Abraham Married His Half-Sister
Question: How come Abraham married his half-sister when Leviticus 18:9 specifically states “Do not have sexual relations with your sister, either your father’s daughter or your mother’s daughter, whether she was born in the same home or elsewhere.”?
Answer: Eve was created from the rib of Adam, which is a very close gene pool. “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23).
We don’t know where Seth got his wife from but it could have been his sister. It would be many years before Moses would tell people not to intermarry with close relatives.
We know these days that the two strands of DNA from both parents help correct any flaws in each other so the baby to be born will not have any genetic errors accentuated. Where one strand may have a defective gene the other strand fills in for it. If close relatives marry then the offspring may not have those flaws covered because both strands of the DNA may have the same flaw.
So Adam had a wife made from one of his ribs. “The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man” (Gen 2:22).
Usually when two people get married they both have a different genetic make-up, and their children are a 50 percent mixture of both parents, but Adam and Eve had the same genes because Eve was taken directly from Adam.
If Seth did marry his sister and subsequent members of the line to Christ married closely too, then what God placed into Adam and Eve was being preserved in the line to Christ, but being lost from Cain’s line. If Cain and his posterity were marrying outside of Adam and Eve’s family, the genes that gave them long life were being diluted and shorter lives would be the consequence.
Noah seems to have married a woman with a regular lifespan or mixed lifespan parentage. People in the adamic family tended to have children after 100 years of age before the Flood. Noah didn’t have his three sons until he was 500, but that was unusually late even for Adam’s line.
From Noah’s children onwards the lifespans decreased. Before the Flood the Lord had said he was grieved and stated, “My Spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years” (Gen 6:3). This relates back to when God first breathed into Adam and his offspring, the benefits were great, with long-life being one of the advantages. But, as Jesus said, “From everyone who has been given much, much will be required.” Adam’s offspring were not coming up with the righteous goods that God required.
So although there were a few people in the line who walked with God, the Lord was cutting the life span to 13 percent of what it had been. God may have let this happen naturally by some intermarrying with women who were not from Adam’s line. Noah’s son Shem lived noticeably shorter than his fathers, he lived 600 years but Noah lived to be 950. so, perhaps Noah married a woman who had mixed parentage, if the angels married anyone of the beautiful daughters of Adam’s line “that they chose” (Gen 6:2) then it’s possible that there would be few left for Noah to marry.
Sarah still contained some of the life-phase elongation, which is why we see her good looks maintained in her older years; though she was over 60 she could still attract the attention of both Pharaoh and Abimelech. But some alteration of the genetic line seems to have occurred.
Jacob was almost certainly perplexed and concerned about the possibility of marriage with the people of Shechem. He didn’t want any trouble with the local people but he was getting railroaded into intermarriage, which he knew wasn’t right.
Simeon and Levi slaughtered all the men of Shechem—The town of Shechem may not have been a well-populated place, but was home to a number of families who had suddenly lost their menfolk.
Then the rest of Jacob’s sons took the women and children. So we see some possible intermarriage there. Hence, by the time Moses came he gave his specific laws about close marriage.
By the time we get to David around 1010 BC, he lived to be 70 years old, so although he was in the line to Christ the overall life span had become normal.
Adam, the man, was formed, or as we may put it these days “formatted” was for the specific purpose of God’s Son being born of human offspring. And the Lord did watch over that line: “When the Most High divided the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the nations according to the number of the angels of God. And his people Jacob became the portion of the Lord, Israel was the line of his inheritance” (Deut 32:8–9 LXX).
Adam needed to be configured accordingly to accommodate the seed that would eventually be born 76 generations later. Adam and Eve were a starting point. The story would lead all the way to Jesus being born of a human woman. a baby, which couldn’t be born blind, or infirmed, or with learning disabilities or any other disability, he had a job to do, he had to walk many miles, and speak to multitudes of people, he needed God’s breath in him to speak such powerfully sharp words that they would slice through disingenuous hypocrisy. As a boy of twelve he astounded the learned men in the Temple. This child was destined to help us, lead us, shepherd us, heal us, and to save us. He was the seed of the woman, born and grown into an adult. “Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect” (1 Pet 1:19).
Eve, Adam’s wife, was made from Adam and contained the same DNA as Adam, apart from the two X chromosomes.
God took time and effort to make sure that the line that led to Christ’s birth was kept true to Adam’s line. Intermarrying was not allowed (Deut 7:3), along with quite a host of other instructions concerning sexual behaviour.
In the early days of Christ’s genetic line, say the first 20 generations from Adam to Abraham, marrying close was not a problem because of the original parents’ genes being the same, so inherited flaws in the DNA would be few.
Abraham would have told Isaac that he shouldn’t get married to a local girl; Yahweh had specifically said that Isaac was the seed-bearer: "in Isaac shall thy seed be called" (Gen 21:12). So Abraham gave the job of finding a wife for Isaac to his trusted servant. But this job was too important to over-emphasize so he made the servant take an oath promising he would only get a wife from Abraham's relatives.
Each cell in the body contains 23 pairs of chromosomes. one chromosome from each pair is inherited from your mother and one is inherited from your father. So when Adam and Eve had children they would inherit Adam and Eve’s composition; they generated offspring like themselves—they lived long, were strong and the women were fair.
Adam couldn’t marry any woman who happened to be around the area because they would have different DNA affecting life-span: “for Adam no suitable helper was found” (Gen 2:20).
God had planted something into Adam and consequently into Eve because she inherited Adam’s flesh and bone. God planted a seed in Adam and when God talks to the serpent we get to hear that the woman has a seed inside her: “I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed” (Gen 3:15).
Seeds can stay in the ground for a long while before they germinate, many years sometimes. God breathed into Adam, then years later the Holy Spirit, when the time had fully come (Gal 4:4), overshadowed Mary and the seed that had been planted in Adam began to grow in Mary’s womb and God sent his only begotten Son into the world.
We plant seeds in the ground, and man was taken from the ground. God took a heavenly seed and planted it in the earthly Adam. The noun Adam is also the masculine form of the word adamah which means “ground” or “earth.” it also means “man” who was taken from the earth. God breathed into Adam planting a seed, he then overshadowed Mary and the seed was fertilized. Those are the two strands of the divine DNA from heaven that began to replicate in a young girl who gave birth in Bethlehem.
The process had a beginning and it had an end. Adam was an ordinary man who had something placed into him by God, Mary was an ordinary woman who had the seed she was carrying fertilized by God. Heaven was touching earth. Jesus, who is called “The life” (John 14:6), passes that life on to us all.
“To all who received him . . . he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).
“These are the generations of heaven and earth when they were created” (Gen 2:4).
God represents heaven and Adam represents the earth. The generating line of Adam and Eve is important because it leads to Christ. Satan would try to extinguish this line through direct murder or mixing it with other DNA, or even mixing it with “other flesh.” This attack on the line of generation continues right up to just before Christ was born, when King Herod commands that all the male boys up to the age of two in the vicinity of Bethlehem should be killed.