Well, the LDS “Pearl of Great Price” at least offers an answer for the origin of Cain’s wife; she was the daughter of one of his brothers. Apparently this brother wasn’t important to make it into the Holy Duo of First Brothers Mentioned. Oh, also this book claims that Cain was a Satan worshiper from the start. God didn’t accept his offering because Cain had only made an offering to God because Satan had told him to. Very interesting how some themes overlap in comparative religion, especially when it comes to these Origin stories.
One site I found addressed the Cain wife issue by saying Adam lived 930 years and would have had plenty of time to have lots of children. And that it was actually one of his sisters, but that it was ok because genetic problems had not entered the world yet and God would be fine with it. Not sure how they knew, but they were pretty sure about!