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A reader mentioned something recently about Cain and Abel. The question was asked "Where did Cain go after he was banished from the Garden of Eden? He went to a place where there were lots of people. How so?" Usually the question is “who did Cain marry?” These questions are commonly used to somehow prove that the Bible’s account of creation is just a story. That it is not a factual account of what happened. People misunderstand quite a bit of the Bible for a few reasons. One is they read it with assumptions already made. Another is they do not take the whole thing into context. Because it is now broken up into chapters and verses it is easily taken out of context. But when you read through it and take in all the facts this is a very simple question.

Understanding the times

A few important details here. First you must understand who we are dealing with here. This is Adam and Eve, the first people ever created. They are in a garden, there is no tv, no radio, no sports, no malls etc.. They have 2 responsibilities, take care of the garden and multiply. God commanded them to reproduce and they had a whole lot of time to do so. Another very important factor is the age they lived until. Adam lived to be 930 years old. Besides the fact that they did not have any of the health issues we have today there are more reasons for living so long, but that will be for another article.

Another thing that must be understood here is that the Bible does not quote every birth. It generally only lists the important ones. In Genesis ch. 4 – 5. We see a few of their children but only male names. But then in vs. 4 of ch. 5 it says that "… the days of Adam were eight hundred years, and he had sons and daughters." For 800 years he had sons and daughters! That is a long time of having children in a world where Eve’s recovery time would have been much faster than today’s. When taking into account the entire section here you can see that he had more children than just those listed.

Multiplication

We do not know that actual number of people alive when Cain murdered Abel. It is really easy however to see that their were quite a few. I have even seen speculation that their could have been billions. But even the lowest I have seen are hundreds of thousands. Just think of how many parents there are today who have 5-7 kids and are only 40-50 years old. Now think of 800 years, how many kids could they have? How many grand kids would they have? Something to consider is that back then kids were not an increase in spending or health care etc… They were a benefit in every way, kids worked at earlier ages and helped the family. There was little reason not to have kids.

Here is a chart that shows how easily a growth explosion can take place. This chart is actually pretty conservative on the numbers. It assumes that child bearing years are only until 500 yrs old, child bearing doesn’t start until 50 years old and only one child every 5 years.

We do not know at what age the murder of Abel took place. We do know that they both had jobs that they did at that point. But you can see how there could have easily been thousands at the time Cain went to live in Nod and got married.

Incest

And finally there is the questions of incest. Regardless of whether you believe in creation or evolution incest would be required to populate the earth. Why this is only used to "disprove" creation, I don’t know. It would have taken quite some time for incest to have the medical problems it does today. The DNA then was not what it is today with so many defects. Later when there was a stable population God did institute laws prohibiting incest.

This is actually a very easy study. The reason skeptics do not consider these facts, is that they generally have not spent a whole lot of time, studying what they aim to disprove.

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