MYSTERY OF CREATION

The Mystery of Creation

God created the universe and the earth and made man in His own image. But some critics, without understanding the power and authority of God and the complexity of creation, have contradictory and divergent views about creation. Their question is: “If Adam and Eve were the first humans, if Cain and Abel were their children and if Cain killed Abel where did any other people come from? Where did Cain get his wife?

The Cain narrative in the Bible is divided into two parts- the murder of Abel and exile. After the first murder in history, God orders that Cain should become ‘a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth.’ Cain then wanders to the land of Nod, ‘on the east of Eden.’ He later builds the world’s first city, and names it Enoch after his son. A city could be built if there were enough people to reside in it. So critics ask: where did these people come from?

The Old Testament creation narrative is divided into two accounts by scholars—‘priestly’ account and ‘Jahwistic’ tradition. The first account centers on God’s creation of the universe and culminates in the creation of man, and the second account focuses on man’s social role in a divinely arranged environment. Most scholars agree that the two accounts are complementary.

A careful analysis of the creation process will reveal that the two creation accounts were not complementary, but there were two distinct creations—a General Creation and a Specific Creation. General creation was by the word of God. In the General Creation, light and darkness, water, heavens, earth, plants, the sun, the moon and the stars, fish, birds, animals, and finally human beings, male and female were created in the image of God by God’s command out of nothing. There are a few repetitive “refrains” in Genesis, like… “And God said…” and this emphatically affirms that what happened on each day of creation was “at God’s command.”

“Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our own image, after our likeness, to have dominion over the fish in the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, all wild animals on land, and everything that creeps on the earth.’

God blessed them and said to them, “ Be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and every living thing that moved on the earth.’  The command of God to fill the earth and to be fruitful by begetting children resulted in the spread of the human race all over the world. Like the trees, birds, animals, fish and other creatures that were created simultaneously all over the world at God’s command, different races of mankind also sprang up all over the world simultaneously to occupy the vast unoccupied, vacant areas of planet earth. This accounts for the different physical features of man in different continents. There arose at God’s command physically distinct groups of peoples with differences in skin color, shape of head,  type of hair , size  of physique and  ethnic groups with their own sense of cultural identity  in different continents of the earth. By God's command of "fill the earth," astrophysical and cosmological conditions were created in the atmosphere which would allow  life to emerge and survive in the universe. This atmosphere created by God has led to the development of life in various species and systems.Thus the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed. On the sixth day God brought to an end all the work He had been doing; on the seventh day, having finished   all His work, God blessed the day and made it holy, because it was the day He finished all His work of creation. This brings to an end the general creation at God’s command. .

Specific Creation

It was only after the creation of the heavens and earth that God planted a garden in Eden, away from the east, to put Adam He had formed. So it is quite evident that the Garden of Eden was a spot selected by God, and it was in a separate zone ‘away from the east.’ Unlike other human beings (male and female) of the General Creation who were created at God’s command, God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living creature. Adam’s creation is unique, since God Himself took special care in creating him, unlike the collective creation of nameless human beings created at God’s command and spread over the entire space of the world. Even in the creation of trees, wild animals and birds in the Garden of Eden, there is a conspicuous difference. God made trees grow up from the ground, and from the earth He formed all wild animals and all the birds of the air. Instead of creating trees, birds and animals by a mere command as God did in the General Creation,  there is a planned, distinctive creation in the Garden of Eden. Trees made to grow up from the ground by God were pleasing to the eye and good for food. It was to this Garden of Eden planted by God that He brought Adam after creating him from the dust taken from the ground outside the Garden of Eden. God specially created Adam and Eve with His own hands. Unlike other women in the General Creation, Eve was exceptionally created from the rib that God had taken out of Adam. God chose Adam and Eve as unique persons, for He knew that they would be the ancestors of Israel’s patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and later of the Savior Himself. So it was a separate creation, the creation of a chosen race, and the creation of the nation of Israel. This is quite evident from the genealogy found in Genesis chapter 5.  The peoples of the General Creation can be classified under the category of the Gentiles.

God was so friendly with Adam that He brought to him the cattle, birds and wild animals which God formed out of the ground in the garden to see what he would call them, and he gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every wild animal. In the General Creation humans were created at God’s command only after completing the creation of plants, living things in water, birds in the air, domestic and wild animals. But in the Garden of Eden, only after the creation of Adam that God made all kinds of trees to grow out of the ground. In the General Creation water teemed with living creatures. But in the Garden of Eden there was the noticeable absence of living creatures in the water, although there were four rivers in the garden.

