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Well, I'm sorry but if it's not in the Bible and you claim it as part of your theology, then you're making it up. You can't just construct convenient characters out of whole cloth to fit your hypothesis and pretend it's biblical.
You may be correct in asserting that Ian's hypothesis is just that: a hypothesis. Nevertheless, it is a sound one, which, as I stated before, a tiny bit of research on your part might confirm. There are lots of things that are not clearly discussed in the Bible - like ancient recipes for beer. So I fail to see on what basis you reject the hypothesis presented other than it completely blows your "contradiction" out of the water.
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I mean, that's what the King James version did with Unicorns (the KJV mentions Unicorns as having been on Noah's Arc), so are you going to start believing in Unicorns now? Of course not: That would be silly.
Unicorns: First of all, KJV is a translation, not an authoritative Hebrew text. As I was trained, you always check the Hebrew text rather than rely on any particular translation. According to Brown Driver Briggs, the correct Hebrew term there,
reem is better translated:
Richard Whitaker, Editor, The Abridged Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew-English Lexicon of the Old Testament, (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.) 1997. wrote:
n.m. wild ox — wild ox, as fierce and strong; sim. of strength of Isr.; so fig. of Joseph; fig. of princes of Edom; of powerful foes; in sim. of skipping, leaping.
So basically, the translators of the KJV made an error in their handling of the term. In which case, the "contradiction" lies with the translators, not with the text itself.
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But, it's somehow OK to make up a story about Cain having a sister and insert it there because it's a very inconvenient thing for Cain to not have any females around to procreate with, huh? Gotcha.
Once again, a little research on your part would demonstrate that, no, you haven't proven anything.
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And I wasn't being "uppity" (and I resent that term, by the way.) I was just highlighting the flaw in his logic. Basically, he was saying that since the bible is silent on who exactly it was that Cain married, let's make something up and call it explained. Well, that's fine for fairy tales and myths, but that's not christianity.
Ian offered you a hypothesis to explain what you called a "contradiction". The mere fact that any hypothesis can be shown to answer the question proves that it is not a contradiction. The fact is the Bible is silent about Cain's wife. It never point-blank says that he didn't have one - only that, if she existed, she was not recorded in the genealogies. There is no real reason to suppose that he didn't, so why should we consider it a contradiction at all?
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If you start doing that, then anything goes. You could say Jesus appeared to walk on water because he knew where the shallow parts were, or that Noah's flood was just a really bad downpour that got exaggerated, or that Jesus resurrection is completely metaphorical. I do believe they used to call that Hersey.
In the case of these events that are directly addressed by the text, you are correct. To deny a miraculous event, or to put some kind of non-miraculous spin on them is heresy. But your question is not addressing such an event, so the charge does not apply. A common sense reading of the text does in fact permit us to speculate that Cain married a sister.
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Since I don't believe any of it, I don't really care which of the characters in the bible you think really existed and which were mythological constructions, but if you're gonna claim Adam et al were real people then don't insult my intelligence by trying to say that the reason the story has a big loophole is that the authors left stuff out on purpose. That's just dumb.
Sarge, you're the one who brought it up. Like I said before, if you don't want an answer, then don't ask the question. If you didn't really care, then why are you bothering?
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If the authors expected people to take the story literally then why make it so easy to debunk it? Why didn't they just say that Cain went away and was never heard from again? That would have tied it up all nice and neat, with no room for ambiguity. But that didn't do that, did they? They made him the founder of a nation ON PURPOSE but they fail to mention where his wives came from. Do you expect me to believe that something as important as that didn't deserve to be clearly explained?
Why do you think the name of Cain's wife is so important? Other than bearing Cain children, she doesn't seem to have contributed much at all to the divine history. But, like I said, if you take the time to study genealogies of the Old Testament, you might note that very few females are ever mentioned in those early genealogies. Why? Because the inheritance was always reckoned through the males. Sexist? Perhaps, but then again, early Hebrew culture wasn't exactly known for it's complete equality between the sexes anyway.
But whatever you might Personally make of the omission, the fact remains: a reasonable answer to your challenge has been offered, a reasonable answer that you seem to be going out of your way to discredit.