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Biblical Views: Who Did Cain Marry?

By Mary Joan Winn Leith

Who was Cain’s wife? The Bible reports only that after killing Abel, “Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch” (Genesis 4:16–17). Since the Enlightenment this question has repeatedly come up in rhetoric against Biblical inerrancy.1 It is a good question. After all, Cain and Abel are apparently the only children of creation’s first couple, so where did this unnamed woman whom Cain marries in the land of Nod come from? And for that matter, if Adam, Eve […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Mary Joan Winn Leith, “Of Philistines and Phalluses,” BAR 34:06.

2.

For differing sources of Deuteronomy 32:8, see “The Most Original Bible Text: How to Get There: Deuteronomy 32:8, ” Bible Review 16:04. While the Masoretic text reads, “according to the sons of Israel,” the Dead Sea Scrolls and Septuagint record, “according to the sons of God.”

3.

See André Lemaire, The Birth of Monotheism: The Rise and Disappearance of Yahwism (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeology Society, 2007).

Endnotes

1.

The idea that the Bible as the word of God contains no errors or contradictions.

2.

Paradise Lost 4:736–752. For more about this, see Gary Anderson, The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), pp. 63–73.

3.

Midrash means (in Hebrew) “searching out” and refers to Rabbinic interpretations of the Biblical text, often taking the form of stories that fill in the missing pieces of a Biblical narrative.

4.

For the record, Islam follows the same line of thought as Jewish and Christian ones.

5.

Gerald Moers, “The World and the Geography of Otherness in Pharaonic Egypt,” in Kurt A. Raaflaub and Richard J.A. Talbert, eds., Geography and Ethnography: Perceptions of the World in Pre-Modern Societies (Chichester, UK: Blackwell, 2010), pp. 169–181.