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.
lol... I'm not even an atheist and I recognize the shit is all made up. Do you actually believe it happened?? or is this just "everyone I don't like is ugly"
to be fuckin honest, if the guy in the picture said the top comment, that's probably one of the most sexy and agreeable things he's said since breakfast
Two things about that (overanalyzing your shower thought):
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.
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.
The only counterpoint i can see is that god is (honestly, at best WAS) infallible.
So god made 2 perfect humans who cannot inbreed as there are no defective genes.
At some point down the line, mutations came in and introduced possible genes that could combine/dominate to produce inbreeding.
If we are accepting the premise of 2 original humans, why not 2 perfect original humans.
If God made eve from adams rib, why not have them be genetically perfect.
But Im sure there is some science i am missing where a huge genome analysis has shown that "perfect" genes have never or could not ever exist.
And, tbh, this might as well be all science fiction based on a bunch of made up stories.
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.
This is probably a result of the Hebrew literary practice of narrating a story once in poetic language and then again in prose. So it's the same man and woman being created, just retold in a different style.
Current scholarly consensus is that the Geneses are actually two different accounts, one likely originating in ancient Israel and the other in ancient Judah. It’s why the two stories are so startlingly different when you read them side by side.
The Bible, and even the Torah, are compilations from stories that existed before these particular books were written down. However, the character of Lilith as "first wife of Adam" is probably not something left out of the Torah, but a much later invention.
Because Lilith is not actually mentioned in the Christian bible despite this wiki page's attestation she is mentioned in Isaiah. She only appears in rabbitic literature.
Lilith is also the catalyst to a lot of vampire myths.
I can't remember where I read this, but I remember reading that the inspiration for vampiric lore was rabies. Fear of water (vampires can't go over running water), fear of the sun, spread by biting...
Sort of but not really. Lilith isn't in the biblical version of Adam and Eve. There might be one mention of Lilith in and unrelated story in Isaiah, or it might be an old Hebrew word for screech owl.
The connection to Adam comes from folktales and fanfics written 1,000 years later. In terms of biblical tradition, she's closer to Steve than Adam.
The Bible does a fine job of demonizing women, starting with Eve. But Christians don't need a scriptural reason to demonize something they can't control.
Incest 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.
Nah genetic disorders aren't mutations, they're incorrect copies of original traits. I'm not a geneticist so don't quote me on this, but the reason incest causes problems has nothing to do with mutations as they rarely happen and everything to do with not having enough variation in your own genetics to cover when there's "data loss". Again, I'm not a scientist.
Anyone 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.
Adam passed up a creampie loving dick riding demon. They were sterile and she didn't have monthlies. Lilith wouldn't have had him eat the apple, she would have had him on pineapple and water until the sky fell as fire and it rained as ashes.
Lilith fucks back, Eve wanted to do it through a sheet. Adam was a damned fool.
Eve had two sons. Cain found a wife "somewhere". Cain was also marked so no one would kill him, but the three other people known to exist were his parents and dead brother.
Also Adam lived quite a long life. Like several human lifetimes
Then there is this fun titbit.
Adam withdrew from Eve for 130 years after their expulsion from Eden, and in this time both he and Eve had sex with demons, until at length they reunited and Eve gave birth to Seth
It might be a creative interpretation of Genesis 5:3, which I just read as Seth being born when Adam was 130 years old.
Perhaps if they didn't age in Eden, the concept of "living X years" wouldn't apply, so "when Adam had lived 130 years" could be interpreted to mean after they'd been booted out. But they hadn't had Cain and Abel before the Fall, so I don't really see how that interpretation could work, unless it's being merged with other narratives.
If 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.
And God got mad at Lilith for not being obedient and banished her so perhaps there were a series of Liliths.
I think Eve was taken from the rib because that was supposed to make her less independently minded than creating her
from the dust like Lilith.
Lilith was made from the dust of the Earth like Adam. The story is that this is the reason why she was independent minded and as a result
God made a new woman from the rib of man so that woman would be "from man" and more likely to be obedient to God and man. Not stating my opinion - that's just what I read.
Presumably because she wouldn't have been made from his rib like Eve. But OP conveniently ignores the fact that Lilith is way too badass to have been a part of most mainline flavors of Judaism and Christianity. So she isn't mentioned because most religious people don't accept her as a part of their canon. They should. It's a great story.
God 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
I 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."