Everyone knows about Cain and Abel, but what about Adam and Eve's 54 other kids?
The story of Adam and Eve's other children is an often-overlooked one, and when it comes
to their daughters, things get pretty weird.
The Bible has a reputation as a single, infallible document, but it actually took a long time
for the early Christian church to decide which stories to include in this sacred text.
Over the course of more than 400 years, lots of freshly minted Christians wrote books that
didn't make the final cut.
One of them is called "The Book of the Daughters of Adam."
In 494 A.D., Pope Gelasius included it on a list of texts that he wanted everyone to
know were not church-approved.
The book reportedly gave Adam's daughters names and life stories -- and it wasn't the
only text to do so.
Literature about Adam and his family had been a popular subject for hundreds of years, as
explained by the book The Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and
Influence of the Lost Gospels.
Other texts that touch upon Adam and Eve's daughters include the Jewish book of Jubilees
and "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan," among others.
Everyone knows about their sons Cain and Abel, but clearly, people wanted to know a little
something about these women.
"Women, women, women, women, women, women, women."
Unfortunately, "The Books of the Daughters of Adam" is lost to history.
But one text that has survived is "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan," which was included
in The Forgotten Books of Eden in 1926.
This book is unambiguous about when Adam and Eve's first daughter shows up.
After they've been thrown out of Eden and Eve gets pregnant, she goes into labor, just
like in the Book of Genesis.
But in the Bible she only gives birth to a son, while "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with
Satan" says,
"And God looked at His maid-servant Eve, and delivered her, and she brought forth her first-born
son, and with him a daughter."
So according to this unofficial version, the first live birth on Earth was twins, and one
of them was a girl.
According to the text, after eight days Adam and Eve finally got around to naming the kids.
The boy was named Cain, just like in the Bible, while the girl was named Luluwa.
With an entire world to populate, Adam and Eve couldn't stop at just two children.
According to "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan," after the twins Cain and Luluwa
finished breastfeeding,
"Eve again conceived, and when her days were accomplished she brought forth another son
and daughter; and they named the son Abel, and the daughter Aklia [AH-klee-uh]."
The text doesn't seem as interested in these two twins, at least surrounding their birth.
There's no explanation for what either of their names mean or why they were given them,
and there's no hint about whether there was any inter-womb conflict.
An interesting note from the end of the chapter on Abel and Aklia's birth is that it reports,
"After the birth of these, Eve ceased from childbearing."
This is true at least until after Abel's murder, when she gives birth to her son Seth as kind
of areplacement.
At that point, we learn that there weren't any more offspring, although this is a direct
contradiction to what's in the Bible.
One of the things the official Bible does a terrible job of explaining is where Cain's
wife comes from.
He just suddenly has one, even though to that point the only people in the whole world are
Cain and his parents.
So unless he married his mom, where did this wife come from?
If Cain had sisters, then he at least had options.
You might be grossed out at the prospect of him marrying his sister, but at least he didn't
marry his twin Luluwa.
For her part, Luluwa didn't remain unspoken for.
She married Abel before he was killed.
In fact, "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" even claims that Luluwa was the cause
of Abel's murder.
Cain, who hated her even as an embryo, got mad when Satan told him that Adam and Eve
were going to have Luluwa marry Abel, while Cain would be stuck with Aklia.
Cain wasn't happy about this, because Luluwa was apparently much more attractive than her
sister.
Other texts trace the disagreement to Abel and Aklia having a triplet sister, and claim
the fight was over who would get a second wife.
According to "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan," Cain was always a jerk to Abel
while they were growing up.
So when Satan appeared and told him that his younger brother was going to get to marry
the sister, who was essentially the most beautiful woman on Earth at the time, it sent Cain over
the edge.
Fortunately, Satan had just the solution for him.
All Cain had to do was eliminate the only other male competition on the planet, and
he'd get to choose his sister as his wife.
The text says that Cain tried to kill Abel multiple times.
It doesn't explain how or why he failed, although it might have something to do with the fact
that at the time, they were barely even teenagers.
Maybe killing your own brother is more of a grown man's game.
Adam and Eve eventually decided that their sons needed wives.
When Cain found out it was true that he had to marry Aklia, he cursed his mother.
After the brothers made offerings to God and Abel's was accepted and Cain's rejected, just
like in the official Bible, Cain took Abel for a stroll and then killed him.
The Bible tells us that after Cain killed Abel, he was banished to wander in the land
of Nod.
This is when an unexplained, unnamed wife appears, as described by Genesis chapter 4,
verse 17:
"And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he built a city, and called
the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch."
