Disclaimer:
I am just suggesting a way of trying to understand areas of scripture that have been left blank. My musings here are primarily the result of my curiosity and love for the story of us and God. What I am suggesting here about Cain, Adam and Eve, God and all mankind is an amalgamation of thoughts from people and theologians that I know and/or trust. This is not a hill I am ready to die on, it is just a way of making sense of something that doesn’t make sense.
From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. Acts 17:27
This scripture is kinda what got me started down this trail. This was in the lectionary last week and as I began to unpack the whole passage Acts 17:22-32 I got a little stuck on this verse. My thought was if everyone died on the planet except for 1 man. And that man, for the sake of this imagining, is my dad and when people ask him how he and my mom met he then tells them, “he fell asleep and when he woke up a woman was there and a rib was missing from his body and God told him he made the woman out of his missing rib.” So my dad and his rib got married and had kids and I am one of them. Now in order to keep the family going I have to marry one of my sisters or… one of my ribs. That is the creation story that most of us are familiar with and we don’t really like to think about brothers marrying their sisters so we really don’t have much of a narrative around that. We just tend to skip over it. So below are the scriptures that for the most part, in short, they give us our narrative for the creation of humanity on earth as most of us grew up learning in church and Sunday school.
26 Then God said, “]Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” 27 So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:26-28
6 But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground. 7 Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living person. Genesis 2:6-7
18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper [p]suitable for him.”
21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. 22 And the Lord God [s]fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said,
“At last this is bone of my bones,
And flesh of my flesh;
[t]She shall be called ‘woman,’
Because she was taken out of man.” Genesis 2:18, 21-23
20 Now the man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all the living. Genesis 3:20
We then read how Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel and Cain killed his brother Abel one day. As a result the land which drank Abel’s blood would no longer produce its crops for Cain and he had no choice but to move away. Genesis 4:1-12
13 Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is too great to endure! 14 Behold, You have driven me this day from the face of the ground; and I will be hidden from Your face, and I will be a wanderer and a drifter on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” 15 So the Lord said to him, “Therefore whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him seven times as much.” And the Lord placed a mark on Cain, so that no one finding him would kill him.
16 Then Cain left the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
17 Cain had relations with his wife and she conceived, and gave birth to Enoch; and Cain built a city, and named the city Enoch, after the name of his son. Genesis 4:13-17
So that is the basic narrative of the story of Cain being the now only son of Adam and Eve, He moves, marries and builds a city. There is nothing in the scripture to support that he marries his sister or that he even has a sister. Likewise there is nothing to support that there are any other groups of people living outside of Eden. So if you want an answer to the questions like: Who did Cain marry? Who are these people he built a city with? Who are the people that he was worried he would be killed by? Well the scripture is silent in this regard. So I formed a hypothesis and I am testing it with what I know/believe to be the truth about the nature of God.
My Hypothesis: There are others outside the garden.
I know that this is really going to jam some people up. But consider this, if you find yourself agreeing or disagreeing with what I am about to lay out either way, you will arrive at a more intelligent position about our ancestry. Also, I am never writing anything in an effort to convince anyone to believe what I am saying. These are my thoughts and I am just sharing them fully aware of the potential to ridicule me. I share them only with the hope that they may help whoever reads them.
So in Genesis 1:26-27 God is quoted as saying, “let us make man in our image” and god created his divine image, both male and female in “them”. So we are made in the image of God. God’s plan it would seem is to create a species that reflects His nature. Who God is is to be seen in humanity.
The biblical definition of an “idol” is an image made to represent a god. Borrowing an idea from “The Bible Project” we as humans bear the image of our creator, God, and God lives in us. That is why Paul tells us that our bodies are God’s temple. (1Corinthians 6:19) So a case could be made that Paul, in Athens is speaking to his audience by starting with the creation story. A creation story that possibly they can relate to because it has images and temples. But in this story, God created his own image and his own temple. We are God’s image and the temple that he lives in here on earth. We are “not made by human hands” for God formed Adam from the earth.
So here is an excerpt from a podcast episode taken from “The Bible Project”.
In Genesis, the narrator creates a wordplay between adam and adamah, linking the human species closely to dirt and clay. In a nutshell, we get two primary nuances for adam in the opening pages of Genesis. It’s a species term, and it’s a term describing origins.
What they are talking about is something that we are all familiar with, Adam, the first man was created from the dirt and was named both man and clay. This carries significance to me because this aligns with God’s nature and is repeated in scripture over and over again and again. God is creating man, a temple that God’s spirit and image will abide in, out of dirt, mud, clay, earth. We see this characteristic of God repeated in biblical stories where God, as Paul says to the Corinthian church, “uses the weak to confound the wise”. i.e, David, Gideon, Moses, Naaman, Mary… God did not make man out of precious stone. We are made from dirt and we are made easily corruptible.
