Originally posted by Sinai
This is one of those topics we can probably discuss and debate as long as we wish without ever coming up with an authoritative and satisfying answer. Since Cain was outside the line of promise, the Bible apparently did not consider this issue important enough to tell us the answer. We are therefore left to our speculations.
The responses generally given tend to fall into two groups: (1) those that think Cain married a relative (i.e., a sister, niece, or other descendent of Adam and/or Eve), and (2) those that think he married a non-relative (i.e., someone not related to Adam and Eve. Sure, thats an oversimplification, its patently obvious, and it pretty well takes in the entire realm of possibilities of Biblical choices.
At first glance, it would appear that only the first of those possibilities could be consistent with what the Bible says. After all, doesnt the Bible say that Adam and Eve were the first people on Earth? Therefore, they and their children would comprise all of mankind, wouldnt they?
Although we would be justified in reaching that conclusion from a literal reading of our English versions of the Bible, that is not necessarily what the Bible says. The original Hebrew text and passages from the Talmud (the collection of writings constituting the Jewish civil and religious law) and from ancient Jewish commentators indicate that the Bible does not close the door on the possibility that there were other peopleincluding men before Adambut that Adam was the first human being to be created with an eternal soul.
Hebrew has two words for soul--nefesh and neshama--and both come into play in the first two chapters of Genesis. When Genesis 1:21 tells us that God created
every animal, it signifies that all animals (humans included) are infused with the nefesh or soul of animal life. When humans are mentioned a few verses later (Genesis 1:27 and 2:7), the text tells of a further creation, which distinguishes humans from lower animals: The third creation mentioned in the first chapter of Genesis is of our eternal and immortal soul, our neshama (the first two creations were of the universe and of life).
The closing of Genesis 2:7 has a subtlety lost in the English. It is usually translated as:
and [God] breathed into his nostrils the neshama of life and the adam became a living soul (Gen. 2:7). The Hebrew text actually states:
and the adam became to a living soul. Nahmanides, seven hundred years ago, wrote that the to (the Hebrew letter lamed prefixed to the word soul in the verse) is superfluous from a grammatical stance and so must be there to teach something. Lamed, he noted, indicates a change in form and may have been placed there to describe mankind as progressing through stages of mineral, plant, fish, and animal. Finally, upon receiving the neshama, that creature which had already been formed became a human. He concludes his extensive commentary on the implications of this lamed as it may be that the verse is stating that [prior to receiving the neshama] it was a completely living being and [by the neshama] it was transformed into another man.
Did you catch that? According to Nahmanides, who is the major kabalistic commentator on the Bible, the biblical text has told us that before the neshama there was something like a man that was not quite a human.
Note that Nahmanides writings preceded discoveries of modern paleontology by hundreds of years---and the Bible said it three thousand years before discoveries of modern science.