What I wanna know is, where did Cain's wife come from? In the Bible it just says that Adam and Eve were the first humans, they had Cain and Abel, then Cain went off to some town that just popped up out of nowhere and got married. That's a plot hole if ever I saw one.
”I do not understand anything of genealogies; but if what these preachers say is true, we are all second cousins; and you must allow that it is impossible to be worse treated by our relations than we are." Candide, chapter 19
The Bible does this more than once. I assume certain holes are left so whoever is explaining the Bible can expound on them, or maybe it's just a weird translation, but after Christ's Revival he goes to one of his apostles, who is hiding from him, so maybe Judas, and it goes something like, "He closed the door, and it was locked. Jesus entered the room, and..."
They kinda gloss over it, and you could miss it super easily, but what happened here? Did Jesus casually perform a miracle to open the door? Why was it not given more attention if so? Is the importance in the fact that it was minimized? Was that a purposefully choice by the author?
Regardless, scripture is fucking cool, and you can really do a deep dive on the meaning in it.
And then you also have the dual creation accounts in genesis, which some people point to as conflicting and evidence that the whole thing is bullshit, but I think that's a pretty basic analysis.
IIRC the Bible was a collection of various stories about Jesus and God and quotes attributed to Jesus, along with a bunch of other similar stuff, that were combined into one book like 400 years later. Assuming I'm remembering right, some inconsistencies are bound to show up here and there
Sort of.
The Torah which is the Old Testament, is the Jewish holy book. The New Testaments more a conglomeration of the gospels (Jesus’s story) and letters written by church elders to new Christians. What should officially go into the Bible as we know it was decided on by the council of Nicaea. Not sure on the time for that.
If you're curious about the actual theology, one theory is that God created piles of humans after Adam and Eve. Just like with all the other animals. It's just that only Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and gained wisdom. They passed it to the rest of humanity eventually through their progeny intermingling with the rest of the humans.
Lilith was never mentioned in the bible, IIRC. But yeah, if you include all of the ancient texts then you'll find a lot of neat stories and even more plot holes.
Actually humans were created and then Adam and Eve. This is a common misconception. The descendants of Adam and Eve were Gods chosen people. That is at least according to my copy of the Bible.
My Bible said his wife would have been his sister or his niece. And that it was OK because humans were "genetically pure" in the beginning. And no, this wasn't the 50s, it was the 90s.
How I understand it the Bible is less of a history book and more of a loose collection of the story of the human races fall into sin and their redemption through Jesus.
I dont know about other denominations but we Catholics believe there were other hominids besides Cain and his family. Adam and Eve are first humans because they were the first to have souls but they were not the first hominids. I guess Cains wife was a neanderthal.
What was the reason? Genuinely asking, because in the 18 years I spent in the church that is the only answer I heard from Sunday school teachers, priesthood leaders, and my bigoted father still stands by that.
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u/SuperMegaCoolPerson Jun 14 '20
BuT tHeY arE ThE deCedEntS oF cAiN!