Most Christians are familiar with the story of Cain and Abel - the first children of Adam and Eve - in Chapter 4 of the Book of Genesis. Most think nothing of these subsequent verses:
[Verses 16-17] Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch.
Has it ever crossed your mind to ask "Where did these inhabitants of Nod come from?" Isn't it curious that there is no mention of this in the Bible? Back in chapter 3 of this same book, we find [verse 20] "The man called his wife's name Eve, because she was the mother of all the living." One might wonder where the people of Nod came from, and if they came from Adam and Eve, why doesn't Scripture make this clear?
I have another theory. Have you ever heard of "Y-Chromosome Adam" or "Mitochondrial Eve"? Check out these articles in Wikipedia...
Here's my theory: Adam and Eve initially inhabited a universe that didn't suffer from the Law of Entropy, often referred to as the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. If they were obedient to God and never gave into the serpent's temptation to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (see chapter 2, verses 16 & 17), there is no telling what sort of civilization might have developed from them.
As it is, their ambition to become "like God" (promised by the serpent) moved them to check it out. They were, after all, human. That same ambition moves people who work on the development of artificial intelligence, even though there is - perhaps - a possibility that the intelligence that comes from this "experiment" will eventually exceed that of any human. There is (most probably) no way to predict what such an artificial intelligence will think of its creators. In theory, this could alter human history so much that no human being survives in a condition of independent thought and volition.
There is, of course, no way to know precisely what happened to Adam and Eve. When they arrived in this universe, I imagine they already encountered members of the species Homo Sapiens - our physical ancestors. Indeed, it seems likely enough that Adam and Eve were not moved physically from the Garden of Eden to this universe. Rather, their souls were moved here - each into a body like they had before, but bodies with limited life spans. It is, of course, also possible that they were moved body and soul into this universe which is subject to the Law of Entropy.
What made them different from the Homo Sapiens who were already here is this: Adam and Eve had souls. They were capable of free will - a free will that was impaired by their sin. That free will made them aware in a way that the other Homo Sapiens were not. After a few hundred years, they and their descendants (who also had souls) eliminated their competition (who did not have souls). To put this another way, their thinking process was greater than the competition which acted solely by instinct and past history.
The souls of Adam and Eve gave them the power to reflect at the highest level - in particular to reflect on the morality of their actions. This made the development of human civilization far more likely, giving them and their descendants a decisive advantage over other Homo Sapiens - thinking primates who acted solely out of instinct informed by experience.
What I find most curious about Y-Chromosome-Adam and Mitochondrial-Eve is the estimates of when they existed. Consider the following:
- From the article on Y-Chromosome Adam we find: "As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans."
- From the article on Mitochondrial-Eve we find: "In terms of mitochondrial haplogroups, the mt-MRCA is situated at the divergence of macro-haplogroup L into L0 and L1–6. As of 2013, estimates on the age of this split ranged at around 155,000 years ago,[note 3] consistent with a date later than the speciation of Homo sapiens but earlier than the recent out-of-Africa dispersal.[4][1][5]"
Obviously this puts a huge dent in any simplistic version of how current humanity got started - including my own speculations. By the way, the so-called "out-of-Africa dispersal" refers to the earliest signs of civilization - for example cave drawings and artifacts like tools or weapons. Even chimpanzees have been known to use rocks to beat on things, but there is no known case (as far as I know) of a chimp (or other non-human primate) fashioning a tool or a weapon out of metal or any combination of materials (such as a stick and a stone).
Also, one should note the following from the article on Y-Chromosome Adam:
- These are estimates, subject to change when further information/evidence enters the picture, such as "While estimates as of 2014 suggested the possibility that the two individuals may well have been roughly contemporaneous,[7] the discovery of the archaic Y-haplogroup has pushed back the estimated age of the Y-MRCA beyond the most likely age of the mt-MRCA. As of 2015, estimates of the age of the Y-MRCA range around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, roughly consistent with the emergence of anatomically modern humans.[2]"
- It is, of course, mere speculation at this point that, some time in the future, a similar adjustment will be made to the time frame estimate for Mitochondrial Eve.
These questions, and my speculations on the answers, should make it obvious that the Book of Genesis was never intended to give a scientific account of how humanity - Homo Sapiens with souls - came to be. Still, it is most curious that there was no effort to explain how people from "the land of Nod" came to be. If nothing else, I suspect it was meant to be something to ponder in some future age of humanity.
The matter of the land of Nod is only one of a few challenges to a scientist's efforts to make sense of the Book of Genesis as a work inspired by the God who created the universe. That problem continues to intrigue me, ergo I have labeled this article "Part 1".
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