So, there's some quandries about this timeframe of history. Nothing big, just places where people will contest the truth of scripture because of these things.
Who was Cain's wife?
His sister. Well, it could have been a neice, but likely his sister. There wasn't a problem with that. God didn't give the prohibitions against incest until the Mosaic law. Remember that the genetics at the very beginning were perfect, or very nearly so.
What does it mean in Genesis 6:3 when God says that man's days shall be 120 years?
There's two possibilities. One is that instead of living 950 years, man would only live 120 years. The only problem with this is that once God said this, the lifespans of man were cut to around 400 years, then to around 200 years. Moses lived 120 years, Joseph lived 110 years, Jacob 147 years. But it would be difficult to say that is what God means, when there is little evidence of it.
The other is that God said that man had 120 years left until judgment. It was a warning. It is interesting to note, however, that Shem, Ham, and Japheth (Noah's sons) were not born yet when God made that pronouncement.
Who was Noah's wife?
Jewish tradition says that she was Naamah, the daughter of Lamech, in the line of Cain. I find it to be an interesting event when a simple fact is recorded that is out of the ordinary, but scripture gives no more information about that fact. Such is this situation when Genesis 4:22 tells us that "the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah." Why is she recorded? Women are recorded in Genesis only when they form an integral part of the stories they are in. This Naamah is never mentioned again.
How many people might have died in the flood?
A lot.
To speculate about how many, here's an excercise I did. I was forced to use Excel since my calculator doesn't have enough spaces.
First, I already said that Adam and Eve had 33 sons and 23 daughters according to Jewish tradition. To be honest, I wanted to deal with nice round numbers. So my Excel table allowed for 30 children...15 sons and 15 daughters. Easier numbers to deal with.
That meant that Seth's generation is made up of 30 people and that made 15 families. Now there's 32 people alive on earth...Adam, Eve, and 30 children.
The next generation, that of Enosh is 15 families of 30 children each, or 450 people. That makes 225 families, and the total population is the previous 32 people plus 450 more, which gives us 482 people. I set up my lovely Excel formulas to calculate the rest of the table. I even set it up to subtract the generations when they died.
So how many people might have been on earth at the time of the flood? Are you sitting down? 82,378,627,232. That's 82 BILLION people. Right now, the world population is estimated at 7,065,393,482. Oops, that just went up... 7,065,393,556.
Of course, that doesn't take into consideration the utter wickedness that scripture tells us was universal. I'm sure murder reduced those figures a bit.
But you cannot tell me that our planet has more people than it has ever had in all history...and you cannot convince me of massive overpopulation. But that is another exercise I did a while back. Something about giving every family of 5 a city lot with a 1600 square foot house and putting schools and shopping centers in every ... well, that's another tale. Suffice it to say, it was eye-opening.
Our last, and probably the most controversial, issue of this timeframe of history comes next.
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