The Wife of Cain

A typical question asked by readers of Genesis is, where did Cain’s wife come from? After all, doesn’t the Bible say

Genesis 4:17 Cain lay with his wife and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. (NIV)

There is a plausible explanation as to where Cain’s wife came from, and believe it or not, it has nothing to do with other creatures such as Neanderthal or earlier forms of hominids as some have suggested. Verse 18 is one of our first clues to the answer. At the time Cain laid with his wife and conceived his son Enoch, he was building a city. Now why would he need to build a city if there were not other people living with him in Nod? The Bible tells us:

Genesis 5:4 After Seth was born, Adam live 800 years and he had other sons and daughters. (NIV)

One thing the scripture does not tell us is whether Adam and Eve had any other children between Able and Seth but given the fact that Adam was 130 years old, and Eve, according to the Book of Jubilees, was 123 years old at the time, it is highly probable that they had give birth to many other sons and daughters before Seth was born.

The only way we can even begin to answer this question is to make some assumptions, so let’s assume that the expulsion from Eden came at a relatively early age for Adam and Eve, say within the first 10 to 15 years or so after Eve was created. Again, the book of Jubilees, in the 3rd chapter, tells us that Adam was 7 years old when Eve was created and they lived outside the garden for 7 years and then inside the garden of God for 7 years, which would have made Adam 21 years old at the time he was sent out of the Garden in Eden. Now, I know the Book of Jubilees is not a canonical text, but it does tell us what many Jews believed regarding Adam and Eve in the Garden. So let’s assume that Adam was in his twenties when Cain was born (assume is all anyone can do here as the Bible is silent on this questions, Although, once again, Jubilees tells a more detailed version of the story.) This would have given them about one hundred and ten years to produce children before Seth was born. Without birth control, how many children could they have produced in 110 years and how many children could their children have produced during the same period?

We know that the average life span of the patriarchs before the flood was about 850 years, and we know that Noah was still having Children until he was well into his 500’s. We can probably rather safely assume that unnatural forms of birth control were not used and the instruction from God was to reproduce, then lets also assume that Adam and Eve produced one child every 2 years for say 600 years or so, and that each female became child barring at around 20 (probably older than actuality, but good enough for our assumption), then we can do some simple math to figure out what this would mean from a population stand point.

If Adam and Eve produced two children every four years, one female and one male, and you add one new child producing couple every 4 years after say the first 20 years, you come up with the following chart. We also need to keep in mind that after about 100 years, the growth would become exponential, so I have figured the number of child producing couple would quadruple every 100 years until the year 800, when some would begin to die off and so thereafter, reproducing couples is the only doubled every 100 years and a 10% mortality rate was calculated in as well.

Pre-flood Population Growth
Year	Reproducing Couples	Children Born
20	1	0
24	1	2
28	1	4
32	1	6
36	1	8
40	1	10
44	2	14
48	3	20
52	4	28
56	5	38
60	6	50
64	7	64
68	8	80
72	9	98
76	10	118
80	11	140
84	12	164
88	13	190
92	14	218
96	15	248
100	16	280
200	64	3,480
300	256	16,280
400	1,024	67,480
500	4,096	272,280
600	16,384	1,091,480
700	65,536	4,368,280
800	131,072	9,829,692
900	262,144	20,643,203
1000	524,288	42,171,843
1100	1,048,576	85,140,578
1200	2,097,152	170,998,360
1300	4,194,304	342,642,204
1400	8,388,608	685,865,344
1500	16,777,216	1,372,253,530
1600	33,554,432	2,744,977,617

 

Others have produced similar charts that are more scientifically based and probably more accurate than mine with much more aggressive numbers. For instance Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe has produced a chart that shows that by the time Adam died at the age of 930, the population of the Earth could well have been close to 5 billion people, (to see his chart, visit www.reasons.org ) Remember, the period before the flood lasted only a little over 1600 years. My chart shows that the number of child producing couples increases by a factor of four every 100 years and assumes that each couple produced one child every two years. This chart shows that by time Cain left Eden, (129 years or so after creation) he could have had as many as 320 others living with him. I understand that I have made a great number of assumptions here, but as we have no hard data to go on, that’s the best anyone can do when trying to project population growth during this period.

