Where did Cain get his wife?

This is one of the oldest questions readers ask about Genesis. Genesis 4:17 simply says, "And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch," without telling us who she was. The key clue comes in Genesis 5:4, which says that after Seth was born Adam lived eight hundred more years, "and he begat sons and daughters." Genesis also calls Eve "the mother of all living" (Genesis 3:20), and Paul says God "hath made of one blood all nations of men" (Acts 17:26), pointing to all people descending from the first couple. On that reading, Cain must have married a sister, or perhaps a niece if time had passed, and ancient Jewish writings such as the Book of Jubilees say just that, even giving his sister-wife a name, Awan. Some readers are troubled by this, but the laws forbidding marriage between close relatives were given much later through Moses (Leviticus 18:9), and even Abraham was married to his half-sister Sarah (Genesis 20:12). Many Christian writers also suggest that the harms later associated with close-relative marriage would have been far less significant in the very first generations. A common misunderstanding is that Cain found his wife in the land of Nod. The text says he "dwelt in the land of Nod" (Genesis 4:16), but it does not say she came from there, and she may well have gone with him. A minority of interpreters have suggested that other people existed outside Adam's family, but most find that hard to square with Genesis 3:20.

Key Passages