Adam's In-laws

This is the third in a series of blogs, "The Top Ten Questions People Ask Pastors."

Top Question #9 is, Where did Cain and Abel get find their wives?" In Genesis 4:17, Cain and his wife give birth to a son. Just a few verses later in 4:26, brother Seth and his wife have a son. The text concludes, "At that time, people began to call upon the name of the Lord."

"So who were all those people who began to call on the name of the Lord?" skeptics ask. Did God make them after he made Adam? Or were they already in existence on the Earth when God specially crafted Adam and Eve? I find that some people are just curious about what Genesis really means, while others are looking for ways to fit the accounts of Genesis and the theory of Darwinism neatly together. So where did Cain find the woman he married?

Answer: Cain married either his sister or a niece. If his bride was a niece, it means that one or more of his other brothers married sisters. Here in the Twenty-first Century, it's normal for us to cringe at the idea of intermarriage. It's more than a legal matter. There are genetic liabilities inherent in close relatives marrying. But in fact, consider this:

• The first two chapter of Genesis narrate an exceptional period when the Earth is brand new, the human bloodline is pure and uncorrupted by the physical wear and tear of sin, and there are only two people available for filling the planet.

• According to Genesis 5:5, Adam lived 930 years. I wonder how many sons and daughters he finally had over that length of time? It makes sense that there would have been plenty of generations for the necessary intermarriage so that human beings could begin to fill the Earth.


• We know for a fact that Abram married his half-sister not that many generations later (Genesis 20:12.) Nobody had a problem with that. That's because the Law,which forbade sexual intimacy among siblings, came hundreds of years later.

There is a theological reason why this is important. Adam's sin did not simply influence or motivate all other human beings to sin. Rather, his sin nature was passed along to all the rest of us as his descendants. For this reason, Psalm 51:5 indicates we are sinful from the time our parents conceive us. For this same reason, Jesus explains to Nicodemus (John 3:5) that no one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven unles he is born again. Everyone born of Adam is born into sin and spiritual death.

If there were originally multitudes of other specially created people who were not descended from Adam, they would surely have ancestors today not genetically stamped with the curse of sin. There are no people like that today, nor have their ever been. For this reason, God sent his own son into the world to rescue us from the curse of Adam, and offer us the gift of a new life.

This is why it is clear that Cain's wife was either a sister or a niece.

Selah.