Where did Cain's wife come from?

One of the most fundamental questions asked by people new to the Bible is where Cain would have gotten his wife. Genesis 5:4 tells us that during Adam’s lifetime of 930 years (800 after the birth of Seth), he had other sons and daughters. Since he and Eve had been ordered to produce a large family in order to populate the earth (Genesis 1:28), it is reasonable to assume that they continued to have children for a long period of time, under the then ideal conditions for longevity.

Without question it was necessary for Adam’s children to marry one another to serve as parents for the ensuing generation; otherwise the human race would have died off. It was not until the course of subsequent generations that it became possible for cousins and more distant relations to choose each other as spouses. There was no definite prohibition about the incestuous character of brother-sister marriage until the time of Abraham (approximately 2,000 years after Creation), who emphasized to the Egyptians that Sarah was his sister (cf. Genesis 20:12), thus implying to the Egyptians that if she was his sister, she could not be his wife (Genesis 12:13).

In Leviticus 20:17 the actual sanction against brother-sister marriage is addressed. But as for Cain and Seth and all the other sons of Adam who married, they must have chosen their sisters as wives.

Kyle Campbell