Wednesday, 04/29/09, 8:48 AM EST USA
Genesis 4:1-26
Who are all these people after Cain and before all this "begatting" was going on? It's quite simple really. In the Bible God refers to entire families by their family name. Thus, even Adam and Eve could mean "men" and "women". This style of reference is used when God tells us about someone, but uses their family name. It's a short form of saying "the house of ...". (What reminded me was a reference to all the shoguns, after 1600, in my Japanese history book - it refers to them as "Tokugawa" - the name of the progenitor of that family. So there is a contemporary reference for this style of writing.