I. The origins of Cain’s wife
A. The Bible does not tell us directly where she came from. (Gen 4:16-17)
B. The Bible does not tell us her name. (:16 “Cain... his wife... she...”)
C. We can logically deduce from the scriptures that she was Cain’s sister. (3:20 cf 4:1; 5:4)
     Pre-dating the giving of the Law through Moses, incest was not yet forbidden.
  
NOTE:  Today we know that the prohibition against incest is needed because of genetic abnormalities that are reinforced when close relatives, such as brother and sister, beget children.
    "Matings between especially close relatives - incest - often lead to multiple congenital defects." (Introduction to Physical Anthropology, Second Edition, by Nelson and Jurmain, West Publishing, 1982)
    Simple observation over the millennia have shown that inbreeding very often results in children with physical problems and, many times, mental ones as well.  Long before the science of genetics was first fathered by Gregor Mendel with his breeding experiments with peas from 1856-1863, people could observe the oft-recurring effects of inbreeding among human beings.
    Today we know that it is the reinforcing of abnormal genes that takes place through incestuous relationships that causes the abnormalities observed in the offspring produced by means of those relationships.  The observation of those abnormalities, even though historically the reasons for them were not known, led to an incest tabu that is close to universal in people groups the world over.  This tabu can be found in almost all cultures existent today and has been found in almost all cultures back through pre-history.  There are and have been a few exceptions, as there are for everything, but these exceptions are and have been very rare.
   Speaking of the incest tabu in "The Human Species, Second Edition, by Frederick Hulse, 1971, Random House" Hulse states:  "The most widespread of these cultural practices is the incest tabu, which in one form or another is found in all human societies."
    Since genetics is a relatively new science, then the tabus against incest obviously predated the scientific discoveries that taught us "how and why" it is harmful to both the offspring as individuals and society at large that must cope with the abnormal individuals.  These observable and experiential harmful effects must have been the reasons for the nearly universal tabu forbidding the practice of incest.
    A germinal focus that began, or at least highlighted, the tabu probably was The Law of Moses. But given that the world overwhelmingly had turned against the God of the Jews long before the giving of The Law, then those in the heathen nations that did know of the Law of Moses, probably quickly lost sight of this seminal event and turned from the Law of the Creator to listening to and learning from the experiences taught them by His creation.  Most had little if any contact with the Jews so they would only have known extremely little, if anything, concerning the Jew's Law.  Including its prohibition of incest.
    Most people in those Lawless nations would simply have viewed the results of incestuous relationships by people, and all people are part of God's Creation, and learned from them that this is a negative and destructive practice.  Therefore, they prohibited such behavior.  Thinking all along that it was simply a rational decision and not giving but little thought, and probably no thought as the centuries progressed, to the Law of the God that they denied that prohibited the practice.  The majority of mankind probably assumed that the tabu was strictly societal and based upon the most good for society and the protection of the individual who would have to live, or die, from the damage caused by incest.  Little did they realize that God was protecting the very race that denied Him by teaching them to obey His Law, which is always beneficial to mankind both physically and spiritually, by means of the hard knocks of experience.  God's methods have always encompassed both teaching through His Word, of which the Law is a small but immensely important part, as well as teaching through physical and emotional experiences.  Even though they denied Him, God is truly God of all and the controller of the destinies of both those who believe in Him and those who do not.  And He uses both the Word and experience on both groups as the situation demands.  And in the case of the tabu against incest, He had ingrained it into the various societies through both means.  And those who did not learn eventually died out or became impotent through their inbreeding and took their incestuous practices with them into infertility or societal death.

    Whether the tabus developed through the Law of Moses or experiential development or scientific theories and proofs, the common thread that is found weaving through both historical observation of abnormal children born of incest and modern understanding of the genetic basis of those abnormalities is damaged or, if you will, abnormal genes.  The reinforcement of those genes that takes place during incest causes them to become active and, since they are abnormal, once they are activated they cause abnormal effects in the children of those incestuous relationships.

Now, what has that to do with Cain's wife?  I'll explain.

