The Untold Truth Of Adam And Eve's Daughters
The Abrahamic religions –- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam –- all have a relatively similar version of the Adam and Eve story (in Islam, Eve is named "Hawwa"). Even if you weren't raised in any of these religions, or any religion at all, you probably know the broad strokes of the story: God makes Adam, God makes Eve out of a bit of Adam, Satan tempts them to eat from a tree God told them not to, God finds out they disobeyed him, they get thrown out of the Garden of Eden, Eve gives birth to Cain and Abel, Cain kills Abel.
For most people, that might be where their knowledge of the story ends. And indeed, if you are only using the Bible or Torah as your source, there isn't that much detail you're missing out on, especially once Adam and Eve are out in the real world and raising their sons. But that lack of details and the crumbs of information that have no explanation, have meant that others tried to fill in the gaps in the story.
If you paid really good attention in Sunday school, you might remember Adam and Eve had another son after Abel was murdered, named Seth. The King James Bible says, "And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters" (via Genesis 5:4). Wait... daughters? Since when did Adam have daughters? Let's look at the untold truth of Adam and Eve's daughters.
Texts that mention Adam and Eve's daughters
While some might make it seem like the Bible is a single, infallible document, it actually took a long time for the early Christian church to decide which of the stories knocking around it wanted to include. Like, over 400 years. In that time, lots of freshly minted Christians wrote books that didn't make it into the final cut.
One of these books was called "The Book of the Daughters of Adam." It's not known when it was written, but we do know that Pope Gelasius included it on a list of texts he wanted everyone to know were not church-approved in 494, according to The Pocket Magazine. This means it must have been around before then, probably before the official Bible was codified, and it was well-known enough to merit mention. Why suppress something no one was aware of? Even if it isn't what Christians believe today, it was what at least some Christians believed at the time, and it apparently gave Adam's daughters names and life stories.
Nor was it 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 Many Faces of Christ: The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels." Books that touch on Adam and Eve's daughters include the Jewish book of Jubilees and "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan," among others. Clearly, people wanted to know about these women.
Adam and Eve's first daughter
Unfortunately, "The Books of the Daughters of Adam" is lost to history, but based on the name you'd assume it would have filled in lots of blanks about the first couple's female kids. However, "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" survived and was included in "The Forgotten Books of Eden" in 1926 (via Sacred Texts).
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. After eight days, the text says, Adam and Eve finally got around to naming the kids. The boy, just like in the Bible, was named Cain. The girl was named Luluwa (alternately, according to the Book of Jubilees, via the Chicago Tribune, her name was Awan), or "beautiful," because she was even prettier than Eve. Cain, on the other hand, means "hater." The text explains that even when the twins were in the womb, Cain hated his sister. (It's unclear how Adam and Eve knew this.)
The second daughter
With a whole world to populate, Adam and Eve couldn't stop at just two children. So after the twins Cain and Luluwa finished breastfeeding, "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" (via Sacred Texts) says that "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."
Just like how many younger children find there are a lot fewer photos of them than their older siblings, 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 not a hint of whether or not there was any inter-womb conflict between the two. While the movements of the family and the timing and meaning behind offerings to God in honor of their first twins are highly detailed, the second twins get a single sentence on these topics.
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," at least until after Abel's murder, when she gives birth to Seth as a kind of replacement. At that point, we learn "neither was any more offspring born of them; but only those five, Cain, Luluwa, Abel, Aklia, and Seth alone." This is a direct contradiction to what is in the Bible, but more on that later.
Where the daughters found husbands
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, as far as the reader knows, are Adam, Eve, and Cain (Abel having been murdered). So unless he married his mom, where did this wife come from? It's such a seemingly thorny theological question, it even came up at the Scopes trial in 1925, according to Answers in Genesis.
But if Cain had a sister or sisters, then he had options. You're probably thinking, "Oh gross, Cain married his sister!?" Don't worry, it's not as bad as you think. Obviously, he couldn't marry his twin, Lulawa. That would be disgusting. But if he married Abel's twin, Aklia, that's ... fine?
Luluwa didn't sit on the shelf though. She married Abel, pre-him being killed. In fact, "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" (via Sacred Texts) says that Luluwa was the cause of Abel's murder, although that's uncalled for. 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, way hotter than her sister. (Bible Odyssey says that other texts trace the disagreement to Abel and Aklia having a triplet sister, and the fight was over who would get a second wife.)
The first murder
"The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" (via Sacred Texts) says Cain, living up to his "hater" name, was always a jerk to Abel growing up. So when Satan appeared and told him his younger brother, who he disliked so much, was going to get to marry the sister who was, by process of elimination, the hottest woman on Earth at the time, it sent Cain over the edge.
Fortunately, Satan had just the solution for him: "Now, therefore, I counsel thee, when they do that, to kill thy brother; then thy sister will be left for thee; and his sister will be cast away." All Cain had to do was eliminate the only other male competition on the planet, and he'd get to choose his hot sister as his wife. The text says Cain tried to kill Abel a bunch, although it doesn't explain how or why he failed, although it might have something to do with the fact that, as we learn a bit later, they weren't even 15 and 12 years old, respectively.
Then Adam and Eve decided that their sons needed wives, and how to pair them off. When Cain finds out it's true he has to marry Aklia, he curses his mom. After the brothers make offerings to God and Abel's is accepted and Cain's rejected, just like in the official Bible, Cain takes Abel for a stroll and then kills him.
Luluwa marries her murderous brother
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: "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." (Genesis 4:17) That's it. That is the first and last time she is mentioned, after being conjured seemingly out of thin air, and not even given a name.
