2 Comments

1. lucille says:

   December 9, 2009 at 2:03 pm

   cain wife was his sister
2. chess7776 says:

   January 10, 2010 at 1:03 am

   Paul states in I Tim. 1:3-5, “As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain men neither to teach false doctrines any longer nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. These promote controversies rather than God’s work — which is by faith. The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.”

   And, again, Titus 3:4-9: “… when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us…through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit…so that…we might become heirs… And I want you to stress these things, so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good… But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless.”

   In the previous comment, I find lucille’s reductionist logic and the blunt force of her assertion to be troubling, as well as lacking in a real defense of the Scriptures, which I hope here to provide. During the Scopes trial W.J. Bryant confronted this very question. Although I generally agree with Bryant’s answer, basically, “Who cares?” (and here I am paraphrasing, of course), this answer, too, fails to address key issues of the question.

   I believe that everything in the Bible is true, and I do not wish anyone to misunderstand what I am about to say. However, this question, and others like it, are clever distractions from the message that is our focus. We as Christians can fall easily into the trap of working hard to DEFEND meaningless controversies from the Bible and forget to focus on the UNASSAILABLE PURPOSE of the message that the Book contains. This being said, the serious student of the Scriptures must understand and appreciate that the Bible IS FULL of symbolic speech, figures of speech (Jesus is famous for word play), parables and convenient shorthand descriptions.

   To illustrate the point, let me remind the reader that fundamentalist Christians (as which I would characterize myself) insist that the Biblical “day” in the Creation account in Genesis means a literal, 24-hour period. To say anything else would be to call into question the terms of the creation story, from which Jesus himself derived guiding principles for marriage (and, by extension based on I Cor. 7, for the church), and it would remove the one-to-one correspondence between God’s period of rest and the commanded Sabbath day of rest. If Jesus quoted the creation story, then it must, according to this way of thinking, be literally, factually, and – this is the stickler – WHOLLY correct.

   Strangely, these same Christians will be quick to remind skeptics that the historical books of the Bible (Kings, Chronicles, etc.) contain shorthand, abbreviated genealogies. How else can serious Bible readers reconcile the conflicting lists of descendants given in different places? Unless the Biblical authors focused ONLY on the details that would have conveyed the eternal message to their readers and left out otherwise unimportant details, than EITHER the lists were edited by different people over time (the oft-refuted redactionist school), or else the lists are pure fiction. Neither of the last two choices is conscionable, but we as Christians often fail to appreciate the implications of the first possibility: the Bible, including Genesis, is not written as strict history, but in such a way that the readers, and especially the original readers, whom the inspired writer had most directly in mind, could understand the PRINCIPLES at hand. The irony is beautiful: we are quick to admit culturally-generated inaccuracies in the HISTORY books of the Bible but adamantly refuse to acknowledge the possibility that the three-chapter summary of Creation might have left out a few trivial details, either for purposes of illustration, culture, or simplification. Let me illustrate this point another way.

   Anyone whose child has asked, “Mommy, where did I come from?” understands the concept of explaining complex and sensitive matters in simple, sometimes representative, terms that the audience can understand. Most Christians (alas, not all) would rather be martyred than allow that the Jesus of the Gospels is different than the God of Genesis – “the Word was God… for without Him nothing was made that was made.” Jesus’ primary method of teaching was parables steeped in the terms of the listeners’ lives and experiences. But we refuse to allow the suggestion that He might have given us a simplified – albeit it true – version of the cosically complicated series of events at the beginning of time!

   The book of Job is outstanding among Scriptural writings for many reasons. The book comes to bear in this discussion because in it the Creator Himself shares part of his cosmic “to-do” list from the Creation (Job 38:4ff). No one in the Christian brotherhood seriously questions the book of Job because that book mentions implied details that the writers in Genesis overlooked or neglected to mention. Yet, when faced with this rather distracting and troublesome question of Cain’s wife, Christians wring their hands until they raise their hands either upturned in a shrug, along with W.J. Bryant and myself, as if to say, “It’s just one of God’s mysterious (and unimportant) details”, or else in the form of a fist, the blunt instrument of a simplistic logic that cannot allow for there to be more to the story than God first hints in Genesis.

   By the way, the Book of Job predates Genesis by hundreds of years with most reputable estimates for its authorship going back to around 1900 B.C. It is entirely possible – but not logically necessary – that Moses was aware of this book, especially if he enjoyed one of the best, albeit Egyptian, educations available at the time. If this is the case, then one concludes that Moses recorded the Genesis account either assuming that the Book of Job was common knowledge or else that its details were unimportant for the purpose at hand – namely, demonstrating to a newly freed nation the sufficiency and all-encompassing power of their one God, who alone and without the help of Ra and Isis created all that they could see and more.

   I hope that Christians who read this will join me in assigning an appropriately low level of importance to this question of Cain’s wife and recall that Genesis served as an introductory narrative between God and His estranged people. This was the short-hand introductory anecdote that Moses used to show the Israelites that they were God’s children and that they were historically significant in God’s plan. The message of the New Testament is the same: you, whether a believer or a skeptic, are a creation of a loving God, whose hands have shaped history in order that he might free you from the bonds of slavery to the carnal desires that have mastered you, as He did for the Israelites.

   The Genesis account is the cosmic equivalent of the birds-and-bees discussion that parents have with their kids: Tell them only what they need to know and are ready to comprehend. The historical factuality of a childrens-story-level account of the first generations of Mankind need not call into question the truths that the story illustrates. In fact, I hope the reader takes comfort in the thought that, even in the times of Moses and Job, God communicated with His people in terms that they can understand and on an appropriate level of detail and historical factuality. God meets us where we are and only wants us to know His love and to reflect that love in our own lives. When a father’s little girl asks how she came to exist, he avoids the messy details and specific timelines and instead focuses on how it was his love for both Mommy and for the daughter that brought her about. This is God’s message to us, as well, and we would do well to follow Paul’s advice to his prodigies, Timothy and Titus: “avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless.” Rather, Jesus says, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” Do not let such troublesome questions as this one blind you, fellow-worker. Such discussions are allowable, certainly; let one person encourage another “as iron sharpens iron”. Although “everything is lawful”, “not everything is beneficial.” Let us put our energies toward the fruitful work of the Gospel of grace, authored by the “Father of Compassion”. (II Cor 1:3)