who cain married

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

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

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

well, yes. i didn't mean to argue against the obvious. genesis is a collection of such stories, about how things came to be.my point was just that it does appear to be set in a legitimate historical context, around an event that did seem to happen, and did at one point probably server a real political goal. aside from that, babylon *is* the cradle of civilization, most languages in the area are derived (a few steps removed) from language originally spoken in babylon. what's your basic problem with the story? that god did something in it?i mean, of course it's overly religious explanation, and unlikely in the details. one event has no real reason to connect to the other trend, but it's the bible, what did you expect from it? i just think it's a little presumptuous to write it off as merely fiction.the analogy i used before was the movie "titanic." the characters might not have really existed (which we can verify by passenger records), and the love story and whatnot may have been a complete fiction -- but there really was a shipped called the rms titanic, and it really did hit an iceberg and sink. it's a fiction, set in a historical context. genesis is the same. it simply uses this historical event and the myths of other cultures, and appropriates them for its own use.

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אָרַח

why would it make it false? how is that any different from any other reading of genesis? any way you cut it, it's a collection of jewish myth and tradition.but like i said, it doesn't totally work out -- the stories clearly come from different sources, which is the origin of the confusion i think. genesis 1 and 2 are both creation stories, but i doubt they were originally meant to go together. the authors of each were simply concerned with different things.it's sort of a mistake to conflate the man in genesis 1 with adam in genesis 2 and 3, too.

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ok, i think we're on the same page then.

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אָרַח

certainly not according to the bible.

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אָרַח

i think god does have a sense of humor.(look at the platypus)

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אָרַח

this is kind of complicated. know what one of the common biblical hebrew words for "man" is? adam.i can't give you a clear formula for when it's rendered as a name, and when it's a noun. but when it says (et-)ha-adam it's usually refering to "the man (in specific)" but not a name. sometimes when it says adam it means "mankind" and sometimes it's rendered as a proper name. it varies from translation to translation.but the word "adam" does appear in genesis 1.

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אָרַח

no no no no. i think some hebrew people wrote a bunch of book about their traditions and beliefs.

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אָרַח

well, let me ask you a few questions? have you read many other pieces of ancient literature? i don't find the hebrew portions strongly supportive of christian traditions. i know you can fire back with a bunch of purported christ prophecy: i've seen them all before. most don't add up (we've spent several threads just discussing the context of a few of them). but that's not the point. there's several glaring problems: like the jewish tradition against human sacrifice, and the incompatibility of atonoing for another and levitical law. but this is a whole separate thread. besides: do you not find that the old testament, for the most part, is strongly hebrew-centric? that's kind of the position demonstrated by this "who cain married" question. he married someone who lived somewhere else. well, i agree to a point. the bible can have some benefit (and harm, too) from even the simplest reading in just about any translation. "love your neighbor" is "love your neighbor" it just about every version i've seen.that said, i have personally found most translations wanting. not so much because of the translation, but because i do not personally understand hebrew language and idioms. i've found it important enough to go and try to learn at least a little hebrew.i have also found that dictionaries and lexicons can do more harm than good. i demonstrated once the fun "translation" i could do with a dictionaried copy of strong's concordance to someone who was using it inappropriately on this forum.

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אָרַח

he seems to be describing something looser -- there has to be a reason we have BOTH stories. somebody thought it was important to include two versions, and i doubt it was just because they became holy independently.i think the author of genesi 1 is trying to describe a broader creation. gen 2+3 is really just the localized hebrew tradition; where their fathers came from. genesis 1 seems to be using "adam" to mean "mankind" (in my opinion).so i think it's fair to say "someone from the other creation story" since the older one seems unconcerned with the ancestry of anyone besides the hebrews. the problem then is that adam ≠ Adam.

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אָרַח

i think that's probably a fair analysis, except i think the personification might have gone in reverse. adamah is the word for ground, suggesting adam's earthy roots (gen 2) would have come first, linguistically. i think the author of genesis 1 might have generalized a name into a word, much like we have done with "band-aid" and "kleenex" and such.

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אָרַח

quite.(that's just my personaly guesswork, btw)

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אָרַח