I personally think there were [other humans back in Adam and Eve's time], and some verses imply that.
For instance, Cain is worried someone might kill him after they found out what he did. If he and his parents were the only people around at the time, who exactly was he afraid of? He also later goes on to found a city. How can you have a city with just three people at most? …
I'm curious as to what others think?
There is no explicit statement in the Bible that other people existed at the time of Adam and Eve, but there is clear indirect statements and indications.
For example, when Cain was banished from Eden to homeless wandering, he expressed fear: “Whoever finds me will kill me” (Gen 4:14). Notably, he does not use a kinship term like “brothers” (אַחִים,
ʾāḥîm) or “house of my father” (בֵּית אָבִי,
bêt ʾābî), but rather an open and indefinite “whoever” (כּל,
kôl). He is not worried about revenge from his family but the vulnerability of exile, of
no longer belonging to God’s protected community. He is not afraid of remaining among kin, but about being cast out from among them. So, God reassures him that divine protection will follow him in exile, such that Cain will be avenged sevenfold if anyone kills him (v. 15).
A similar pressure emerges when we consider the world in which Abraham lived—a world of cities, kingdoms, and civilizations stretching from Uruk in Sumer to the Longshan culture in China. The global population was roughly 25 million people, about 4 million of which lived in Mesopotamia and the surrounding Near East alone. Attempting to derive that world from
just eight people in only 300 years misses the demographic target by nearly three orders of magnitude. From the Flood to Abraham, the young-earth creationist model comes in about
500 times too low. The picture coheres, however, if we carry forward the population implied already in Cain’s fear, treating the biblical genealogies as covenantal lineages (which a redemptive-historical hermeneutic would have us do) rather than exhaustive census records.
This also entails denying a global Flood with a universal biological bottleneck, but there are a lot of good reasons for doing that—textual, theological, scientific, historical—and rather poor reasons to keep it, which is why it’s basically just young-earth creationists who believe it.
(One also must keep in mind that the population of Egypt during the Exodus—often given as ~1450 BCE—was around 2 million. One's population growth rate must take that into account.)
Edited to add: I am reading a new book,
The Generations of Heaven and Earth by Jon Garvey (2020), and he adds an interesting piece of indirect biblical evidence for non-Adamic humans, evidence I had not considered before. In this chapter, “Where Are All the People in Genesis,” he details nine pieces of evidence—some of which mirrors what I’ve argued here—but the one that struck me regarded Genesis 4:26, “At that time people began to call upon the name of the LORD.”
“Which men would those be?” he asks rhetorically. In Genesis, the expression “calling on the name of the Lord” is covenantal language typically denoting formal worship, often in a sacrificial context. Its appearance in connection with Seth’s line should therefore be jarringly unexpected. His parents had known Yahweh face to face, and his older brothers had worshipped him with offerings. It is quite unlikely, then, that Seth’s family were those who “began” to call upon the name of the LORD. Garvey argues that this verse “appears to suggest that some outsiders began to worship Yahweh, either under his covenant name or at least in substance.”
Now the introduction of outsiders to Yahweh, like the growth of population recorded in these chapters, would actually be a limited fulfilment of the commission that God had always intended for Adam, and so it has a logical place in the unfolding story. This mission was impaired, but not cancelled, by the Fall, just as the parallel commission of Israel, marred from the start by the rebellion at Mount Sinai, nevertheless moved forward under the hand of God.
Greg Beale deals with this at length in
A New Testament Biblical Theology, tracing the commission down through its various bearers from Noah onwards, and writes:
After Adam’s sin, the commission would be expanded to include renewed humanity’s reign over unregenerate human forces arrayed against it. Hence, the language of “possessing the gate of their enemies” is included, which elsewhere is stated as “subduing the land …”
Such an understanding takes what is otherwise both a curious and (in the absence of an outside population) incomprehensible snippet of information and ties it into the whole missiological purpose of Genesis, the Torah, and indeed the whole Bible. Adam’s people are damaged goods, but God’s word was not spoken in vain. But in order for this to be the case, we need to see and acknowledge the “invisible” population surrounding the new-creation population which Yahweh has seeded into the world. Somehow people began to perceive the Lord through this family—perhaps through intermarriage, even—and to call on the name of the Lord.
Paul tells us that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Perhaps this verse includes some of the very first followers of Christ in history.
Jon Garvey,
The Generations of Heaven and Earth: Adam, the Ancient World, and Biblical Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020).
