Everyone makes incest jokes about Adam and Eve and their children but they never mention that there was another woman named Lilith (Adam's first wife) who would have added variance to the gene pool.
Everyone makes incest jokes about Adam and Eve and their children but they never mention that there was another woman named Lilith (Adam's first wife) who would have added variance to the gene pool.
Two things about that (overanalyzing your shower thought):
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Geneticists have what they call the "50/500 rule," which basically means that you need at least 50 people to avoid inbreeding, and at least 500 to avoid genetic drift. So while three people are 50% better than two, it's not going to come close to avoiding inbreeding.
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If you read up on Lilith, including your Wikipedia link, you'll see her name only comes up once in the Bible, and it's not as Adam's wife. All the stuff about her comes from other things, including Babylonian and Mesopotamian writings, and lots of folklore from the middle ages. And at that, she's sometimes Adam's first wife, with different explanations about what happened to her that really in her not coming back to the garden, or she's a demon. So there's not much likelihood that she's contributing to the gene pool.
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Because Lilith isn't mentioned in all versions of the Adam and Eve story, and certainly isn't mentioned in Genesis. There's plenty of versions of the story with lots of different characters, and plenty of interpretations of what happens, but in the Canonical Christian Bible, there are at least two events where the entire human race is only directly described as being one single family - Adam and Eve, and Noah's flood.
69Incest doesn't inherently cause genetic disorders, it just increases your chance of being born with recessive genetic disorders. Most of those disorders are mutations, and if the Garden of Eden is so perfect there probably aren't genetic disorders to start out with, meaning incest is fine from a genetic perspective. All the genetic disorders would be mutations later down the line. Maybe they're punishment for the original sin or something, to fit it into the themes of the story.
32Anyone feel like this is just the story of some douche who divorced his awesome wife to find a subservient slave wife and over thousands of years its become part of a religion?
“Oh that Lilith we don't talk about her she was a demon” he tells his grandson and 200 years after the story people interpret her as a literal demon, and just gets wackier and wackier as time goes on. Kinda feel like you could explain all that Abrahamic lore that way.
23Can't have an ancient story without an evil woman you can blame everything on.
22Thing is, Lilith didn't pop up in texts apart from post-Jesus, such as talmudic texts. (although a Lilith was mentioned in Isaiah, it could have been a demon of some sort) so she'd only really be regarded by modern day Judaism, not by Christians.
12If you're grasping at cousins as being the sole separator you know you have a problem. But also there's a lot of conflicting information, such as Cain settling in the city of Nod east of Eden which suggests I guess that there were people outside of Eden already. Don't take anything too literally, and jokes are jokes.
12It's estimated that it would take about 160 people to perpetuate the species.
7I also hear she's a super sexy top.
6God the book of Genesis is so fucking dumb, I can't believe people base their entire worldview around it. Like there's people who adhere to all forms of ridiculous Christian morality, some less so, some more so, but ON TOP OF THAT also believing that fuckin Abraham wasn't in active psychosis and was a reliable source, or that Jesus is the actual son of God, what the fuck....
The dumbest part of religion is the answers. The absolute coolest part is "YOU KNOW NOTHING OF THE ABSOLUTE, BOW DOWN IN IGNORANCE MORTAL" like hell yea i can get down with being a dumbass more than listening to someone who doesn't know he's a dumbass
4I don't. There are far more interesting fictional character to talk about.
3I mean, in the KJV at least there's adam and eve, then cain and abel. then just cain, and then the book just says "Cain went to the land of Nod, east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife." So there were definitely other people around and canonically we're not inbred, it's just that we all have a common inheritance from Cain, and therefore Eve, and therefore we all inherited original sin.
It makes a lot more sense when you remember that YHWH was originally a bronze age thunder and warrior god who was not the one and only god like it says in christian canon. He was a god amongst many gods, and only ever asserted himself as the one and only god of the tribes of Judea (who were, at the time, polytheistic). It's the difference between your girlfriend saying you're not allowed to date anyone else and your girlfriend saying she's literally the only girl that has ever existed and will ever exist. It's not until after the Jews lost their war with the Babylonians and Solomon's temple was destroyed that we start seeing YHWH spoken of as the creator and the only God. Early versions of the creation story even have YHWH using the first person plural when making declarations, implying that the audience was other gods which would have been easily accepted at the time in which the stories emerged but are absolute anathema to Christians and Jews today. From memory, after Adam and Eve eat the apple YHWH says something like "They have eaten of the tree of knowledge, and now know of good and evil. If they eat from the tree of life they will become like us."
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