Cain and Able

[mfj]

Is there any scripture that says that Adam and Eve were the only humans Gd made from the dust of the earth. Is there a chance that scripture

just doesn't record such an action. Sin, I guess, would have been committed by each set of parents to be passed on through lineage.

Just throwing out speculative theory.

[Guest LadyC]

wait,

nobody that i'm aware of has said anything in support of adam sleeping with a daughter. in fact, that was debunked quite early by the simple fact that God created marriage between ONE man and ONE woman, and any sexual relations outside of that would have been adulterous.

mfj, no offense, but i'm not sure you made your "theory" very clear. of course sin was committed, it started when eve ate the apple. sin then entered into the human race.

no, there is no scriptural support for the idea that God created any other humans from the dust or in any other manner. it's rather dangerous to speculate that God did something when there is no scripture to back it up. and it's not just that nobody else was recorded, it's that there literally isn't even any scripture that lets us think maybe He did and forgot to mention it.

[e lansing]

If there were other righteous people, why were they not brought on to the ark? Why would God only make provision for family of one righteous man? The wording of the text implies that Noah was distinct from "all flesh" (including his own sons). Noah is pictured as the only man of his day that found grace in the eyes of the Lord. That would not be true if other righteous people existed at that time.

God saved Noah because He listened to Gods command. The bible does not say that Noah was the only righteous man. History itself proves this wrong. Methuselah was certainly a righteous man and died days before the great flood. God did not promise to allow Methuselah on the Ark..but did promise to spare him from the deluge. Lemech, Noah's father was also a Godly man, who died before the flood. God chose Noah because he would listen to Gods command to build the ark...and because the people found him blameless. Either way..Noah is waaaayyyy off-topic (my fault on that one I guess.)

To argue that God created other people is nothing but conjecture. It is more likely that early on when the population was extremely small, people married close relatives. There is nothing intrinsically immoral or impure about that.

Truthfully, both sides are conjecture. Nothing in scripture tells us that they committed incest either. My conjecture is that God had already shown that He would create a mate. On the flip-side of that, no one can show any evidence that God has ever approved of sleeping with a sister or daughter. I don't see why my conjecture is so frowned upon...but the idea of Adam sleeping with his daughter is openly accepted.

Axxmen, i think you have made some good points. Some of the your points were some of the questions i had. i feel the same way you do when people tells me that the Bible is silent on sum things. But its hard to move outside of what scripture says. It humbling to accept the Word as it is and its even mor humbling to tell people that inbreeding was a part of Gods plan to fill the earth. However, its been a great topic and i've learnd some things and for that i am greatful!

[canuckamuck]

[name=canuckamuck' date='Jan 14 2010, 03:36 AM' post='1487950]

Had there have been other lines of men, God could have simply killed of the ones with the sin nature and kept those that were still innocent. It is hard to miss the fact that God stuck with Adam's line to bring Jesus to the world. He must have had a compelling reason

I think you present a very good argument and i agree with your 4 reasons. What do you mean by "pure"?

What I meant by pure was, exclusively carrying the genes of Adam and Eve.

Humans are humans are they not? If Adam and Eve sinned first why would this only effect there off spring and not, lets say, another line of humans that did not come from Adam? Adam blew it for all of the human race and the second Adam [Christ] came to fix what the first Adam blew for all the humans who would repent and put there faith in Jesus.

Ok, we do know that the original sin effected all of creation. Therefore if you allow the hypothesis of other created humans outside Adam and Eve's line, there is a hypothetical possibility that Adam's sin would have effected their flesh in the same way original sin effected all creation. Hypothetically they would experience genetic mutations and health issues because of the curse on the earth. We know this is true of animals.

But what about spiritual death? Do you think that One created man's sin would logically cause the spiritual death of another man who was righteous? This is what people are proposing here when the add extra humans to the creation account.

Humanity experienced spiritual death because of Adam. This cannot be altered because of our feelings today.

For some reason beyond my total understanding, God went to great lengths to ensure that Jesus was of the line of Adam. This strongly implies that there is a hereditary component to the spiritual death Adam received in the garden and passed on to all humanity.

[canuckamuck]

In order to get from 2 to 6,000,000,000+ people, there needed to be reproduction between close relatives. This was the plan, not an oversight. All believers are saved through Jesus because of this fact. If this were not true, God would have had to find not only a righteous man to do Noah's job, but this man would have also had to have be proven to be purely of the line of Adam, any marriage in to Noah's line from any other source would have caused complications, and Noah's wife as well would have had to been equally pure. And the same would also have to have been true for all of the wives of Noah's sons. This would be a real problem since God could only find one righteous man. What would have been the odds that Noah matched all the other criteria had there have been other lines of mankind intermarrying Adam's children.

