One of the age-old Bible questions is, “Who was Cain’s Wife?” and to answer that, we also have to ask, “Who did Cain think was going to kill him if they found him?” If you remember Episode 20, we talked about how theological history is different from our modern history books and that will help us uncover the solution to this mystery. Also, Cain founded a city—does that make cities bad? What does the Bible say about cities and where does Revelation show us ending up when Jesus is king? And we’re going to talk about why there are so few women and children mentioned by name in the Bible.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all scripture is from the ESV unless I say otherwise)
416 Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. 17 Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. 18 To Enoch was born Irad, and Irad fathered Mehujael, and Mehujael fathered Methushael, and Methushael fathered Lamech.
And boy howdy, are we ever gonna hear a lot about Lamech next week. Dang, that boy. But this week we are going to talk about the big controversy over Cain’s wife and Cain building a city instead of wandering. Because, well, you probably have already wondered about who Cain’s wife was. If there are only just those four, oops, three people on earth—Adam, Eve, and Cain—then who on earth did Cain marry? Of course, the grossest possibility is that he married a sister who hasn’t been mentioned but if that is true then we have some other questions—namely, how can you build a city without a bunch of other people out there somewhere? And to answer those questions, we’re going to talk about theological history again. So, let’s review.
You remember what the word history means—a history is an account of events in the past. Like, a book about some important event with dates and pictures and quotes and step by step details about everything that happened and what people did. That’s how our modern histories work. Our modern histories don’t talk about God and what He is doing. We writw our histories to be really really accurate and to only include the things we can prove. Back in Bible days, they would have looked at that sort of “history” as ridiculous. They would have asked what the heck good something like that was and who would even care about something that boring. But to them, any “history” that wasn’t a story that talked about what their gods were doing would have been ridiculous. That’s how they looked at the world. They fought a war and when they wrote it all down afterward, they talked about how their gods fought for them and helped them and destroyed their enemies. To them, that was history—the story of their people’s relationship with their gods and what their gods did for them and what they did for their gods. And so, the Bible is also that kind of book. The Bible is God’s story and it includes people because that shows us how God was interacting with the world. When we see how God deals with people, we come to understand how wonderful He is. We learn about Him by watching what He does in the human story.
Theological is a word that means something is related to the study of God. So, theology teaches us about God. So, we would expect that a theological history is a history that is specifically designed to teach us about God. In other words, it is a history because it deals with real people and real events but it is theological because those real people and real events are written about in a way that will teach us about God. Adam and Eve and Cain were real people but we are not hearing their story in order to learn about their lives. They are only mentioned so that we can find out about how God cares for us, that He wants to be in a relationship with us, that He doesn’t start hating us or abandoning us when we do bad things. So, was Cain real? Yes, absolutely. He is a historical person, a real person, but he is only important to us because of how God is using him and what he did to teach us what we need to know. That’s theological history. A history that revolves around God and not around the human beings who are like supporting characters in someone else’s movie.
I explained to you a few weeks ago why I believe Genesis two and three were written theologically as though there was only one family on earth. That reason was to make us understand that all humans are human—and not different species. By the time the Bible started to be written down, people weren’t really clear on that concept. Although they didn’t seem to care about skin color, like some people do today, they sure cared about nationality. Were the hated Ammonites, Moabites and Amalekites humans too? How about the Egyptians and Canaanites? Yep. God says they all came from Adam, and Noah, so they had to be human. When we stop believing that, we can do all sorts of horrifying things to each other. And when people are very different, sometimes it is tempting to think that we are more human than they are but nope. Not a chance. So, when we look at the Bible as a book where God is the center and He wants to teach us certain things without confusing us (because we are not as smart as He is), He will leave things out or present what is true in a way that is easier for us to understand. Sometimes, He exaggerates so that we won’t miss the lesson—like when Jesus said that the mustard seed was the smallest even though He and everyone knew it wasn’t. The Bible is a teaching book, meant to teach us about God and how He wants us to behave and think. Because that’s what books were way back when—we make different kinds of books now and write in different ways and sometimes we make the big mistake of thinking that the way we write things down is the best. If God liked the way we were writing things the best, He would have written the Bible that way. But He didn’t. We can sure get really wrapped up in our own way of doing things and think that God needs to think the way we do but I am glad He doesn’t.
So, that’s why I think that there were a lot more people that God created when He created Adam and Eve and that He chose them to be in the Garden out of all the other people. It doesn’t make the Bible untrue, it just means that God presented the information in a way that we would best understand what He wants us to know. If there were other people, then it makes more sense what happened last week. Do you remember? After Cain killed his brother Abel, God told him that he wouldn’t be able to be a farmer anymore, no matter where he went, and Cain announced that he was running away from God—but then he freaked out and started crying that if anyone found him they would kill him.
14 Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” 15 Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.
