If Adam is the first man of humanity, why was Cain running from others?

If Adam is the first man of humanity, why was Cain running from others?

If you want to help Myth Vision podcast grow, you can join our Patreon. There are different tiers as well as help out with PayPal. Thank you so much. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, share, and comment. Dr. Price, Derek Lambert has a question for you. Derek Lambert does, and here is the question we talked about, Adam. Great questions coming in from people, if I say so myself. And you know, this is a simple one, we’ve all heard it a million times when we were Christians, and of course now that we’re not. And those who are watching might be Christians too, but I have a few questions, and it’s kind of a two-for-one. The first one would be why, if Adam is the first man of mankind, and of course his son Cain comes on, does this what he does, Abel? And now he’s freaking out because there’s others who are after him. All right, I know you’re a critical scholar and stuff, so how do we deal with that? I’m supposed to be the first man, here we have Cain, right? That’s the first part of the question. You know where I’m going with that. And for those who are watching that think Adam is the first man, why is Cain running from people? Who are these people that he’s running from that exist? And then number two would be Enoch.

I know this is two separate kind of questions, but you mentioned Enosh being the first man, another narrative of Israel’s first man is Enoch, who walked perfectly and upright, that was taken, possibly something interesting here. What’s going on with him? I know the New Testament mentions this guy, faith, whatever, in Hebrews, talks about him having faith and God taking him. But first with Cain, if you don’t mind, how is Adam the first man of all mankind, his wife Eve the only wife he has, boom, all these children come? Is Cain running from his own people, descendants of Adam himself, or what’s going on with that? Well, Cain seems to have been a popular hero slash rogue. There must have been loads of stories about him that were not consistent with one another. And I was like a parallelism with Xena Warrior Princess. The premise of the show is that she was an ancient warrior and ancient women. And if you look at a number of episodes, you got to say, well, wait a minute, she is at the siege of Troy, she meets Goliath, she meets Galen the physician from the second century A.D., she sees Joseph and Mary headed for Bethlehem, she meets Julius Caesar. How old was this woman? How was she the wandering Jew? Did she live for century after century ago? They don’t mean to say that. They just figure, well, this isn’t a history lesson, let’s just take advantage of these interesting scenarios from the past.

And I think it was the same with Cain. These stories do not fit together. The thing with those who, whoever finds me will slay me, and he gives him the mark to say, oh, that certainly is an attempt to explain the Canaanite tribe who were allies of David, etc., who were pretty rough customers. And they had a tribal tattoo, and they were so rough, this is why you’re saying keep on walking, buddy. That, and if somebody was in a bar with one of these guys, oh yeah, hey pal, this guy’s a Canaanite, oh wow, excuse me, sir. That was the point of it, that, you know, God gave him this special mark to protect them, and surely that’s the point. And they were violent, hence the link with Cain. But that’s that, there must have been nomads too, because he’s not going to dwell in any place. Well, the thing, the variant on the Romulus and Remus thing, Cain founds a city after killing his brother and names it for his son. Same problem, building a city for whom? Well, this supposes that there was a well-populated earth, or region, at any rate. It doesn’t assume that Cain was the first one. And even the two that fit together pretty well, his killing Abel and his, oh boy, being the first man, even those don’t necessitate each other. The one is the accepting of the sacrifice of Abel, a slaughtered sheep, and the salad that Cain gives Jehovah, that’s just to tell you, according to one group, what you should offer God and what you shouldn’t.

And Cain stands for the Canaanites, who are agriculturalists, so vegetables. Abel stands for shepherds, namely Israel. And so these stories all had different meanings and were said in different times, and so there’s no contradiction. Exactly, I love to point this out. If it is supposed to be a continuous narrative, the Genesis writer is an idiot, and there’s no reason to think that. It’s pretty obvious what he’s doing is just kind of a collection of what Cain anecdotes survived in his day. And they weren’t consistent with each other, and he doesn’t actually say they are really. He just uses the narrative to connect them and include them all. I think you’re right, because even if you try to harmonize, because that’s I think what’s going on, it’s the method of harmonization. When you’re looking at Cain and there are others on earth now, you’re trying to go, well, there weren’t, because there’s only it was Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, where are all the other people? And there’s like this harmonization connecting of the narrative. And I think that what you’re saying makes the most sense. Because when you get to Lot, as you’ve described many times, Lot’s the last person on earth, or they think they’re the last. Yeah, what about Abraham? What about what about, yeah, his people? And it’s not like they’re so far you can’t find them, they’re right across the valley. Couldn’t he have gone or repopulated right there? Yes. So if you want to be literalistic, it’s because originally it was a world flood story. It was part of another version of the flood story, as there weren’t anybody, any, anyone else. The daughters of Lot are like Deucalion and Pyrrha in the Greek flood story. Everyone is killed except the two of them, and they repopulate the earth. And so, yeah, it makes sense once you connect the dots in this way.

