Bestiality Among Adam and Eve’s Immediate Descendants

Question

Dr. Craig, I recently finished In Quest of the Historical Adam and found the argument for locating Adam and Eve within Homo heidelbergensis both fascinating and persuasive. However, I still have one unresolved question regarding the interbreeding issue. In Chapter 13, you suggest that Adam and Eve were the first true humans, endowed with rational souls and the image of God, while other contemporaneous hominins were biologically similar but not yet human in the same sense. Suppose Cain's wife came from the land of Nod and was one of these non-Adamic hominins. How should we understand the status of their children? Would Cain's wife be considered fully human, or not? If she was not human in the image-bearing sense, would God create a rational soul for each child born from such a union? Do you envision God subsequently endowing additional hominins with rational souls after the Fall, or does humanity spread exclusively through Adamic descent? More generally, how does the image of God propagate through a population if interbreeding occurs between Adam's descendants and nonhuman hominins? This seems to be one of the most important implications of the model, and I would be grateful for any clarification. Thank you for your work. Mike

Accepted Answer

Thanks for your encouraging comments, Mike! With respect to your question, we can only speculate as to whether Adam and Eve’s children engaged in sexual relations with non-human hominins. Such relations would amount to bestiality, and while such behavior would be sinful, it would not be surprising in a post-fall world. It seems to me that if humans did engage in sexual intercourse with non-human hominins and somehow managed to have progeny as a result of such unions, the offspring would not themselves be human, any more than if someone were to have sexual intercourse with or artificially inseminate a non-human primate. In that case, the progeny would not have a rational soul and so not be created in the image of God. It seems to me that we are biblically committed to Adam and Eve as the universal progenitors of all mankind. Therefore, only their human descendants have rational souls. God is not creating additional people with rational souls subsequent to the fall. Rather every human being is, as you put it, of Adamic descent. If interbreeding were to occur between Adam’s descendants and non-human hominins, then any progeny produced would not bear God’s image. How the rational soul is produced from one human generation to the next remains, however, an open and controversial question.

#1004 Bestiality Among Adam and Eve’s Immediate Descendants

Dr. craig’s response