Well, if everyone on earth knew him, couldn’t God just tell his family not to come after him and kill him? Why does God need to put a mark on him to protect him? To keep strangers from killing him! In those days, your family was your lifeline. They protected you from violent outsiders and fed you. All of a sudden, Cain would have no protection at all. A person all alone in the ancient world was a very suspicious character and it would take an act of God to protect them from being killed on sight. And the Bible says Cain settled down somewhere to the east and he got married and his wife had a baby. It also says that he built a city. Not like you can have a city with just three people in it so there must have been more people around. Maybe from his wife’s family. Why did Cain need to build a city? Because someone who can’t grow food needs to build a place where people can come and trade crops for animals and tools and other supplies. Cities were places where people could band together and help one another and protect each other from other people and from wild animals.
And some people will assume that because Cain founded a city, that cities are just automatically bad. But that’s not the case at all—at the end of the Bible, where are we all worshiping God? In the biggest city that ever existed, that’s where! New Jerusalem! When God was telling the Israelites where they would live in the Land, He commanded them to make places that were especially for the Levites and the Priests and those places were cities! God chose Jerusalem to be the site of the first and second Temples. So, if you live in a city, don’t think that God can’t find you there or that He doesn’t approve or is angry with you. We need people in all sorts of places. God’s people especially need to be everywhere! And in cities there are a lot more opportunities to serve God than out by yourself in the country.
So, was Cain disobeying God when he built that city with his family? I don’t think so. God told him that he would be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth. He was told that he wouldn’t be permitted to farm, that the earth wouldn’t cooperate with him, but he was never given a commandment to always be on the move. He was a fugitive, which means he was a criminal—a murderer, and hiding from his own family where he wouldn’t be welcome or trusted anymore. And he was a wanderer, which meant that he had to roam far from his home to somewhere else that he could make a life for himself. But that’s not the same thing as God telling him that he can never stop moving around.
Anyway, when Jesus came on the scene, He didn’t live out in the country. He lived in Capernaum. He travelled to cities all over the Galilee and even in pagan areas where people didn’t believe in our God, and He also went to Jerusalem for festivals. People came from the country to see Him in the cities. When He was in cities, He taught people about the Kingdom of God. He healed the sick people who lived there. He cast demonic spirits out of people who were suffering. He healed people who were disabled. He blessed children and laid His hands on them. He ate with people who other folks didn’t think he should be seen dead with. He made sure to give the sorts of people who don’t usually get mentioned a lot of attention. And He told His own disciples to take care of those people too and make disciples out of them. When Paul and the other apostles went out spreading the Good News that Jesus is King and that the Kingdom of Heaven had arrived, they went to the cities. They set up congregations wherever they went. They went to the places where there were Imperial Cult Temples dedicated to Roman Emperors and the goddess Roma and other Temples where gods and goddesses like Artemis were worshiped. The apostles didn’t avoid those kinds of places, that’s where you go when you want to make a big impact for God’s Kingdom, to the places where there are a ton of people and where they are in trouble and need Jesus.
Sometimes when they went to the cities, they had huge successes and a ton of people came to faith in Jesus and joined God’s Kingdom, and in other places not so much success. Sometimes they were even beaten and killed. But we have to remember that Jesus’s own friends and neighbors in the tiny town of Nazareth wanted to stone Him to death when He told them that God would also be reaching out to and saving their hated enemies, the Gentiles, instead of destroying them (that’s in Luke chapter four if you want to read about that later). So, people in the country aren’t necessarily any better than people in the cities—there are just more people in the cities and so the chances of meeting someone dangerous might be higher, that’s all. But cities aren’t evil—God loves the people there and wants them all to hear His good news and be saved. God wants entire cities to be devoted to Him.
Let’s talk about Cain’s wife, who is the first person in the Bible without a name. And you might think it is odd that Cain’s wife isn’t given a name, probably because in those days they weren’t really interested in hearing about anyone except for men and a few notable women. It’s just how it was. Remember when God told Eve that she would want things to be the way they had always been but that Adam would start ruling over her instead, but He never actually commanded Adam to do that because Eve wasn’t cursed? Well, that didn’t go away and even today we still have some problems with that. Does it mean that women aren’t important to God? Certainly not! God loves women every bit as much as He loves men and women can serve God just as much as men can. Not all women in the Bible are unnamed or only mentioned as someone’s mom, wife or sister. Miriam was the sister of Moses and she was one of the three big leaders of Israel.
Micah 6:4 “For I brought you up from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery, and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.”
That’s what “sent before” means, it means that those three were in charge. Were any of them perfect? Oh no, all three of them committed serious sins. During the time of the judges, one of the judges of Israel was a woman named Deborah. People would come from all around to present legal cases before her because she was a prophet and God would give her wise answers. A woman named Yael was responsible for defeating one of the dreaded enemies of Israel, a warlord named Sisera. One of my favorite women in the Bible, Abigail, saved her entire household after her husband foolishly refused to feed David and his men even though they had been taking care of his shepherds and his flocks while they were out in the wilderness. Not only did she save her household, but she also prevented David from committing terrible murders against their innocent servants. Huldah was a respected prophetess during the time of King Josiah and she advised the High Priest and the rest of the King’s advisors. Temple gates were named after her. What about Ruth? Ruth is one of the most wonderful stories in the whole Bible of a woman who was kind, brave, hard-working and generous. Esther was also very brave and she did great works as Queen—she even saved the Jewish people from being destroyed. In the New Testament, we see that women were among Jesus’s students and that it was women who were financially supporting his ministry. It was women and only one man at the Cross when Jesus died and women were the first people to see Him after He was raised from the dead. Of all the people Paul names in his writings as leaders in the first century church, 20% are women—women who were apostles, prophets, and deacons and who did general good works.
