His words read:
One thing that people have tried to use to discredit the inerrancy of Scripture is the fact that Cain was able to marry and have children, even though there is no record of Adam and Eve having daughters at the time when he killed his brother, Abel. They see this as evidence that there were either other people on Earth at that time, unlike what Scripture says, or that Scripture is inaccurate and reliable.
Neither position is accurate. Let me explain.
1 Corinthians 2:14 says:
“But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
If your natural senses lead you, you can never understand the Word of God. The Word is spiritual. Christ said as much in John 6:63:
“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.”
So, how did Cain have children and propagate his lineage after he was banished from the presence of his parents?
If you read Genesis chapter 5, you will see quite clearly that Adam had children BEFORE Seth. Obviously, Cain and Abel were born BEFORE Seth.
Genesis 5:3-4 says:
“Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth: the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and DAUGHTERS.”
Hebrew and Ethiopic theology does NOT record female ancestry, that is why the daughters of Adam, which he had BEFORE Seth, are not named. Scripture just says that he had daughters.
If you read Numbers 1:2, you will see that in the first census ever taken, God asked Moses to count only MALES.
“Take a census of all the congregation of the children of Israel, by their families, by their fathers’ houses, according to the number of names, every male individually.”
In Christ’s ancestry in Mathew 1 and Luke 3, only MALES were recorded. Even when Christ fed the 5 thousand with the two fishes and five loaves in Mark 6, and again, when He fed the 4 thousand in Mark 8, only MALES were mentioned.
Some people have promoted alternative theories of one Lilith and suggested that Cain either married her or her daughters. This is false because there was no Lilith. That story is just some made up nonsense and only goes to show the intelligence of those who believe it.
In those days, people married their sisters. For example, Sarah was Abraham’s sister, as we see in Genesis 20:12:
“Indeed she is truly my sister. She is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife.”
Abraham’s brother Nahor married Milcah, his own niece. We see that in Genesis 11:29. Also, in 2 Samuel 13:13, Tamar asked her brother, Amnon, to ask their father, King David, for permission to marry her.
Adam and Eve had daughters. Cain obviously married his sister, as did the other male children, grandchildren and male descendants of Adam and Eve, who married either their sisters or female cousins.
If you read Genesis 4:17 in the original Hebrew, this is obvious. But not if you read it in English translations, with the exception of the Amplified Version, which reads as follows:
“Cain knew his wife [one of Adam’s descendants] and she conceived and gave birth to Enoch; and Cain built a city and named it Enoch, after the name of his son.”
Initially, the gene pool in Adam and Eve was perfect. However, after the fall, when man lost perfection, the gene pool began to be weaker and weaker until God intervened in Leviticus 18:9:
“The nakedness of your sister, the daughter of your father, or the daughter of your mother, whether born at home or elsewhere, their nakedness you shall not uncover.”
Scripture is a perfect book. I have read it from cover to cover in multiple translations. I have also read it in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek.
The challenges that people have with Scripture is that they read it in English, or some other language to which it has been translated to.
If I gave you $100 and you converted it to British Pound Sterling, you would get £75.3. But if you take that £75.3 pounds to a bureau de change, you would not be able to buy back the original $100. You could perhaps buy $98. You see, in the course of conversion, some value is lost.
Now, consider that the King James Version was not translated from original Scripture. It was translated from the Latin Vulgate, which itself was translated from the original codexes. So, instead of buying $98, you are actually buying something like $94.
It is like making a photocopy from another photocopy. You can get an image, but you can’t get a perfect image.
In the course of translating Scripture to English or any other language besides the original languages, some value, or should I say power, is lost.
A good example is Matthew 11:12, which reads in the King James Version as follows:
“And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.”
As a born again Christian in university, my colleagues and I read that verse and began praying ‘dangerous’ prayers to take the Kingdom by force violently.
It was not until I read that verse in Greek that I realised that that was not what it said and that the KJV translators mistranslated it.
If you read that verse in subsequent translations, such as the NIV, NLT, CEV, etc, you will see that it is saying NOTHING of the sort of things that the KJV implied.
For example, this is the same verse in the NIV:
“From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been subjected to violence, and violent people have been raiding it.”
Another mistranslated verse is Isaiah 45:11:
“Thus saith the LORD, the Holy One of Israel, and his Maker, Ask me of things to come concerning my sons, and concerning the work of my hands command ye me.”
I remember that my spiritual colleagues and I were literally obeying God by commanding Him, because He asked us to command Him.
It was not until I read that verse in Hebrew that I realised that that was a question. God was asking us if we had the audacity to command Him concerning the works of His Hand.
Biblical Hebrew has very few punctuations, and it does not have a question mark. So, it is effortless for translators fo turn a question into a licence.
And subsequent translations have since corrected that error in translation. I will now quote the same Isaiah 45:11 in the NLT:
“This is what the LORD says– the Holy One of Israel, and its Maker: Concerning things to come, do you question me about my children, or give me orders about the work of my hands?”
It is a similar thing that occurred in the case of Cain and his lineage. Because Western culture makes men and women equal, Westerners, and those they colonised, have inserted their bias into Scripture, and because Scripture does not acknowledge women in ancestral lineage, they have been misled into thinking that only males existed on Earth (with the exception of Eve) at the time Cain killed Abel.
That is far from the truth. Very, very, far indeed.
And unless Christians learn from Muslims, and instead of translating Scripture, we translate ourselves, by learning the original language of Scripture, we will keep getting tossed to and fro by translators who may or may not have an agenda.
Reno Omokri
Gospeller. Deep Thinker. #TableShaker. Ruffler of the Feathers of Obidients. 1 Bestselling author of Facts Versus Fiction: The True Story of the Jonathan Years. Avid traveller. Hollywood Magazine Film Festival Humanitarian of the Year, 2019. Business Insider Influencer of the Year 2022.
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