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Oh you guys just make me sick. There is no way you guys will ever understand the Bible because you are not members of God's family. How can an out sider know what goes on in the family. The Bible says the canal mind does not understand the things of God for the are spiritually discerned. I wont waste my time explaining a thing to you guys because even if i do for the whole of eternity you will not understand because you do not have the capacity to do so.
Good advice, Get born again and you will cease wondering about what is plain to even a moo-moo. Sorry you may not find the word in your dictionary so dont look it up.
Simon
So your mind is closed and no amount of contradictory evidence will open it. Ok, suit yourself. That's the problem with religion, you're not allowed to question just accept.
It is impossible to discuss the subject in a meaningful way with those who would rather look at the bible as the word of god instead of the man Jesus as the christian faith requires. It would certainly seem apparent that Adam was the end result of a long natural evolutionary process from dust to man as I was saying in an earlier post. Eve is explained as being taken from Adam's body. I don't know exactly how that occurred. Adam was in a deep sleep. What does that mean?
I'll try to reword the question. Man has been brought about by a natural process. Sexual reproduction has prevented the human and some animal species from being wiped out by deadly diseases through the constant changing of dna combinations. In light of all this what natural process is being referred to when Eve is made from Adam's bone? I believe understanding these things can ultimately help bring about a better understanding of the man Jesus.
The bible tells us that the first "man" was called adam.
The bible also tells us that mankind was made outside the garden.
The Bible does not talk about other men left outside the garden when Adam was taken and placed inside it.
While there is room to say that there could have been millions of people left outside the garden at that moment, there is no story in the Text about it.
Thus it would be a guess...right or wrong we dont know, but still always a guess
Correct me if I"m wrong but I don't believe guessing will be useful. My self asked question from above may be simply a matter of the woman Eve coming from the same evolutionary stock leading up to Adam, hence she is taken from his bone. The bone represents the underlying stucture that supports us.
I was looking at the March 2009 Discover magazine. It says DNA studies have revealed we are linked to one man about 60,00 years before present but if we follow the maternal (female) line we are linked to one woman 140,000 years before present. This may explain several things. First, according to the Jewish record we are all come from one man Adam. That we are linked to a woman further in the past indicates that Adams sons would have had relations with women outside of the immediate family.
Is this what it means where the record in Genesis says the sons of God took wives from the daughters of men?
For the Christian believer in the Jewish man Jesus it is noteworthy that while Jesus arrived as a Jew, born of a Jewish woman but not through natural means like Adam, it was always intended that non-Jews would also come to be related to him.
The Bible does not talk about other men left outside the garden when Adam was taken and placed inside it.
This is true; there's not a single word in all of Scripture, much less the Book of Genesis, about Leo (he was going over to the bakery on his wife's instructions to buy a loaf of rye bread, and completely missed all the goings-on with Adam. Afterward, his wife said, "What took you so long? You missed your chance to get into the Bible!").
The questions surrounding Adam, the first man, don't bear well to joking. Those that hold tightly to the Jewish man Jesus hold a high respect the ancient Jewish writings. To them it is the Jewish people who carried the seed from Eve to bring about the man Jesus. The writings forecast and provide some introduction to the man Jesus who ultimately explains God to them fully. It would seem apparent that we all do actually inherit both the "knowledge of good and evil" and "death" from Adam, hardly joking matters. Those non-Jews that have become aware of the man Jesus carry an expectation of being included in his inheritance of "life", which if true, is obviously precious.
I believe it is useful to keep these things in mind while still trying to to obtain the most accurate scientific picture of the goings on with early man, even though with our current knowlege I cannot obtain the clarity I look forward to
I've read over the posts in this thread and have found a few things worth expressing an opinion. It seems a few people are confusing matters. Admittedly, I'm speculating, much as many others here have done.
