Whete did Cain get a wife from?
As AZPaul3 says in
Message 114,
it's just a story!
That said, generations of fan-boys have argued with each other over their elaborate attempts to rationalize away gaping plot holes like Cain's wife (eg, if ENS Chekov didn't appear on
Star Trek until the second season, well after Khan's first-season episode (
Space Seed), then how did Khan recognize him in the movie,
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan?).
Part of the rationalization (though not necessarily to explain away Cain's wife) is the question of whether all races derive from a common human ancestor (
monogenism or "monogenesis") or are the result of separate creations (
polygenism or "polygenesis"). Monogenism is the logical consequence and prevailing view of evolution, whereas polygenism has been used to justify racism (including institutionalized racism in Nazi Germany and in the American South).
Actually, I first encountered polygenism on a webpage that examined Nazi books on their
Rassentheorie ("Race Theory"). The idea was that Aryans were the true humans descended from Adam, whereas the
Untermenschen ("sub-humans") were the result of a separate (and implicitly inferior) creation which necessitated maintaining the purity of the blood by preventing intermarriage.
I next encountered the exact same ideas in connection with American racism. While that may seem to be a coincidence, there is a very good reason. While Nazi anti-Semitism had a long tradition, the Germans had no experience in creating laws to institutionalize racism, outside of traditional sequestering in ghettos which had been done away with a century earlier when the Spanish Inquisition and Constantinian Law (term I have only heard used by my Rabbinic Lit professor, a rabbi, for the body of Roman law in effect in Europe from the 4th century to the mid-19th century that included isolating the Jews and making it a capital crime for a Christian to convert to another religion). For inspiration, the Nazis chose to learn from the experts in institutionalized racism, the USA (especially our Jim Crow laws, but also the highly popular
Eugenics Movement). Thus the parallels between Nazi and American racism should be no surprise, since they had copied the ideas from us.
BTW, it was in a presentation by former
NCSE Executive Director Dr. Eugenie Scott that I learned the terminology for those ideas: monogenesis and polygenesis. Basically, the difference between the two ideas is that monogenesis says that we humans are all basically the same, of the same kind, whereas polygenesis says that we are of different and separate kinds. Despite creationism's attempts to blame racism on evolution, the reality is that racism is based on creationism. Knowing the necessary keywords is essential to a successful Internet search.
If you follow that link to
polygenism/polygenesis you will see discussions of attempts to rationalize the Bible:
quote:
The Bible
To make polygenism compatible with the Biblical account in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, some argument is needed to the effect that what is in the Bible is incomplete. Three standard positions are:
- Pre-Adamism;
- Co-Adamism;
- incompleteness of the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.
In Christian terms, polygenesis remained an uncommon Biblical interpretation until the mid-19th century, and was largely considered heretical; however, it has been pointed out by some modern scholars that, while Pre-Adamism was strongly rejected by most and deemed heretical, Co-Adamism was not received with the same degree of hostility.
Sections discussing those ideas follow. Pre-Adamism is basically the idea that there were already races of humans living before the creation of Adam. Co-Adamism says that there was more than one Adam – small groups of men, created at the same time in different places across the Earth – and therefore that the different races were separately created.
We saw that in
Inherit the Wind which was a fictionalized account of the infamous
Scopes Trial when the Clarence Darrow character asks the William Jennings Bryan character where Cain got his wife from, suggesting (quoting from memory) : "Do you think maybe God performed another creation over in the next county?"
In addition, there was the 1966 blockbuster movie,
The Bible: In the Beginning. In their account of the Cain & Abel story, Cain receives the Mark and flees, finds a wife (no explanation), and produces descendants who are still with us today (my emphasis added in the following quote):
The Bible In the Beginning:
Eve gives birth to two children: Cain and Abel. When they are older, Cain becomes a farmer and Abel a shepherd. Both make regular ritual sacrifices to God, which Cain's offering is his share of harvest while Abel's offering is a lamb, God then favours the lamb sacrifice made by Abel. Cain, filled with jealousy, murders Abel and runs away. Adam and Eve mourn the loss of both their sons, but God gives them another son, which they named him Seth. Generations come to pass, and most of the descendants of Cain grow evil.
The movie depicts Cain's descendants as black Africans (stock film clip used in the movie showed two native African women, apparently
Ubangi or giraffe women, as I seem to recall -- in accessing that image in my memory from 1966, the only time I had watched that movie, I can see the two women sitting and basically what they were doing but cannot quite resolve the lip or neck details with any degree of reliability), reflecting a religious belief (I forget from which denominations) which I have heard several times over my seven decades that black skin is the
Mark of Cain:
Wikipedia:
American Protestant racial beliefs on the mark of Cain
At some point after the start of the slave trade in the United States, many[citation needed] Protestant denominations began teaching the belief that the mark of Cain was a dark skin tone in an attempt to justify their actions, although early descriptions of Romani as "descendants of Cain" written by Franciscan friar Symon Semeonis suggest that this belief had existed for some time. Protestant preachers wrote exegetical analyses of the curse, with the assumption that it was dark skin.
Baptist segregationists
The split between the Northern and Southern Baptist organizations arose over doctrinal issues pertaining to slavery and the education of slaves. At the time of the split, the Southern Baptist group used the curse of Cain as a justification for slavery. Some 19th- and 20th-century Baptist ministers in the Southern United States taught the belief that there were two separate heavens; one heaven was for Black people, and another heaven was for White people. Southern Baptists either taught or practiced various forms of racial segregation well into the mid-20th century, though members of all races were accepted at worship services. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention officially denounced racism and it also apologized for its past defense of slavery.
Unfortunately, that opened up one helluva a festering cesspool.
Nonetheless, hopefully that gives you some leads and search keywords to aid in your research on this question.
Though I feel that I must remind you once more:
It is just a story!
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