Without Excuse: Apologetics Blog

If the human population only started out with two people, Adam and Eve, where did Cain get his wife? The most obvious answer is, Cain married his sister (gasp). Marrying blood relatives is a social taboo today, but there's no reason to believe it was a social taboo in our antediluvian past. The Bible only mentions three named children belonging to Adam and Eve: Cain, Able, and Seth, all male children. But Genesis 5:4 says that Adam had sons and daughters. Clearly then, Adam and Eve had other children that were not specifically mentioned. So, let's take a speculative journey of how many children Adam could have fathered. I used ChatGPT to help me work out the hypotheticals. We have a lot of unknown variables such as how long did Eve live? How long were her childbearing years? How long would she have waited to conceive between children? We can only guess here, so we're never going to know the exact numbers. For the sake of this discussion, let's make some assumptions. Let...

The purpose of this article, which I hope to become a series, is to examine bible stories that are difficult to understand or to accept in natural terms. Oftentimes bible stories, which are thought of as fanciful or myth, can often be explained in natural terms. This is not an attempt, however, to explain away every supernatural event in natural terms. There are legitimate miracles, things that can’t be explained naturally, though they appear to be rare. More often than not, God does work through the natural to achieve His goals. That, however, does not make them any less miraculous.   Here we will be examining Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. Lot’s wife’s name is not given in the bible, but in rabbinical literature she’s identified as “Irit” or “Idit”. As the story unfolds, Lot and his family are fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah before its sudden destruction. But Lot’s wife turns back and is suddenly turned into a pillar of salt: “ Then the LORD rained brimstone ...