So after God made Eve from Adam, the terms “ish” and “ishah” are introduced. After God takes the side of adam to form a second human in Genesis 2 the two humans are referred to as “ish” (man) and “ishah” (woman). From that point forward, adam is used interchangeably with ish and takes on a male gendered nuance.
As I am understanding this, God creates one species, adam, that is both male and female and then separates the one species into two, a male (ish) and female (ishah) version of the same species. And this is God’s design to reflect God’s image to all the earth. So collectively as christians, we read Genesis, and what Paul says to the Athenians, the Adam and Eve were the first born of God’s creation and we are all descendants of them. And we read it that way because it sounds like that is exactly what the text it saying. But then what about this passage in Colossians 1:
15He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.19For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Paul in Colossians tells us that Jesus is the firstborn all creation. Why are we a lot more comfortable taking this figuratively and Genesis literally? Perhaps because chronologically and historically, it doesn’t make sense for us to take this literally and it goes against our literal reading of Genesis so in order for us to fit the two together, we have to decide that Paul is speaking figuratively here and Moses was speaking literally in Genesis. So we are capable of reading the scriptures both figuratively and literally. I ask can we do that to the same passage? Can we read the creation passages in Genesis both literally and figuratively?
So when I read the story of the birth of Jesus, I have to suspend my scientific mind and allow an opening for the supernatural to exist. Otherwise I might as well stop reading the bible and throw it in the trash. God intervenes in the only scientifically viable procreation pattern of the species of adam and supernaturally planted His seed in “ishah”/Mary. That is, by faith what every christian believes.
So what if that is not the first time that God supernaturally intervened in the procreation of humanity. What if Adam and Eve were an example of time when God saw a lost humanity and decided to bring order to it. This would explain how Cain was exiled and yet took a wife. This would explain why Cain was worried that he would be killed by “others”. He wasn’t worried that if he stayed with his people they would kill him for killing his brother. He was worried that if he left his people he would be killed because he was alone, a wanderer and a vagabond. He was worried that others would recognize that and kill him. I am not trying to prove that this is theologically sound and I don’t know how theologians and people smarter than me would argue against what I am saying, but it is a way of looking at a gap in scripture that doesn’t offer any answer. So you have to make up one. One that I am offering is that humanity existed before the Garden of Eden. Perhaps Eden is a place God created where Heaven and earth came together and there He created humans to reflect to all of creation, who He was. His plan was beautiful and merciful. He created a divine couple of sorts, the first spiritual power couple to influence all of humanity by reflecting their creator who is both male and female. Unfortunately, being made in God’s image, humanity has free will to choose and this new couple were easily deceived and chose to disobey God.
So if His way was not to be born into our world but to create a couple that were divinely made bearing His image to all of humanity as a first attempt to live among us, then we would have to suspend our same scientific minds, and allow an opening for the supernatural to exist just as in the story of the birth of Jesus.
Unfortunately the powers of evil were too much even for a divinely made couple. But God used this divine model over and over: Noah and Na’amah, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Rachel. The idea that humanity could see God’s image reflected, both male and female, ish and ishah, in a divinely appointed couple and through that, establish His line of people so others would know who God is, was a good idea but it didn’t seem to work. But God, patient, merciful and loving not giving up on us, came up with a different way of rescuing us from evil.
God eventually abandoned the idea of reigning through a couple and came to us in the form of Jesus. God brought “ish” and “ishah” back into one human. Now rather than his people being a nation or a location, His people were to be a church. The idea of “ish” and “ishah” is expressed as Christ being the groom and his church being the bride. Going back to our passage in Colossians, all of God coming to us this time not as a reflection of his image but the fullness of God dwelling in man.
Paul makes the statement that I want to continue exploring:
From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth ~ ESV
He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth ~ NASB
From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth ~ NIV
and hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth ~ KJV
He made also of one blood every nation of men, to dwell upon all the face of the earth ~ YLT
From one person God created every human nation to live on the whole earth ~ CEB
and he made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth ~ ASV
So Paul makes this statement, that we are all descendants of Adam and Eve, and more technically accurate, just Adam. It creates a bit of a perplexing problem for most of us. How could one man procreate with a woman who is directly related to him, and have children and fill the whole earth without creating a mess because of all the problems related to inbreeding? Do we just ignore all that we know about inbreeding? Some have made the case that they were a divine couple so there were no genetic defects that are at the root of problems associated with inbreeding. If that were the case then how could people without any genetic defects begin to produce people with genetic defects? If that’s where you stand with it in your theology I’m not trying to disprove that way of thinking I am just saying that you have to answer that question before I can get on that train and go further.
