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Summary
- Genesis names three sons of Adam and Eve, Cain, Abel and Seth, and says that Adam “begat sons and daughters” (Genesis 5:4).
- Genesis does not name Cain’s wife. The traditional Jewish and Christian answer is that she was his sister; Ken Ham allows a slim possibility that she was a niece.
- The Book of Jubilees, a Jewish retelling of Genesis from the second century BC, names Cain’s wife Awan and Seth’s wife Azura, both their sisters; the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts Jubilees in its Old Testament.
- The law against marrying a sister came later, through Moses (Leviticus 18:9). Augustine called the first marriages a necessity that religion later forbade, and the Talmud says they were permitted at the beginning of the world.
- Genesis records no children of Abel, who was killed by Cain, and gives no total for Adam and Eve’s children; Adam lived 800 years after Seth was born (Genesis 5:4).
- Some modern writers, such as S. Joshua Swamidass, propose that Adam’s descendants married people living outside the garden.
- In Humani Generis (1950), Pope Pius XII said Catholics may not hold that true men existed after Adam who did not descend from him; the Society of Catholic Scientists, an association of Catholic scientists, reads the encyclical as leaving the question of many first parents unresolved.
Bibliography (Click to show)
- King James Version: Genesis 1:28; 3:20; 3:23–24; 4:1–2, 4:14, 4:16–17, 4:25; 5:3–5; 20:12; Leviticus 18:3, 18:6, 18:9; 20:17; Acts 17:26, BibleGateway.
- Augustine, The City of God 15.8 and 15.16, tr. Marcus Dods (1887), New Advent.
- The Book of Jubilees 4, tr. R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913), pseudepigrapha.com.
- Crawford Howell Toy and Kaufmann Kohler, “Jubilees, Book of”, The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), JewishEncyclopedia.com.
- The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, “The Bible” (canonical books), ethiopianorthodox.org.
- Bereshit Rabbah (Genesis Rabbah) 22:2, The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah (2022), tr. Joshua Schreier, Sefaria.
- Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 58b, William Davidson Edition, Sefaria.
- John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (1554), vol. 1, on Genesis 4:17 and 20:12, tr. John King (1847), CCEL.
- Ken Ham, “Cain’s Wife”, in The New Answers Book 1, Answers in Genesis (2007, last featured 2024), Answers in Genesis.
- S. Joshua Swamidass, The Genealogical Adam and Eve: The Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry (InterVarsity Press, 2019), publisher’s description at Washington University in St. Louis, The Source.
- Hans Madueme, “Evolution and Historical Adam? A Provocative But Unconvincing Attempt”, review of The Genealogical Adam and Eve, The Gospel Coalition.
- Pope Pius XII, Humani Generis (12 August 1950), 37, vatican.va.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 360, vatican.va.
- Society of Catholic Scientists, “Q6: How do ‘Adam and Eve’ fit in with evolution and the science of human origins?”, catholicscientists.org.
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