    Adam and Eve were created perfect.  There were no abnormalities in their genes.  Every gene was beneficial and worked exactly the way they were supposed to, and when they were supposed to, to give both of them perfect health.  The garden of Eden was the perfect environment with no weeds or noxious plants or anything in it that could cause genetic damage.  And within it, the tree of life to furnish them with every needed substance to nourish their perfect bodies.  The canopy surrounded the earth and perfectly filtered out any deleterious effects cause by radiation from space and trapped within it the oxygen-rich atmosphere that promoted good health.  Perfect beings, with a perfect genetic makeup, living in a perfect environment.  Their bodies fashioned to live forever as self-repairing biological mechanisms that replicated every cell perfectly from the perfect genetic code contained within their cells whenever one of those cells had lived out its allotted span and was replaced by another perfect cell.  This was the state of the mother and father of Cain and his sister, who became his wife, and their various other siblings (Gen 5:4) including their brother, Abel.

    Then, The Fall.
    Sin entered in and Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden and began to deteriorate.  Their cells began to be less than perfect and each replication took their cells farther from perfection.  A slow process, to be sure, but an inexorable one that eventually led to their deaths some hundreds of years later.  (Gen 2:16-17)  Their deaths, and death is a process (barring catastrophic sudden death such as in an accident or murder), began to take place at the moment of their committing sin.  No longer was the genetic code locked within their cells perfect.  No longer did they live in a perfect environment.  No longer were the animals under their dominion and docile.  And catastrophic death, specifically murder as committed by their one son upon their other son, became part of the world that they now lived in.  No longer nurtured by the perfect environment of the garden, they now had to live in a world bleak by comparison from which they had to wrench their food by toil and sweat.  The cursed and malevolent environment in which they now lived began to cause mutations within their genes which began to accumulate and move inexorably toward cumulative and irreversible damage.  Over a period of hundreds of years their once perfect bodies moved toward the culmination of the process pronounced by God upon them because of their disobedience- because of their sin- eventual cessation of their physical lives.  Death!
    This process of deterioration, which took hundreds of years to damage beyond repair the perfection with which God had endowed them at their creation, was very slight to begin with and would have had only little effect on the genetic makeup of their offspring.  No catastrophic malfunctions would be caused by their genetic makeup as of yet.  Therefore, there would have been no visible physical abnormalities passed on to Cain and his sister and their other siblings.  Neither would there have been any hidden physiological abnormalities that would have been debilitating or life threatening.  Only minor changes would have occurred this close to the original perfection of their makeup to be passed on to their children.  Cain and his sister would both have inherited near perfection from their parents.  Deteriorating, yes.  Catastrophically so, no.  They would have experienced near perfect health, which can easily be seen from the, by our standards, extremely long life-spans of the actors in this drama of the painfully slow deterioration of the species.  Their various physiological systems, such as their immune system, would still have been able to quite effectively fend off the infections that now assaulted them from the fallen creation.  Their bodies would have been able to quite effectively isolate and dispose of the toxins that were now entering their systems.  Not perfectly, true, but effective enough to keep them living for some hundreds of years.  And there would have been but very tiny abnormalities in their various organs.  None that would have been noticeable or that would have caused malfunctions in the workings of those organs.  True, they had to fear this thing of catastrophic death, such as the murder that Cain had committed upon his brother Abel, but God promised, at least to Cain, that such a thing would not happen to him.  God even placed a mark upon him to warn all mankind that they were not to harm him.  And this provided a measure of safety for his wife/sister also.  However, our main concern is the matter of possible damage caused by incest because of the genetic problem of reinforcement of abnormal genes caused by those types of matings.

    Now we have two people, Cain and his wife, brother and sister, who are carrying only negligible genetic abnormalities inherited from their parents.  But these are very tiny and not of a scope that would cause any serious abnormalities in any children produced by a mating between the brother and sister couple.  Minimal aberrations, also carried by their siblings who also must have married one another in order to propagate the race, not serious enough to cause them immediate problems, but which will eventually, through cumulative effect, guarantee their eventual death and death for all of the race of mankind that will spring from them and their siblings.  And that new thing, death, is the exact consequence that God had pronounced upon the progenitors of the race, Adam and Eve, because of their sin, and through them was also pronounced upon the whole race that would spring from them.

    Obviously, marriage between Cain and his sister would pose no immediate problem, in fact no problem for many generations to follow them, because of their genetic closeness to the original perfection of Adam and Eve in their original creation by God.  When many years and many generation had passed and God wanted to slow what would by then be an accelerating and manifestly destructive deterioration in His Chosen Nation, God would then give the Law to Moses and Moses would give the Law to Israel and then incest would be prohibited because of the imminent danger.  But that pronouncement was, at the time of Cain's marriage to his sister, still many centuries in the future.  However, when the Law was eventually given it would prohibit incest from that time forward for all time.

