Cain’s Wife

Cain’s Wife

Then God said:

― Let us make human beings in our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the livestock, all the earth, and all the creatures that crawl upon the earth.

27 So God created human beings in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them.

28 God blessed them and said to them:

― Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the creatures that crawl upon the earth.

29 Then God said:

― Behold, I give you every plant that grows throughout the earth and produces seeds, and every tree that bears fruit with seeds. These shall be food for you. 30 Furthermore, to all the animals of the earth, to all the birds of the air, and to all the creatures that crawl upon the earth—that is, to everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.

And so it was.

31 God saw all that he had made, and he perceived that it was very good. Evening passed, and morning came; "...this was the sixth day."

Exegesis of the Book of Genesis allows us to semantically construct the understanding that Adam and Eve were neither the only ones nor the first; rather, they were a specific, representative experiment within the Garden of Eden—much as Abraham was the patriarch of a particular lineage under a specific and exclusive religion. Nothing more than that; there were no exorbitant privileges, for nothing existed beyond material life. There was no conception of the existence of such constructs as:

a) the soul;

b) hell;

c) heaven or paradise;

d) life after death.

Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político