who cain married

who cain married and had kids with, and don't tell me, his sister

Hi stud, welcome to EvCforumThread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.This message has been edited by AdminNWR, 12-07-2005 08:52 PM

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hey yo dude, later interpretations of genesis generally agreed that although adam and eve were really not the only people living at the time there were other people squandering around elsewhere adam and eve were only first ones that supposedly had souls at least thats what i have been told sorry thats all i know

Gotta tell you it was his sister.

but he was cast away by god before adam and eve supposedly had other children, what he came back later and snatched one of his sisters

why?wait, wait, do i get to take a more fundamentalist approach than even you, faith? i was gonna say "the bible doesn't say, so i don't care."that's honestly my answer, too.

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אָרַח

Cain married somebody he picked up in the next town. (Or maybe it was from the land of Nod )

this is one of those one-liner "the bible is stupid!" kind of trick questions. there's no real answer. it's like asking "can god make a rock so big even he can't lift it?" or "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"it's kind of a dead horse, really. and it doesn't really matter. it's just a way to write off the bible. i could show thousands of contradictions and supposed contradictions. does it really mean much? my favourite professor at college contradicts hismelf daily, and he's just one person, in a single day. the bible was written by MANY people, over a thousand years or so. to expect it to agree is silly -- something i've been telling the fundamentalists all along. it does show that the hand of an imperfect being was definitally involved to a major extent. that, or god changes like he said he doesn't.instead of using it to write off the bible, they are actually quite a valuable tool in studying the bible. we can learn alot about the changing perceptions of society, revisions, and dates. now, this question in particular is so old that there's stuff that was almost in the bible about it. several pseudepigraphical texts say that cain married a daughter of eve who ran away. (book of adam and eve, i think?) it also includes a story about seth being bitten by a snake, and killing it with a blow to the head. -- stuff that the authors or redactors of the bible didn't seem concerned to say, but became controversial questions later on.

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אָרַח

1. Adam and Eve had other children, and they had begun to populate an area called the land of Nod. I think this is plausible.2. The Bible isn't factual. I disagree with this.3. The Bible gives a hint at a deeper reality and structure within the universe, and that something had occurred resulting in a nearby land, called Nod, with people in it. Perhaps after the Fall, there was a change in the universe (multi-verse) that enabled people to emerge, sort of a blending of the time-line.4. The people of the land of Nod were humanoid aliens. Just throwing this out for run.Clearly, the authors state there was a land of Nod with people in it. They imply everyone stemmed from Adam and Eve and so that would make scenario 1 the most plausible intent of the author of Genesis.But the Bible does not say. For all we know, the people of the land of Nod were the evos that evolved from apes which occurred after the Fall as time expanded, and they eventually intermingled with bad but also good creationists.

Before I posted Message 7, I googled for "Land of Nod". Some of the references suggested that there might be a bit of a mistranslation here. It could actually be "land of wanderers" or "land of nomads". That's why I put my "Nod" comment in parentheses.My own view is that Genesis is not a history. It was probably written based on an oral tradition from the early Jewish people. And oral traditions tend to be unreliable as histories.My advice is to take Genesis as providing a spiritual message, but don't take it as a record of actual events.I recognize that literalists will disagree with me. But there is too much in Genesis that cannot be literally correct. The creation story is incorrect. The flood story is incorrect. The meaning of "heaven" in Genesis 1 is not consistent with current Christian views. The Tower of Babel story is obviously wrong.

you mean "guesses." i want to elaborate on point 1 for a second, before i move on. genesis doesn't seem very concerned with female offspring, unless they play an integral role in the story (and that's much later one). some of the suggestion is that while adam and eve had 3 sons, they had 7 daughters at some point as well. cain's wife could be one of those -- but there is no actual biblical support for this.another possibility is that genesis 1 is concerned with all mankind, and genesis 2 and 3 are concerned with the first hebrews ancestors (king and queen?) who were created specially, separate from mankind. they may have even been created sometime after genesis 1's sixth day, years down the line. genesis 1 is one of the few over-arching passages of genesis, the rest seems to be concerned with just the hebrew people, except for the few famous stories, like babel.so it's possible that "the fall" just lowered adam to the level of the rest of mankind, and removed him from god's favor, which returned with abraham. well, at least one person besides cain anyways. even if there were other people, created before or alongside adam and eve, eve would still be the mother of all mankind when the story was written -- any other peoples died in the flood. noah came from eve, and all mankind came from noah.of course, i will admit, it requires a little mental gymnastics. why is she called that by adam? how do we know noah didn't take a wife from another group? either way, you pretty much end up requiring incest somewhere. do you agree though that it doesn't seem particularly concerned with explaining this problem? that sort of leaves us with a few possibilities. either they simply didn't care that it was a problem, or it wasn't a problem because people knew by tradition, or some similar possibility. sounds kinda ad-hoc and a little, um, strange to me. shall we stick to textual interpretation, not trying to get text to line up factually with reality at any cost? how about fallen angels?

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אָרַח

why do you say that? there's a ziggurat in babylon that seems to match the description -- a long history failed construction. it was finally completed under nebuchadnezzar, just before the hebrew exile to babylon.i think it's highly likely that story is referring to a very real place; just satirizing it.

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אָרַח

The story of Cain and Abel is a teaching story. It is meant to make a point and not to be taken as history. Accuracy is not the backbone of a teaching story. It is the point or moral of the story that is important.

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There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. -Edith Wharton

You are treating it as a story about a building.I think of it as a story about how their came to be multiple languages. I see it as about as likely as "How the elephant got its trunk."

Cain found a worm-hole in the apple?

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Just because as we dig a little deeper, our notions change does not mean the discoveries are not useful.--randman