So, I don’t want anyone to get irritated or sad that women don’t get mentioned much. That was the culture and that’s just the way it was. Remember I told you that kids don’t get mentioned much either? Same deal. No one would think that God doesn’t love children! After all, the prophet Jeremiah was told by God Himself that He’d had His eye on him since before he was even born. The prophet Samuel was called by God as a child. So, don’t ever think you are invisible to God for any reason. Oh, and have you ever read how much attention Jesus paid to children? And to people with disabilities? Jesus healed the blind and the deaf and the people who couldn’t walk and who couldn’t even get up out of bed. He taught the women who even other women thought shouldn’t be learning. He blessed the children that His own disciples tried to shoo away. He healed the people who society didn’t want around because in those days people thought that all disabilities were because of sin! Can you even imagine that? Nowadays, we know that sometimes things just go wrong before we are even born—like with my son and with me. Sometimes there are accidents. Sometimes people get hurt through no fault of their own. Jesus told everyone that being sick, or not being able to walk or hear or see—it wasn’t because of sin. They thought it was always because of sin. I guess when nothing is wrong with you, that’s the easy thing to assume but Jesus said it was wrong.
In ancient times, people lived in what social scientists call a patriarchy. Now, social scientists study how people interact with each other—and that is very important to understand when we read the Bible. If your families have read my curriculum books about honor and shame and social identity and kindship relations, then you know how much your brain started to explode when you would read the Bible and you saw all the connections. Well, patriarchy is another one of those things. In a patriarchy, the men control everything in families and in society. Women and children are kept close and protected and really not allowed to do many things that men could go out and do. Families were very afraid of being shamed by women and children—of having their reputations destroyed, which was very serious. After all, if the men in the family couldn’t keep the women and children under control, all the other men in society would think that they were pretty pathetic. So, the answer was to keep women and kids locked away and only publicly out in large groups of women or with the men of the family so that they couldn’t be accused of anything. Men from other families were always looking for opportunities to make other families look bad so that they could look better themselves. The easiest way to hurt another family was to accuse a woman of something terrible—but of course, if a woman was always being watched, there was no way to accuse her of anything. And she didn’t have to do anything wrong to be accused.
So, when we read through the Bible and see not very many women and children being mentioned, you can understand why. The Bible generally deals with people who do things that are very right or very wrong. Things people notice. Women and children weren’t noticed much because they were hidden away—they had very little opportunity to do anything either heroic or wrong. Men, on the other hand, had all the power in society and so we will see them doing things that are both awesome and terrible. They had the opportunities. What they did was out in the open and so they got noticed, for better or for worse. So, I don’t want anyone to make the mistake of thinking that the Bible ignores women and children because God ignores them—Jesus proved that He doesn’t!
Remember the big secret of the Bible—that it is God’s story and not the story of Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, David and Abigail, or even Mary and Joseph. It’s the story of God and only God—and we learn best about God by seeing how He deals with us in our stories. When we look at it that way, as His story, then it doesn’t matter who else shows up. Those people were all there but maybe we don’t learn nearly as much about God by hearing stories of women and children who were at home just living normal, faithful lives and behaving themselves as we do through the stories of the men who did good and bad things as priests, and kings, and soldiers. It’s only when we make the mistake of thinking that the Bible is about people that we start believing that God plays favorites. Remember what the Bible tells us in Genesis one, that both men and women were made equally in God’s image. What people have done after that is really sad but we have to remember that, at the Cross, everything changed and we can be changed into people who are God’s image-bearers again. And it doesn’t matter how old you are or if you are male or female. God wants the world to see Him in you, whether you do that on your feet or in a wheelchair or from your bed. God has given you gifts, gifts to show the world who He is, and as you use them faithfully, He might give you even more.
There is a hero of the faith I want you to learn about. Her name is Joni Eareckson-Tada and when she was a teenager, she broke her neck in a terrible freak diving accident. Not only is she in a wheelchair for the rest of her life, but she can’t use her arms and hands. But she is an amazing teacher and speaker. She goes all around the world and people who know her name all praise God. She paints amazing paintings, using a paintbrush in her mouth. There was a time when she wouldn’t be listened to, or respected, or even taken seriously. There was a time when people would have assumed her accident was proof that she had done something secretly evil and was being judged by God. But now, God has used her life to change the life of millions of people. When God’s Kingdom finally comes to earth and we have our resurrection bodies, which will be perfect, Joni will be up and dancing I am sure and she will also hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And everything she couldn’t do won’t matter. What will matter and what did matter are all the things she did do because God loved her and called her to do important work for Him and for all of us.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray you have a wonderful week studying God’s word with the people who love you.