Were there other human beings contemporary with Adam & Eve?

Were there other human beings contemporary with Adam & Eve?

There are at least four biblical hints that there were other human beings in existence at the time of Adam and Eve:

• Eve is told “I will greatly increase your labor pains” (Genesis 3:16).
The word “increase” implies one of two options: Either God had already *planned* for there to be pain in childbirth (remember that at this point Eve hadn’t had any children) but now God was going to increase it (hardly seems likely?), or else Eve was not the first to have had children (hence the increase, because others hadn’t had the pain before).

• Cain is afraid he would be killed (Genesis 4:14-15).
Who would Cain be afraid of if the only other people on earth are his parents, and perhaps a younger sibling or two that are not mentioned in the Bible? And the marking of Cain so that no-one would kill him hardly sounds necessary if it was only his family. The context of thought in these verse only makes sense if there are other people on the earth.

• Cain finds a wife and builds a city (Genesis 4:17).
There are two concepts to consider here:
Firstly, who was Cain’s wife? “God’s moral compass does not change” (1). In other words, God’s moral values would be constant. Leviticus is quite clear that relations with one’s sister (not to mention other close relatives) are expressly forbidden and wicked (Lev 18:6-18); are a disgrace (Lev 20:17); and a cause of His anger against the Canaanites - (Lev 20:23).

To imply this was Cain’s sister not only inserts a concept into the text that is not there, because the scriptures specifically do NOT say he took his sister, but it also requires God’s moral compass to do a 180-degree turn-around.
Secondly, who lived in his city? Surely more than Cain, his wife and son Enoch? The text appears to assume the existence of a large number of other people in the area.

• After Adam and Eve’s first grandchild was born, “people began to worship Yahweh” (Genesis 4:26). If the only human beings were Adam and Eve, their children and grandchildren, it makes no sense to say that, “people BEGAN to worship Yahweh”.

Abel had previously been faithful, and it appears that Adam and Eve remained faithful after they left Eden (see Genesis 4:25). So at least some of the family were already worshipping God. The verse only really makes sense if these “people” are those who were not part of the family of Adam and Eve.

So throughout the early chapters of Genesis, there are many hints of a wider human population that existed at the time.


Most of what is known of the Sabians comes from ibn Wahshiyya's The Nabatean Agriculture, translated in 904 CE from Syriac sources. The text discusses beliefs attributed to the Sabians, in particular that they were people who lived in Pre-Adamite times,