As Cain became a young man, and assuming the birth rate of girls to boys was about 50/50, then Cain would have had at least several sisters old enough to marry and begin a family with. We have no way of knowing exactly what the population was, but it is mathematically probable that there were hundreds of millions or even billions of people living at the time of the flood. So the question of where did Cain’s wife come from, is answered quite simply by stating, “from among his sisters.”

Our modern moral code causes us to get a little squeamish when we start talking about Cain and others marrying and having children with their sisters. However, we have to remember that at that time there was no prohibition against such things and in fact had to have been quite common in the first few hundred years of population growth. Today, Geneticists know that inbreeding of this sort becomes dangerous after about 20 generations, and even earlier if there is a genetic abnormality that can be passed on by both parents, but in the early days of population growth, it was not as genetically dangerous, therefore, by the time Cain left Eden and was sent to wonder in Nod, there could have been a couple of hundred people dwelling in Nod. Many probably preceded Cain to Nod. The news of Cain’s murder of their brother Abel would probably have spread quickly between the peoples of Eden and Nod, as they were still relatively small in numbers at the time, which explains why Cain feared for his own life.

Genesis 4:13-14 ¹³Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is more than I can bear. ¹⁴Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” (NIV)

The scripture is silent on how many years had passed before Cain began to build his city, but by continuing the formula in my chart, by year 200 hundred, there would have been well over 3,400 people alive and by year 300 over 16,000 descendants of Adam and Eve would have been alive. Building a city would have begun to make sense, especially for someone who could not produce food from the land. Cain obviously had to find other means to care for his family, so he would have figured out he could make or build other items to trade for what he needed, thus, the beginning of commerce.

The other thing we need to remember is that just because the scripture gives an age at the birth of a son or mentions a particular son by name as is the case with Noah’s line, does not mean that that was by any means the first son. Cain was the first child, there is little doubt of that, but if we assume that Abel was the second child in order of birth or that any other child mentioned by name was in fact the very next in birth order, we run the risk of making an erroneous assumption. For instance, the genealogy in Genesis 5 from Adam to Noah is intended to show the line from Adam to Noah, but does not mean that each male mentioned was the first born of the father mentioned. What evidence can we use to back up this contention? Look at the genealogy of Jesus listed in Mathew 1:1-16. Jesse, David and Solomon are always listed in succession, but we know that David was not the first-born son of Jesse nor was Solomon the first-born son of David. In fact, both David and Solomon were well down the picking order of sons. Women, especially before the flood, are rarely mentioned at all. As I said in a previous essay, Eve, Adah, Zillah and Naamah are the only four women mentioned by name in the first 7 Chapters of Genesis. None of the names of the wives of Noah, Shem, Japheth or Ham are mentioned, which is somewhat a mystery in itself, as they were instrumental in beginning the new world after the flood.  This is not to say that are not mentioned in Jewish folklore in books such as The Book of Enoch, The Book of Jubilees, The Biblical Antiquities of Philo, etc., but not in the Torah or the Christian version of Genesis. We knoow however, that David and Solomon were the ones used by God and therefore listed in the lineage of Christ but we know there were many other sons before each of them. Understanding this, it is entirely possible that there were one or more sisters born between Cain and Able and many more brothers and sisters born before Seth was born. However, it was through the line of Seth that God chose to work His plan of redemption through Noah and his sons, so it stands to reason that he was the next mentioned. All of this evidence together allows us to come to a reasonable conclusion that Cain would have had plenty of women from which to choose a wife. Especially if he waited until after he began to build his city. In my 3^rd installment of The Witness Chronicles, due out in the Spring of 2009, I spend a great deal of time building a plausible scenario for rapid development of civilization and the building of Cain’s city and his descendants.

To read more of my essays on Genesis or to learn more about my fiction series, The Witness Chronicles, based on the stories in Genesis, visit my website at http://thewitnesschronicles.com. For comments or questions about my fiction books or essays, please feel free to write to me directly at ken@thewitnesschronicles.com.