.It is not shown in the Bible the number of years Adam lived alone in the Garden of Eden. It is also not known the number of years it took for Adam to name the animals and birds in the garden. It is also not revealed at what age Adam got Eve as his wife. The Garden of Eden was a place of beauty, bounty and idyllic happiness. It is not recorded how many years Adam and Eve lived together in the exotic garden luxuriating in its charm and savoring its fruits.

Garden of Eden

The Bible says that Adam lived for 930 years. It was only after Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden that Cain and Abel were born to them. When Cain killed Abel they were fairly grown up adults, for the Bible says that Cain was a tiller of the ground and Abel was a keeper of sheep. The Bible says that Adam was 130 years old when Seth was born. We can infer from these accounts that Adam probably would have been 100 years old when he and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden. The Bible says that God banished Adam from the Garden of Eden “to till the ground from which he had been taken.” So Adam was brought back to the soil, ground, or dust of his origin and thereby became a part of the rest of mankind.

There are many theories as to the location of the Garden of Eden. The most commonly held view is that it was somewhere in Mesopotamia. This view is based on the reference to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Garden of Eden. But the other rivers the Pishon and Gihon have not yet been located. Probably the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia would have been named after the rivers that Adam saw in the Garden of Eden. . Spencer Wells speculates that the Garden of Eden was somewhere on the coast of East Africa. Sometimes I think the Garden of Eden would have been a satellite planet circling the earth, and later pulled deeper into space beyond the reach of man, for the Bible says that God placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. The Bible says: “And the Lord God said,” The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” Man has already reached the moon.  I think God would have taken the Garden of Eden very far into space beyond the reach of man. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed massive galaxy clusters in the distant Universe. Astronomers have recently discovered seven more moons circling Jupiter using world’s two largest digital cameras at the Subaru and Canada-France-Hawaii telescopes. Moreover, only Adam and Eve were sent out of the Garden of Eden, and nothing is known about the trees, birds and animals created by God in the garden. There were also the tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. The garden is elsewhere called the ‘garden of God.’(Ezekiel 28:13) or ‘garden of the Lord’ (Isaiah 51:3). Some of the verses in Ezekiel describe the human king of Tyre. But in reality they are indirect references to Satan himself, for it is stated that he was in the Garden of Eden, he was also anointed as a guardian of cherub and had access to the holy mountain of God before he was thrown to the earth.

In the Revelation also there is a reference to the Holy City “coming down out of heaven from God.” The holy city, descending from heaven, will be suspended over the earth and filled with such divine radiance that it has’ no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it’. Since the Garden of Eden has not been discovered until now, the idea that it was a small planet circling the earth at the time of creation cannot be brushed aside as foolish and ridiculous. Frequent references to “the east of Eden” in the Bible indicate that the planet would have probably stood as a landmark in those days like the Pole Star in the sky.     

Cain’s Wife

When God created men and women in His own image, He blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” So from the time of creation itself these men and women lived together and gave birth to children in different parts of the world. But in the case of Adam and Eve, it was only after they were sent out of the Garden of Eden that, according to the Bible, “Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain.” Probably God did not want them to multiply when they were in the Garden of Eden.

God drove Cain from the place where he killed his brother Abel, and cursed him to be a restless wanderer. Then Cain tells God: “I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” The fact that Cain was afraid of being killed by others indicates that there were other human beings on earth apart from Adam, Eve and Cain. God also put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. It is a clear indication that there were people in other places. The land of Nod probably had many inhabitants, and there would have not have been any difficulty for Cain to choose a wife suitable to his age. Some scholars suggest that Cain probably married a sister or perhaps a niece or grandniece from among Adam and Eve’s many offspring. But there is no reference to such a marriage in the Bible. Moreover, God had driven Cain from his birthplace because of the gruesome murder of Abel, and there was no possibility for him to return to the same place. The land of Nod was also having a fairly developed civilization. The Bible tells about one Lamech’s family in that region. Lamech, a descendant of Cain, was a poet and his short poem in the Bible is one of the first poems in the recorded history of mankind. His sons were also strikingly creative and intelligent. Jabal specialized in making tents and raising livestock. His brother, Jubal, was the originator of stringed instruments and woodwinds, and he is known as the “ father of all who play harp and flute.”Tubal-Cain, another brother, was an inventor who took technology to a new dimension by forging all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. The Bible also says that Cain built a city, and named it after his son, Enoch. This is a further proof that there were many people in the land of Nod, and the increase in population necessitated the building of another city.  So the answer to the question of the critics: “Where did Cain get his wife?” –definitely from the land of Nod.  

                                                                                    --Prof.Dr.A.Yeshuratnam.

                                                                                     

                                                                  .                         

                                                                                               

.

.