"The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" (via Sacred Texts) goes into much more detail. Adam and Eve were super not happy about one son killing the other, but at least as far as Cain was concerned it worked out, because he got to marry his twin sister: "As for Cain, when the mourning for his brother was ended, he took his sister Luluwa and married her, without leave from his father and mother; for they could not keep him from her, by reason of their heavy heart."
The land of Nod isn't mentioned here, only that Cain took Luluwa away, to live near the place he killed Abel, which is just not acceptable. That's like straight out of a horror movie. And since there was still a whole planet to populate, it got worse for Luluwa: "His sister bore him children, who in their turn began to multiply by degrees until they filled that place."
Luluwa in the land of Nod
So after Luluwa is forced to follow her brother-husband in exile, what happened to her? All we know from the Bible is the information given in Genesis 4:17, that Cain's wife had a son named Enoch and Cain built a city –- the first ever city -– and named it after his son.
But again, other sources have expanded on these stories from the official Bible in an almost fan-fiction way. 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 the city of Enoch, and from that we can infer what Luluwa's life would have been like.
The short answer: terrible. Cain had learned nothing from the punishment he got after killing his brother. He sounds like the worst husband/brother ever, and Luluwa would have been trapped in a gilded cage. Cain did well for himself in Enoch. He accumulated "much wealth," but he got it by violence, robbery, and pillaging. He became "a great leader of men," but led them "into wicked courses." He invented weights, measures, and property boundaries, which sounds cool, but it meant people went from being innocent and chill to practicing "cunning craftiness." So Luluwa would have been married to the most important guy in the city, with lots of money, but all of it gotten with evil. Josephus doesn't write if she got any sort of happy ending.
What happened to Aklia?
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 — all on his own this time — and they named him Seth.
"The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" (via Sacred Texts) says that when Seth was 9, Satan came and tempted him, but the boy wasn't swayed and went home and told his parents. This is when Adam decided his prepubescent son needed a wife to keep him in line and make sure if Satan tempted Seth again, he would continue to hold strong. This seems like a lot of pressure to put on a wife, making sure her husband doesn't give in to Satan, but sure. Things were obviously very different back then.
The only wife available to Seth was, of course, Abel's twin, Aklia. Spare a thought for this girl, who was apparently so undesirable her brother murdered her twin so he didn't have to marry her. She's left in a cave with her parents. Now no one bothers to ask her if she wants to marry this new brother. The text does give us Seth's thoughts on the matchmaking, though: "Seth, however, did not wish to marry; but in obedience to his father and mother, he said not a word." No word on if that was because he also didn't think Aklia was hot enough.
Adam and Eve's many other daughters
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 or the Torah, most people haven't heard of them. So if there were two, there could be more unknown kids, right? Like, lots more.
Weirdly, the Bible actually does say something about this, although you might not have heard it either. According to Genesis 5:4, "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 say that Adam went on to have daughters (assumedly with Eve, although that's not mentioned). In 800 years, you can have a lot of kids. Theoretically, Adam and Eve could have any number of daughters, according to accepted scripture. (This is where "The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan" goes against something the Bible says directly, rather than just embellishing information, since it states Adam and Eve only had five kids, and that Seth was the last.)
All About Creation says that Jewish tradition records not just how many more kids Adam and Eve had, but their ratio as well. Apparently, they had a further 56 children: 33 sons and 23 daughters. This makes sense, since God told them to "be fruitful and multiply." Five kids just wouldn't cut it.
Doesn't the Bible say incest is bad?
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 a no-no. While the Ten Commandments are the most famous, there are actually lots more commandments that God gave to Moses. And when it comes to incest, God doesn't leave any room for doubt with Leviticus 18:6: "No one is to approach any close relative to have sexual relations. I am the Lord." He 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 18:9: "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."
Just in case you thought He stuttered, God is back in Leviticus 20, repeating a variety of unacceptable incestuous pairings, including, in verse 17: "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 Biblical contradiction? Well, Answers in Genesis says that Cain and Luluwa didn't break God's commandment because He hadn't made it yet. God tells Moses no sleeping with your sister, which Biblical math puts some 2,500 years after Cain and Luluwa had babies. Accordingly, in their time, they weren't doing anything wrong. Technically.
What about genetic abnormalities?
Okay, but even if Luluwa and Cain (and Seth and Aklia) technically didn't make God mad with their incest since He hadn't decided that He didn't approve of it yet, surely there would have been issue besides that. Science has proven that incest, especially between close relatives -– let alone actual twins –- is more likely to lead to serious genetic abnormalities in their offspring. (Scientists could explain this by gesturing frantically at Joffrey Baratheon.) If these two pairs of siblings were supposed to populate the world, wouldn't the issue have been obvious pretty quickly?
Ah, but Answers in Genesis lives up to its name and has an answer for that problem too. You see, when God created Adam and Eve, they were absolutely perfect. They had a pristine genetic code. Everything in the Garden of Eden was perfect, so it was only after God kicked them out for disobeying him that things could start going downhill. There simply hadn't been enough time or enough generations for the genetic issues modern-day incest presents to emerge. And by the time they did, God told Moses to tell everyone to stop boning their relatives.
We don't know much about the children these brother-sister couples had. Genesis 4:17 mentions that Cain's wife (Luluwa) gave birth to Enoch. Seth's wife (Aklia) isn't mentioned in the Bible, but Genesis 5:6-7 says that Seth had a son named Enos, followed by an unknown number of nameless "sons and daughters." Hopefully they were fine.