Question: If everyone came from adam and eve, doesn't that make everyone somehow brothers and sisters? and hence when we marry, is it considered a form of incest? if no, why so? Profile: Not provided.
You are correct. We are all brothers and sisters in God’s family. God created Adam, and then Eve (Genesis 1:26-27; 3:20). From these ancestors all mankind was propagated.
What we consider incest today, we first learned from the Bible in Leviticus 18:6-18. Until then, this practice was common, given that all people descended from Adam and Eve. The Bible says that Sara was Abraham’s half-sister (Genesis 12:13, 20:12), and in an effort to continue to populate the earth, even Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father (Genesis 19:30-38).
However, by the time Moses wrote the book of Leviticus (about 1445 B.C.), God had prescribed laws against improper sexual relations, among which were listed what we now commonly consider incestuous relationships. (In addition to Leviticus 18:6-18, see also Leviticus 20:11,12,17,19-21, and also Deuteronomy 22:30, 27:20-23; Ezekiel 22:11; and 1 Corinthians 5:1).
While the Bible is silent about God’s permitting what He later labeled as sinful and incestuous, Biblical scholars have several theories. One is that Adam and Eve had no genetic defects, which may be presumed because the Bible makes no such claim or assertion otherwise, so it was safe for them to intermarry at that time. However, over time, again for reasons not explicitly stated or explained in the Bible, our genetic code may have become polluted, and intermarriage among family members with such defects produced greater and more severe defects.
Further, after The Flood, there were only eight individuals on Earth: Noah, his wife, and their three sons and daughters-in-law. Some scholars also believe that these people, many generations after Adam and Eve and their descendants were responding dutifully to God’s charge to populate the Earth (Genesis 1:28), may have become sufficiently genetically different that they essentially represented what we understand today as the different races. Again, Noah and The Flood occurred long before the proscriptions against incest.
In any case, God is silent about many of these questions, although we know from the Bible that there is truly only one race: the human race. Your question is excellent and thoughtful, one which can be more fully understood with additional Bible reading and study.
Used by permission from GotQuestions.org.
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