Saturday, May 11, 2024

Jon Garvey on Some of the Biblical Evidence for Non-Adamic Populations Contemporary with Adam, Eve et al.

  

Cain’s Exile

 

The marking of Cain, to prevent his finders killing him, follows on from the sentence of exile that Yahweh pronounced on Cain for the murder of his brother. And that, of course, raises the question of who would wish to kill him, and why. Cain’s fear is the result of his being sent away—he shows no fear of vengeance by Adam, or by future kin at home. Blood vengeance scarcely seems a likely outcome within such a family household anyway, let alone their pursuing a manhunt across a large and unoccupied land of exile.

 

No, Cain’s fear must be, and naturally reads as, that of being a stranger encroaching on another group’s territory without good reason. It is strangers who are likely to be killed if they stray into foreign territory. That group, we suppose, consisted of whoever occupied the land of Nod, though since “Nod” is translated as “wandering,” it probably had another name amongst its own people (this is by no means unprecedented: the name “Wales” derives from “foreign,” whereas the Welsh name for their land, “Cymru,” means “fellow-countrymen”).

 

Cain’s Wife

 

The identity of Cain’s wife has been debated for centuries, and of course the traditional interpretation, amongst both Jews and Christians, was that he married his sister, or perhaps his niece, Eve having been busily producing the population of the world without its being mentioned in the text, which only tells us that “[Adam] had other sons and daughters.”

 

One problem with this interpretation is why God would have exiled Âwân (the name given to Eve’s daughter, Cain’s wife, in the second temple Book of Jubilees) for a murder her husband and brother, Cain, had committed. But the bigger problem is that Cain is said, in a matter of fact manner, to have built a city and named it after his son Enoch.

 

Now we know a lot about the building of cities in the ANE, and archaeologists have excavated many examples. The oldest true city, according to both archaeology and Mesopotamian tradition, was Eridu, founded around 5,400 BCE. Like other Mesopotamian cities, it was the product of population growth, the centralization of resources, the stratification of society, and strong leadership. Cities were, from the first, built to maintain large populations (and to manage regional economic resources). A city for one family is called a “house.”

 

But even a so-called “proto-city” like Çatalhöyük, established from around 7,500 BCE, had an average population of 5,000. It was never a family farmstead, and even if Cain and Âwân lived for centuries, that kind of population growth is frankly incredible.

 

However, what would be realistic is for the immigrant Cain, bearing the inheritance of Adam’s royal election and the ruthlessness of sin, to have married a local woman, and gained power and influence in a local population, to the extent of building a city—and probably not the first ever constructed, or at least Scripture does not tell us it was.

 

Calling on the Name of Yahweh

 

After naming Cain’s descendants, the writer of Genesis returns to Adam’s third son Seth, and to his son Enosh. But then he adds the strange comment that “at that time men began to call on the name of Yahweh.”

 

Which men would those be? In Genesis, the phrase “calling on the name of the Lord” usually implies sacrificing to him as Abraham did. But Adam had known Yahweh face to face, as had Eve, and we have already been told that both Cain and Abel “brought an offering to Yahweh.” It is hard to believe that Seth or his family didn’t also share in the family worship. Even if they only began to do so late in life, they would not be the first to do so. The verse, then, appears to suggest that some outsiders began to worship Yahweh either under his covenant name, or at least in substance.

 

Now the introduction of outsiders to Yahweh, like the growth of population recorded in these chapters, would actually be a limited fulfilment of the commission that God had always intended for Adam, and so it has a logical place in the unfolding story. This mission was impaired, but not cancelled, by the fall, just as the parallel commission of Israel, marred from the start by the rebellion at Mount Sinai, nevertheless moved forward under the hand of God.

 

Greg Beale deals with this at length in A New Testament Biblical Theology, tracing the commission down through its various bearers from Noah onwards, and writes:

 

After Adam’s sin, the commission would be expanded to include renewed humanity’s reign over unregenerate human forces arrayed against it. Hence, the language of “possessing the gate of their enemies” is included, which elsewhere is stated as “subduing the land …”

 

Such an understanding takes what otherwise is both a curious, and (in the absence of an outside population) incomprehensible snippet of information, and ties it into the whole missiological purpose of Genesis, the Torah, and indeed the whole Bible. Adam’s people are damaged goods, but God’s word was not spoken in vain. But in order for this to be the case, we need to see and acknowledge the “invisible” population surrounding the new-creation population which Yahweh has seeded into the world. Somehow people began to perceive the Lord through this family—perhaps through intermarriage, even—and to call on the name of the Lord.

 

Paul tells us that “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Perhaps this verse includes some of the very first followers of Christ in history. (Jon Garvey, The Generations of Heaven and Earth: Adam, the Ancient World, and Biblical Theology [Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2020], 33-36)