One poster commented about the "snake" in the garden. If I'm not mistaken, the biblical translation doesn't say anything about a snake, but rather a serpent. Yes, it does speak about the punishment of the serpent was that it would crawl on its belly and be bruised by the heel. Still, a few hundred years ago you'd find that dragons were also called serpents. In much of Asia, dragons are depicted very much like snakes. That's not to say the biblical serpent was a dragon either. I'm inclined to think it was used as more of an illustration to help visualize rather than to be taken literally. After all, the Bible does contain plenty of symbolism. Jesus, himself, used parables to illustrate certain points to people which made those points easier to understand.
A number of people have commented about Cain marrying his sister and are repulsed at the thought of incest. First of all, there is no Biblical mention that Cain's wife was his sister, that is a direct child of Adam and Eve. The problem is that we see incest as undesirable today because of numerous genetic flaws people have today. An act of incest today places an extremely high risk of those flaws being magnified in the birth of a child produced by parents who are close relatives like brother-sister, father-daughter, mother-son, etc. The risk is high even among first and second cousins. The more distant you are in relation to your spouse, the weaker the flaws are that are passed on to the children, even though those flaws are still there. The point is that even if Cain's wife was his sister, there would not have been so many genetic flaws to make incest as risky as it is today.
Secondly, nothing is mentioned as to how old Cain was when he left his parents. If Cain's wife was NOT his sister, then where did she come from? Assuming people actually lived 900 years or so, then Adam and Eve would have been the source for many, many generations that followed. Adam and Eve could well have produced more children than most of us would want to think of. Other children of Adam and Eve could well have moved on long before and bred to produce more distantly related children. Although there is no mention who Cain married and what (if any) relationship he had to his wife, they could easily have been very distant relatives, meaning it would not have been an incestual relationship. We look at it as incest today because of the potential of causing birth defects. But back then, there probably would have been far fewer genetic defects when separated by multiple generations. For all we know (which we don't) Cain could well have been 750 years old and his distantly related (by many generations) wife could've been 25 or 35 years old.
So where did all the people come from to build a city or tribal community? Do the math. If you assume parents could give birth every year or two, some births are bound to be twins, triplets, etc., and if all those kids could start having children at the age of 15, 16 or even 30 or so, and people lived for 800 or 900 years, that's a tremendous number of children that would be born over the span of nearly 1000 years, not to mention the generations of children that followed. Easily more than enough to be able to build a community or even a city.
Here we seem to have had a post from a person I'll call a "biblical creationist." They can be identified by the way they address issues. In this case, rather than look at the difficult questions, this person has picked an easy one. If everyone survives it can easily be mathematically calculated to develope a large population in several hundred years. The trouble is, this may have nothing to do with what actually happened.
The real question is why do they pick small and irrelevant subjects to talk about. I know a little about this because I used to practice it myself. What we were looking to do is justify a predetermined dogma by only picking simple not so relevant arguments we think we can win. If subjected to a real challenge, we could simply not respond or again move to another subject we thought we could get the upper hand in. We were simply too insecure to expose our weaknesses.
I will suggest their real purpose is to attempt to validate a dogma which refers to the bible as the " word of God." Their faith appears to be in the people who assembled the books of the bible in about 300AD. I think they find this useful because if they they can just hold on to this dogma, they do not have to expose themselves to learning about the man Jesus who is considered the word of God in the real Christian faith. It may seem harsh but we are all are better off exposed to reality.
I believe it is better to face the realities of the natural earth's long evolutionary history. I am convinced that through the word of God, Adam or "man" was brought about by a natural process as was Ishmael Abraham's first son through Hagar, natural in Hagar's case because she was still young enough to have a baby. What is Natural in Adam's case appears to be "evolution" in light of steadily mounting evidence.
The bible is quite clear that Adam was the first man....in one of the Gospels Jesus' ancestry is traced back to "Adam, son of God". Cain's wife was simply his one of his many sisters...human beings were created perfect and although Adam passed on sickness and death through his disobedience to God, they were still very much able to procreate without any of the inherent problems that gradually came and which we find today. Jesus is also called "the last Adam" as it was his perfect life (that Adam and Eve once had) that was given as a ransome for al people. I recommend Answers in Genisis....a website that will throw clear light on many questions along this line and others...
You're absolutely right!!! Nice to know there are still some people who believe the Word of God.
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