About 20 years ago there I remember the game, 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon. The idea was to find an actor of actress that it would take more than 6 films to relate them to having worked with someone who worked with someone who worked with Kevin Bacon in a film. I don’t know why they came up with 6. Perhaps the college kids who created the parlor game were genealogists? Turns out from the study of genealogy that it takes no more that 20 generations back and we are all related! The average generation being about 20-25 years and we only need to go back 400-500 years before we are all related. Paul’s generation was much farther along than 500 years from Adam and Eve. We probably have today a much more comprehensive network for discovering our genealogical roots than Paul did. But I wouldn’t question their understanding of genealogy, genealogical records are all over the old and new testament. So when Paul makes this statement I have a hard time believing that he is saying that they are all products of inbreeding. I think he is saying that you, Athenians, come from the same lineage that I do. We are bothers and sisters. No matter what nation you are from, we are all children of royal and divine upbringing. God himself created our parents, in hopes to show humanity all that it could be and as a result, everyone of us is related to every one of us because we are all related to Adam and Eve.
There is also the POV that the creation story is not meant to be taken literally. It is a story that represents the journey of all mankind. A journey that starts with innocence and the loss there of. The corruption that defiles our innocence is ever being redeemed by God and is what ultimately matures us. The more we mature, the less we need rules and laws to determine right from wrong. In fact the rules and laws have their own way of keeping us from maturing. Till finally we desire to return to our innocence and shed all that corrupts us. All of our journeys end in discovering our true selves when we are willing to die and live as Christ.
That is just as viable a way of looking at the creation story and for me both can live side by side without conflict. In fact each make the other more interesting. For whatever reason, the biblical narrator either chose not to or was kept from (Luke 24:16) including any sort of explanation for how Adam and Eve “multiplied and filled the earth”. So for now this will remain a mystery shrouded in questions for which there is no answer. But what we can know is that each one of us is a child of God and we will inherit the kingdom of God and understanding this mystery is not crucial for either of those. Knowing God happens through knowing Jesus Christ (John 14:7) which is eternal life.(John 17:3)
So what if I can consider the idea that the earth that God “saw”, did not reflect His image at all and so the story of creation in Genesis is a story of our earth, before God poured himself into it to reflect his image. So it existed but it was formless and empty. The opposite of God. God is love and to know God is eternal life. So perhaps “formless and empty” means existence on earth was just that, it was existence, or survival. God brought life, consciousness, meaning to a place that had none. He did this not by creating something new but by pouring his own spirit into all that already was. From dirt and water, mud, clay he made “adamah” man. From what already existed, He created life. It’s interesting that the formation of Adam mimics the birth process. The earth was the womb and the earth’s water broke and man was brought forth and life began with the first breath.
6 But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground. 7 Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living person. Genesis 2:6-7
Prior to God there was only survival. God saw a place where man had no love. No art. No music. No beauty. No community. No friendship. No neighbors. No order. No meaning. No family. No laughter. No stories. No anything that reflected who He was at all and he created Eden, a place where Heaven and earth meet, and began his work from there. He began creating order from chaos. Beauty from the ordinary. Love, community, family, friendship all reflecting the triune nature of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit was integrated into everything that already existed. In the Garden of Eden, there existed the knowledge of good and evil. An order of things. A true sense of right and wrong that was God’s and God’s alone. Right and wrong has to exist in a world that reflects the nature of God but it is not man’s to control or decide. Because God is eternal and the one who breathes life into Adam – Man, eternal life the tree of life, exists in this realm as well.
Adam and Eve, having God’s spirit and being created by God Himself, just as Jesus was, they now go into all the world and affect all that was once “formless and empty” and bring order and meaning to everything. Perhaps this is how, we who are in Christ, are now the final “divine couple”, Christ and his church, the completion of God’s original vision, are to live out our lives. His Holy Spirit is poured into us to help us fight the evil and darkness in our world and as we are born again, and Christ’s family grows, God affects more and more of the world we live in bringing order into our chaotic lives. Rather than bringing anything new into the world, God takes our lives right where they are and brings beauty and art and music and kindness and generosity and grace and mercy and forgiveness and all that is God’s out of the mess that they are. He does this one moment at a time. One heart at a time. One person at a time. One family at a time. Taking what already exists, turning our empty and formless existence and brings life and meaning and beauty and all that is good out of it.