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Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
Cain's wife
Cain marries, fears that whoever finds him will kill him, and builds a city. Who were these people?
Genesis 4:14-17, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: where did Cain's wife come from? A family Bible lists the parents and the first two sons. The daughters may be missing because nobody wrote daughters down, or there may have been other families nearby that this Bible was never about. Both happen, and the list alone does not tell you which.
Genesis names Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel. Then Cain has a wife, is afraid of whoever finds him, and builds a city. The text never says who any of these people are.
Genesis 5:4 says Adam had other sons and daughters after Seth. Cain says "whoever finds me will kill me" (4:14). He builds an ir, a city (4:17).
Lennox does not discuss Cain or his wife in Seven Days. He holds that Adam was the first man, as Paul says, and rejects models with other humans alive alongside Adam and Eve. On that position Cain's wife has to come from Adam's own family; that last step is an inference drawn here, not a statement of his.
Walton argues that if Genesis 2 is a sequel to Genesis 1, there may be other people in Genesis 2 to 4 besides Adam and Eve's family, and that this helps with Genesis 4. The sister option, he says, has never been attractive, though many have taken it as the only possibility. Cain's fear of being killed once he is driven away from his family, and the word city, which implies a settlement of some size, suggest to him that the text assumes other people.
The MacArthur Study Bible says Cain's wife was one of Adam's later daughters (5:4), that such close marriage was later forbidden in Leviticus 18, and that Cain's fear shows the population had by then greatly increased. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible reads 4:14 as assuming that Abel has an extended family who might seek revenge.
The sister reading leans on Genesis 5:4, but the daughters there are born after Seth, and Seth's birth comes at 4:25, after Cain's wife and city in 4:17. So that reading has to assume either that Genesis 4 is not told in strict order or that Adam had daughters before Seth whom 5:4 does not name. It also has to account for the fear and the city in a world of one family, which it does by assuming a large, unrecorded population. The other-people reading has to answer Paul's "one man" and Acts 17:26; Walton takes up both in his propositions on Paul's use of Adam and on whether all people descend from Adam and Eve.
Not a question the text answers. Every reading here fills a silence.
- Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015), propositions 7, 19 and 20
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 4
- The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), notes on Genesis 4:14 and 4:17
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, ed. John H. Walton and Craig S. Keener, note on Genesis 4:14
