p. 2 | 3726 - Cain's Wife

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Apr 16, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 16.

3726 — Cain's Wife

Who was Cain's wife? and was the land of Nod inhabited at the time when Cain went there? or was there any other woman on earth at that time excepting Eve? C. S. and Others.

There is compressed in the book of Genesis 2,500 years of human history, and therefore a little story covers a great period of time. Men lived at a great age at that time. We read in Gen. 5:4 that Adam lived eight hundred years, and begot sons and daughters. We would see by this that Seth was probably about eight hundred years older than Adam's youngest children. These children, of course (and at this time there must have been children also of Seth and Enos and Cainan, descendants of Adam), were scattered all around the early settlement near Eden, and the earth around its center was becoming populated. This we gather must be so, from the record itself; and while this is told after the story is told of Cain, some of the events must have taken place long before. Having begun the story of Cain, the record carries it clear through to the end. So we read, in Gen. 4:16, after Cain's crime he went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. The word "Nod" means "wandering." Cain said, "And I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond [or a wanderer] in the earth." He went out into the land of wandering. How long he wandered there alone we do not know; but as Adam's posterity increased, of course others came in connection with him, and in this land of wandering he found some of Adam's children — Cain's own sister, or his more remote relatives — and there he married. If we will but keep this in mind,—that hundreds of years passed, perhaps, before Cain had even taken to himself a wife,—there will be no difficulty in understanding the record. Cain married either his sister, or one of his brothers' or sisters' children.