The reconnaissance mission of the angels at Sodom and Gomorrah, that was part of a Greek story too. Zeus and Hermes are going around seeing how wicked people really are, and if they’re bad enough, they’re all going to get it, and they do. Well, if you put that together with Lot’s daughters, you got a consistent parallel with the Greek myth, and that’s clearly what happened. Russell, come here. Shout out to our boy. Now, Enoch, hmm, sinless, 365 years old. Hint, weird number there, my friends. And then he’s taken. He’s taken. So, the death range from Adam to Moses, and yet supposedly there’s a sin concept in Romans that brings us up. I know that’s out of context of ultimately hear what’s going on. But there’s this harmonization, like in the systematic approach that I’m trying to point out. Is that how is he perfect? How is he sinless and being taken, and death supposedly reigning here? Oh, well, because he didn’t sin. If he was perfect and righteous, he was the exception to the rule, and so he needn’t die, and he didn’t. But that doesn’t actually make that connection, because of course Genesis doesn’t say what Romans says hundreds of years later, originally. And you touched on this, the 365 Enoch is yet another sun god, and there are several of them in the Old Testament, Esau, Elijah, and Samson, Moses, and so on and so on. Well, the big clue is that his lifespan of 365 years, that’s the solar calendar. And just need to look at the several Enoch books written centuries later, they’re in the pseudepigrapha, that make it clear that he was associated with that calendar. Big debating matter back then, which lunar solar, and the going up into the heavens and walking with God means that he is the sun who rises to the zenith, and who walks with God around the firmament as the sun travels.

It’s very much like Apollo. Because think of, how does Elijah ascend into heaven aboard a fiery chariot? That’s Apollo. Oh, okay, I’m thinking the sun, but yeah, he was the sun. And then his, Apollo’s son Phaethon steals the keys to the car, and he tries to make the solar circuit, but he can’t control the horses, and down he goes. Interesting. So maybe on that note, we’ll close out with this on Hebrews 11. He’s talking about, now faith is the assertion of things hoped for, or you know, the old school method, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. This is trying to explain prior to the law, I think is what Hebrews is trying to say, prior to the Mosaic covenant. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible. By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain. Interesting that he says that here when we know it was the substance of his. Yeah, this is all kind of refried in Hebrew and Christian. I’m just like, you know, this is funny because he mentions Enoch, right? So we’re like, okay, and this guy, the way he’s describing it, I don’t know, I can’t read the author’s brain, but it sounds like he takes these characters literally. Well, I think the Genesis writers did too. They just didn’t erase the, they didn’t tie up the loose ends that showed an earlier origin that meant something else. Hmm, okay. So he says, he says, through which he obtained the testimony that he was righteous, God testifying about his gifts. And through faith, though he is dead, he still speaks. By faith Enoch was taken up so that he would not see death, and he was not found because God took him up. For he obtained the witness that before his being taken up, he was pleasing to God, and without faith it is impossible to please him. And I think that’s all he says about Enoch there. Yet then he goes into Abraham and such. This is similar to Elijah except he had never sinned. This guy is claimed to have never sinned, correct? He’s just taken up according to the narrative, but well, it doesn’t actually say he never sinned, but it says about Job that he was perfectly righteous.

Does that mean he never had an unkind word at somebody when he was feeling rotten? I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know what they would have considered a sin, but it certainly means that, you know, people say, look at that guy, I really admire him, he let his light shine, no pun intended with the solar thing, and people thank God for him. Death, I mean, he didn’t die though. He was, did Elijah die though? No, he was taken up in the fiery chariot, and that’s why you got this truckload of rabbinic anecdotes and folklore about Elijah returning to the earth periodically to help people out. And a lot of people thought the same with Moses, since Deuteronomy says God buried him and nobody knows where. That kind of suggests, and you find this in both Philo and Josephus, that he didn’t die. God brought him into occultation, as the Muslims would later say about the hidden Imams. He took him up to heaven, and so people didn’t see him anymore. But there are various rabbinic tales about God and Moses conversing in heaven.

And that’s weird because that reminds me of the amount of, the amount of transfiguration. Yep, exactly. Wow. And I don’t know if I’m putting too many, if anyone who’s watching this should feel what you and me are doing right here, this is, I love the Bible more than I ever did now. You know, Elijah and Moses are on the mountain talking because they’re available, they’re still alive. Interesting, this is fascinating. So I’ve never thought about this like this. If you haven’t, comment down below and tell me what you think. This is great, Dr. Bob. Your treasure. Anyway, I’ll shut up, please continue. In the book of Revelation, it says that the two witnesses are Moses and Elijah. But in a whole bunch of other ancient Christian apocalypses, they have the two witnesses, and they’re always Moses and Enoch. And that implies at least that a variant version that they had or their own calculation suggested that at least that they got the point that these guys had never died. Because it’s more clear with Enoch than with Moses, but it’s the same point, they were still available. Now, they died, but they were raised from the dead in Revelation, but it all works out. Because the apocalyptic comes from the scribes, and they were the kind of guys that would make these connections, so it really fits.