That's the first and last time that Cain's wife is mentioned, after being conjured seemingly
out of thin air and not even given a name.
"The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" goes into much more detail.
Adam and Eve weren't particularly happy about one son killing the other, but at least as
far as Cain was concerned, it worked out, as he got to marry his twin sister Luluwa.
The land of Nod isn't mentioned here, only that Cain took Luluwa away to live near the
place he killed Abel.
To modern sensibilities, that sounds like a premise straight out of a horror movie.
And since there was still a whole planet to populate, it got worse for Luluwa, as the
text explains,
"His sister bore him children, who in their turn began to multiply by degrees until they
filled that place."
The Book of Genesis mentions that Cain and his wife had a son named Enoch and that Cain
built a city and named it after his son.
But other sources have expanded on these stories, almost as a sort of biblical fan fiction.
In this case, it was the great Jewish historian Josephus, who lived in the Middle East in
the first century A.D.
His work Antiquities of the Jews adds some details about what Cain got up to in Enoch,
and from that we can infer what Luluwa's life would've been like.
The short answer: it was terrible.
Cain had learned nothing from his punishment for killing his brother.
He did well for himself in Enoch, as he accumulated great wealth, but he got it by means of violence,
robbery, and pillaging.
He became a leader of men, but he led them into wickedness.
He invents weights, measures, and property boundaries, which may sound innocent enough,
though it did lead to people practicing so-called "cunning craftiness."
So Luluwa would've been married to the most important guy in the city, with lots of money,
but all of it procured through evil means.
With Abel dead and Cain banished, this left no more brothers for Aklia to marry.
After Adam and Eve took seven years to deal with their grief, they decided to have another
kid.
It was a boy, and they named him Seth.
According to "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan," when Seth was 9, Satan appeared
and tempted him, but Seth wasn't swayed and he went home and told his parents.
This is when Adam decided that his prepubescent son needed a wife to keep him in line and
make sure that if Satan tempted Seth again, he would continue to hold strong.
This seems like a lot of pressure to put on a wife, but things were obviously very different
back then.
The only wife available to Seth was, of course, Aklia.
Let's spare a thought for this girl, who was apparently so undesirable that her brother
murdered her twin so that he didn't have to marry her, and now she's stuck in a cave with
her parents.
Now nobody bothers to ask her if she wants to marry this new brother.
The text does at least give us Seth's thoughts about the matchmaking, by noting:
"Seth, however, did not wish to marry; but in obedience to his father and mother, he
said not a word."
While the Bible doesn't mention where Cain's wife came from, the apocryphal additions to
the story do make sense, even if they kind of have to jump through hoops to make everything
fit.
Since Luluwa and Aklia aren't mentioned in the official Bible, most people haven't heard
of them.
This could lead to the question: were there even more children?
Weirdly, the Bible actually does say something about this.
According to Genesis chapter 5, verse 4:
"After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters."
That's right, while the official version of the Bible doesn't mention Luluwa or Aklia,
it does indeed say that Adam went on to have daughters.
In 800 years, you can have a lot of kids.
Thus, according to accepted scripture, Adam and Eve could theoretically have any number
of daughters.
This is where "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" goes against something the Bible
says directly, since it states that Adam and Eve only had five kids, and that Seth was
the last.
Jewish tradition records just how many kids Adam and Eve had, as there were apparently
a total of 56 children: 33 sons and 23 daughters.
This makes sense, as God did tell them to "be fruitful and multiply."
Five kids just wouldn't cut it.
Since the Bible is an anthology of books written by different people, it contradicts itself
a lot.
But one of the things it's clear about very early on is that incest is not okay.
You probably know about the Ten Commandments, but there are actually many more commandments
that God gave to Moses.
"The Lord Jehovah has given unto you these fifteen — Ten!
Ten commandments!"
When it comes to incest, God doesn't leave any room for doubt.
According to Leviticus chapter 18, verse 6:
"No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations.
I am the Lord."
God then lists 11 different variations of incest and why each one specifically is unacceptable.
The key one in Luluwa and Aklia's situations is Leviticus chapter 18, verse 9:
"Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father's daughter or your mother's
daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere."
This is essentially repeated in Leviticus chapter 20, verse 17, when God declares,
"If a man marries his sister, the daughter of either his father or his mother, and they
have sexual relations, it is a disgrace."
So is this just another case of biblical contradiction?
From one perspective, Cain and Luluwa didn't break God's commandment because it hadn't
yet been decreed.
So at the time, they technically weren't doing anything wrong.
"It's a bit creepy."
"Very creepy."
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