   Because the Bible tells of no other people from whom he could have chosen a wife, it is quite logical, and quite permissible, that Cain married his sister and that together, as husband and wife, they then had children as is recorded in God's Word.  And it was not genetically dangerous, nor at that time did God prohibit it between these two, brother and sister, because neither carried any serious genetic abnormalities which would have caused problems with their progeny.  There would be many generations of their children and grand-children before the cumulative effects of genetic damage passed on from generation to generation would grow to be a danger.  When that time came God would prohibit incest, and with good reason; but, at the time of Cain and his sister, such close-relation marriage was allowed and even necessary.

II. The involvement of Cain’s wife regarding the sin of Abel's murder.
    She went with her husband from the presence of the Lord; but, as far as we can tell, she was an innocent victim suffering the consequences of her husband’s sin.
A. Cain had murdered Abel and there is no indication that his sister was present during the time of the murder.  (Gen 4:3-15)
B. Cain was subsequently banished and went to live in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden.
    (Gen 4:16)
C. His wife obviously went with him because they subsequently had a son, Enoch, in that land.  (Gen 4:17)
D. All evidence seems to indicate that Cain's wife was innocent of the crime but, because she was his wife, she too suffered the consequences of her husband's sin.
E. This lesson shows us that whatever the husband or wife does, the consequences will affect not only the individual committing the transgression but, because God considers them to be "one flesh," the consequences will also affect the spouse as well.  (Gen 2:24)
F. In addition, this lesson can be extended out to show us that anyone with a familial relationship to the transgressor will also suffer in varying amounts.  Those who do not repent but carry the fullness of their unforgiven sins generally pass those sins down through the children and grand-children even to the fourth generation.  (Gen 4:17-24; Ex 3:4; Num 14:18)
G. However, the spouse, in this case the woman of Genesis that we are studying, Cain's wife, will usually suffer the full brunt of the consequences because of the way that God looks at the married couple as being "... one..." and no longer two separate people.  (Mark 10:8)  Therefore she suffers not only the immediate consequences, in this case the consequence of banishment, along with her husband but she also has to suffer with her husband the heartbreak of seeing one of their fourth generation grand-sons, Lamech, also become a murderer.  Evidently powerless to stop him from following in the exact footsteps of her husband into condemnation, and grieving as she watches him take his wives, Adah and Zillah, into condemnation with him exactly as Cain had done to her.  And finally she has to suffer the heartbreak of knowing that Lamech is also taking her fifth generation grand-children, Jabel, Jubal, and Tubalcain, into condemnation with him and their mothers.
    Husbands- Our sins are destructively far-reaching if we leave them unforgiven.  They have the potential of poisoning our whole family line, beginning with the one human being we should love the most, our wives.
    Wives- Encourage your husbands to follow God.  And if they sin, do the best you can to encourage and help them to take those sins to God for forgiveness through Christ.  Without that forgiveness, you and your husband will both have to suffer the consequences.  And your children for generations to come may have to suffer them as well.

III. The faithfulness of Cain’s wife in the execution of her duties as a wife and mother.
A. She followed her husband and went where he went. (Gen 4:16-17)
B. She fulfilled her physical duties as a wife and mother.
      ::17 "And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived and bare Enoch.... ”

IV. Summary.
    Cain’s wife was unknown and unnamed. She followed her brother-husband wherever he went and fulfilled her duties as a wife and, by inference, as a mother. As far as we can tell she was the innocent bystander who suffered the consequences of her husband’s sin.

NOTE: Probably the one most important lesson to be learned from the study of this mysterious woman is that no married person suffers alone for their unrepented sin. Their spouse is ALWAYS involved and will suffer the consequences along with the unrepentant transgressor when they depart from the presence of the Lord, as Cain’s wife suffered along with him when he departed from God’s presence because of his sin. God considers them “one flesh” (Gen 2:24) and, therefore, whatever happens, it happens to the one unit- husband and wife- the one flesh.
    And the second lesson is just as heart-breaking.  The consequences of unrepented sin will follow the family line down through the years, even to the third and fourth generation.

LESSON TWO TEST
Lesson test is "open book," which means you may use
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You cannot proceed to the next Lesson until the day after you have
passed this Lesson Test and found all of the correct answers
in the textbook or the Bible, whichever is appropriate, to
all questions missed on this test even though
you received a passing score.