Cain's Wife (Genesis 4)

[Esaias]

Originally Posted by n david

Chapter One is the synopsis of creation. Each day, poetic in structure.
Chapter Two are the details of man and the garden.

Both are about the same event.

There wasn't a first creation of man, and then came Adam in chapter two. There was only one creation of man with two different stories of origin.

Consider the first two chapters like this: you could journal a week-long vacation, detailing each day's events; and then after doing so, write again in detail about one of the events. It doesn't mean there were two separate events, just that the first entry was a synopsis of the whole week and the second entry detailed one event which happened during that week.

Chapter 1:

Animals created first, then mankind (male and female). Mankind is told to fill the earth and subdue it.

Chapter 2:

Man (male only) is created first, then animals, then woman. Man (male only) is put in a Garden to tend it, woman created as a helper for him in the garden.

There is no way these are two descriptions of the same sequence of events. If they are, then one of them is false. Since they are both correct and accurate, they must necessarily be describing two distinct events. Both accounts differ materially as to the sequence of activities.

Were the animals made before man and woman? Or after man and before woman? Was mankind told to spread out and populate the earth? Or put in a garden to tend it?

That these are two different events explains who Cain was worried about being found by and for whom he built his city. It explans who his wife was most likely to be as well as possibly who Seth's wife was, and so forth, without resorting to "sanctified incest" which creates other difficulties.

The idea that these are two accounts of the same event not only creates all those difficulties, but also the difficulty of the integrity of the text itself, since the two accounts are clearly fundamentally different. Not to mention it creates a discrepency with known history and archaeology (humans have been around longer than a mere 6,000 years).