Hello Canuckamuck,

Couple of things. Noah's lineage to Adam is traced through the men of the line, not the females. So, if God created mates for the males in Adam's lineage (Cain, Abel, and Seth) just as God created a mate for their father Adam...it doesn't disrupt the lineage, and it keeps the lineage free from patently impure breeding cycles. It is also not true that God could only find one righteous man...Noah. There were plenty of righteous men. Methuselah was one, Noah's father Lamech was another. What the bible says about Noah is that he was righteous (not the only one) and blameless among the people of his time.

You are forgetting that Jesus traces His lineage initially through Mary and then through males. But what you are proposing is that God conveniently distributed females for the sake of acceptable mating? This is a pretty big thing for Moses to miss in Genesis. How many, special creations were necessary? When did this practice end? Did it end? And it doesn't address the fact that people still did marry sisters, For example Abraham, and God was not unhappy about it.

When sin entered the world the perfection of the human species was compromised by the curse. One of the manifestations of the curse is mutations at a genetic level. At a certain point in history, humans had accumulated so many defective traits that he only way to protect humanity from extinction was to forbid marriage between close family members. This was done as a matter of our protection, not because it was against God's nature. It is a moral issue today for at least 4 reasons

1) Because God said it is wrong

2) Because incest is irresponsible and it creates health problems and birth defects for the children of these relationships.

3) Because it is has become a cultural pariah which will bring all manner of abuse and psychological burdens on the family from outside the home.

4) Because it is inherently abusive in the current cultural reality, and because of the sin nature which was originally not present in man.

Ask any animal breeder and they will tell you that animals are prone to genetic defects when breeding pairs are too closely related. In the garden this would not have been true. Nor would it have been true for Adam's kids. It took generations for the mutations to develop.

Couple more things. Since we are discussing incest, we should discuss what incest is. The bible is pretty specific in Leviticus 18 as to what God considers incest and who can have relations with whom. Oddly, in the entire list of people who cannot have relations, cousins are not mentioned. A sister is incest according to God...that leaves the whole idea of Cain and Abel marrying their sisters out. Heck, even step-sisters were taboo. However, a man was not forbidden to marry a niece or a cousin. In fact, marrying a cousin was mentioned in several places in scripture with Gods approval. It is still very common and very legal to this day in most of the world including almost all of Europe and half of the U.S. On the flip-side, marrying a sister is still strictly taboo. Science has also shown that there is almost no increase in birth defects amongst cousin marriages (2-3%).

So why would God, who never changes, allow incest (marrying sisters) which He has clearly disapproved of? He wouldn't in my opinion. It would be much more viable, and pure to create mates for at least Cain and Abel just as God had done for Adam. Then Cain and Abel's children would be free to marry as cousins. Furthermore, when Seth comes along he is free to marry one of their children (a niece.) This keeps the lineage of Adam pure, without incest from a scriptural standpoint, and without dishonor.

There are many things in Leviticus that apply to the era of the Law. Many of these things we can now see to have been beneficial to the survival of the Israelites, for example the dietary laws.

Incest is certainly something that has been adopted by most cultures because it makes sense to ban the practice. But we do not see it as displeasing to God before Leviticus, once again I will give you Abraham as an example. You do mention Lot's daughters, you must remember that his daughters tricked him and conspired to make him do something that obviously he was unwilling to do. This fact alone is extremely sinful behavior and worthy of a generational curse. It is certainly worse that Canaan mentioning Noah being naked, but that too earned a generational curse. Tis is not evidence of incest being offensive to God.

You want it to put it on the same moral level as murder and stealing, but from the point of view of populating the earth from One significant event and one couple. Intermarriage is necessary and therefore totally unlike murder and stealing. It did became necessary to end the practice at the time of Moses for the reasons I have mentioned before.

Your point about birth defects and cousins is not compelling. A 2 to 3 percent increase in birth defects makes it a real risk. if it was a drug it would be banned.

