By Rev. SM Williams (JP).
The Bible is replete with seemingly inexplicable accounts of people and events. Some are even bizarre. One such account is where Cain got his wife from at a time when Adam and Eve and their two sons Cain and Abel were the only ones known to have existed in the garden. There are Christians who have been greatly perplexed and puzzled over this question. But if one will study the Bible carefully and note exactly what it says there is really no great difficulty in the question. Unbelievers constantly assert that the Bible says that “Cain went into the land of Nod and took to himself a wife.” In point of fact it says nothing of the kind. What the Bible does say is that “Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod on the East of Eden. And Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bare Enoch (Gen.4;16,17). What the Bible means by “knew” in such connection anyone can discover for himself by taking his concordance and looking it up. He will discover that the word “knew” used in such connection does not mean to get acquainted with but is connected with the procreation of the species (see for example Gen 4: 1 Judges 11:39. Cain doubtless had his wife before going to the Land of Nod and took her there with him.
But who was she and where did he get her? In Gen. 5:3,4 we learn that Adam in his long life of 930 years begat many sons and daughters. There can be but little doubt that Cain married one of those numerous daughters as his wife. But someone will say “In that case Cain married his own sister”. Yes that was of course a necessity. If the whole Adamic race was to descend from a single pair, the sons and daughters must intermarry. But as the race increased it remained no longer necessary for men to marry their sisters and the practice if continued would result in great mischief to the race. Indeed, even the intermarriages of cousins in the present day is fraught with frightful consequences. There are parts of the globe where the inhabitants have been largely shut out from intercourse with other people and the intermarriages of cousins have been frequent and the physical and mental results have been very bad. But in the dawn of human history such an inter-marriage was not surrounded with these dangers. As late as the time of Abraham that patriarch married his half-sister (Gen 20:12) but as the race multiplied and such intermarriages became unnecessary, and as they were accompanied with great dangers, God by special commandment forbade the marriage of brother and sister, and such marriage would now be sin because of the commandment of God; but it was not sin in the dawn of the race when the only male and female inhabitants of the earth were brothers and sisters.
Such marriage today would be a crime, the crime of incest but we cannot reasonably carry back the conditions of today into the time of the dawn of human history and judge actions performed then by the conditions and laws existing today.
If we were to throw the Bible account overboard and adopt the evolutionary hypothesis as to the origin of the human race our early ancestors would have been beasts and the mother of the human race would be descendants of the same pair of beasts, brother and sister beasts. Take whatever theory of the origin of the human race that we may, we are driven to the conclusion that in the early history of the race there was the necessary intermarriage of the children of the same pair.
To sum it all up, Cain married one of the many daughters of Adam and Eve and the impenetrable mystery that some fancy surrounds the question of where Cain got his wife is found to be no mystery whatever.