[Guest LadyC]

actually it's not such a real risk. i mean, the risk is real, but the RISK is not compelling... which means his point, IS. the increase of risk for cousins is 1.4 to 2.8 percent higher than the background risk for unrelated couples, who already have a background risk of roughly three percent. that means that chances that two cousins will give birth to a perfectly healthy, normal baby is more than 94%... the chances of two unrelated individuals of differing ethnic backgrounds is 97%. as i'll point out in following paragraphs, many couples have 50% odds of having a child who has a severe and life threatening genetic disorder, cousins are not among that high risk category..

conversely, if the cousins have strong genes with no family history of genetic disorders, the odds of them having a healthy child with desirable traits is increased above that of unrelated couples. that's one of the reasons why it was so popular among many wealthy families, of every culture, including our own. (keeping the wealth in the family was another compelling reason.) ever heard the name DuPont, or Rockefeller? both of those families preferred intermarriage for many generations. this really is no different than in biblical times when cousins married... not the strong genes argument, but to keep what belonged to the family in the family. case in point, God commanded that zelophehad's five orphaned daughters marry the sons of their father's brother.

the increase of risk is only in the area of autosomal recessive gene disorders... those being the LEAST common of all types of genetic disorders. the risk to first cousins is the equivalent of two people from any specific ethnic group that is more prone to certain disorders. for example, two jews marrying have the same increase of risk for the autosomal recessive disorder called tay sachs. two black people marrying have the same increase of risk for having a child born with sickle cell anemia.

far more common genetic disorders are not applicable at all to cousins. for instance, hemophilia. despite the misconception that it was the scourge of the royal family due to inbreeding, it had nothing to do with inbreeding, because it is an x-linked disorder. if the mother carries the gene, the son is most likely going to have the condition. it matters not who the son marries, HIS offspring can not get it from him. the increase of risk for this inheritable trait if the mother has it? 50%. (sure makes that 1.4-2.8 look puny, doesn't it?)

or marfan's syndrome, which is an autosomal dominant disorder. only one parent has to have the condition for it to be passed down to the children, and it doesn't matter if the parents are related or not. again, the risk for passing that condition down is 50%.

or let's go on to things like chromosomal defects, such as down's syndrome. that is largely based on the age of the mother and the subsequent deterioration of her eggs when she gets pregnant. the risk of a woman at the age of 35 having a child with down's syndrome is approximately the same as the risk of two cousins having a child with a recessive condition. by the time the woman reaches 40, her odds of having a child with a chromosomal defect have skyrocketed way above that of cousins passing along defective genes.

oh, and... if the point of this is to say that cain and abel couldn't have married sisters because that would have been a sin, which it wasn't, but following that train of logic, seth could not have married his aunt, because of levitical law.

[Guest LadyC]

canuck, i made some minor edits to my post while you were reading, to clarify what i was saying a bit further.

[canuckamuck]

canuck, i made some minor edits to my post while you were reading, to clarify what i was saying a bit further.

Actually I went to the mall

Interesting explanation the risks involved with heredity. Of course initially none of these conditions would have existed. Part of the reason people lives so long, they had really perfect health.

[e lansing]

[name=canuckamuck' date='Jan 14 2010, 03:36 AM' post='1487950]

Had there have been other lines of men, God could have simply killed of the ones with the sin nature and kept those that were still innocent. It is hard to miss the fact that God stuck with Adam's line to bring Jesus to the world. He must have had a compelling reason

I think you present a very good argument and i agree with your 4 reasons. What do you mean by "pure"?

What I meant by pure was, exclusively carrying the genes of Adam and Eve.

Humans are humans are they not? If Adam and Eve sinned first why would this only effect there off spring and not, lets say, another line of humans that did not come from Adam? Adam blew it for all of the human race and the second Adam [Christ] came to fix what the first Adam blew for all the humans who would repent and put there faith in Jesus.

Ok, we do know that the original sin effected all of creation. Therefore if you allow the hypothesis of other created humans outside Adam and Eve's line, there is a hypothetical possibility that Adam's sin would have effected their flesh in the same way original sin effected all creation. Hypothetically they would experience genetic mutations and health issues because of the curse on the earth. We know this is true of animals.

But what about spiritual death? Do you think that One created man's sin would logically cause the spiritual death of another man who was righteous? This is what people are proposing here when the add extra humans to the creation account.

Humanity experienced spiritual death because of Adam. This cannot be altered because of our feelings today.

For some reason beyond my total understanding, God went to great lengths to ensure that Jesus was of the line of Adam. This strongly implies that there is a hereditary component to the spiritual death Adam received in the garden and passed on to all humanity.

Thanks for the education One question. I thought we are righteous on the account of Christ and we were unrighteous on account of Adam. Is it true as scripture says, none are righteous? Then why wouldnt Adams sin effect all of humanity even if there was a seperate line of people from Adam? There are all humans. Or is genetics the reason why sin could not have effected another race of people?

[e lansing]

canuck, i made some minor edits to my post while you were reading, to clarify what i was saying a bit further.

Actually I went to the mall

Interesting explanation the risks involved with heredity. Of course initially none of these conditions would have existed. Part of the reason people lives so long, they had really perfect health.

Its making more since!