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In the Beginning, Incest Was the Best

In the Beginning, Incest Was the Best

Last updated on: August 20, 2026 at 2:12 pm by Stuart Delony

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In the Beginning, Incest Was the Best 2026-08-20T14:12:17-04:00 Stuart Delony

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Weathered bucket labeled “Theological Spackle” beside a cracked plaster wall covered in failed patch jobs.

DALL-E

There are certain questions biblical literalism would probably prefer you stop asking somewhere around third grade. Who did Cain marry?

It sounds childish until you actually think about it. Adam and Eve are the first humans. They have Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel. Seth shows up later. And yet Cain somehow acquires a wife, starts a family, and eventually gets involved in city planning.

So where did Mrs. Cain come from?

If Adam and Eve were literally the first two human beings and every person on Earth descended from them, there really aren’t that many possibilities. Cain married his sister. Possibly a niece, depending on how generous you want to be with the timeline. Either way, welcome to the first family.

When Incest Was Apparently Fine

The standard creationist answer doesn’t deny this. It explains why sibling sex was reasonable back then.

You see, Adam and Eve were created perfect. Their DNA hadn’t accumulated all the nasty mutations ours has today. Therefore their children could marry one another without producing the sort of family reunion that eventually requires its own genetics textbook.

Problem solved, apparently.

Except Genesis never says any of this. There is no verse explaining that Adam possessed a pristine super-genome containing enough carefully distributed genetic diversity to populate the planet. There is no footnote saying early incest was medically safe. There is no parenthetical explaining that harmful mutations would slowly accumulate until God eventually had to tell everybody to stop sleeping with their sisters.

That’s all supplemental material.

Biblical literalists like to say they’re simply taking Scripture at its word. Apparently Scripture’s word comes with a lot of deleted scenes.

Theological Logic Spackle

Biblical literalism thinks constantly. It has to.

Every new problem creates another explanation. Cain needs a wife, so there were unnamed daughters. But incest — their genes were perfect. But how do two people contain enough variation to produce all of humanity? God designed them that way.

Eventually you realize you’re not reading Genesis anymore. You’re watching somebody apply theological spackle to the places where Genesis stops lining up with the world outside Genesis.

Patch. Sand. Paint. Nothing to see here.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

If something in science appears compatible with the Bible, that’s evidence the Bible is scientifically accurate. If something contradicts the Bible, science simply hasn’t caught up yet. If there’s no evidence for the proposed explanation, God could have done it supernaturally. If the supernatural explanation cannot be tested, that’s because God’s ways are higher than ours.

Heads, I win. Tails, you lose.

Take Adam’s legendary 930-year lifespan. Why did Adam live so long? Because humans were genetically healthier closer to Creation. How do we know humans were genetically healthier? Because Adam lived 930 years. Why don’t humans live that long anymore? Because our genetics have deteriorated. Evidence for that? Well, look how much shorter our lives are.

It’s a perfect circle. You can run around it forever and never accidentally encounter an exit.

The Fall Gets a Lab Coat

There’s even a creationist term for part of this: genetic entropy.

The basic idea is that human genetics began in pristine condition and have been deteriorating ever since. Mutations accumulate. Bodies become less perfect. Lifespans shrink. Humanity drifts farther from the biological glory days of Eden.

Actual biology is messier. DNA changes. Mutations happen. Some are harmful. Many don’t matter much. Some turn out useful depending on the environment. Selection, drift, and population size keep shuffling the deck, and there’s no baseline to fall away from.

Evolution has no arc. Nothing in it points back toward a pristine Adam or forward toward a better one.

There isn’t a little meter inside your genome that reads EDEN: 14% REMAINING.

But that model is incredibly convenient for biblical literalism because it makes biology follow the same plot as the theology.

Everything Has Been Going Downhill Since Eden

The larger Christian story already has a direction. God creates everything good. Humans screw it up. Cain kills Abel. Human wickedness increases. God floods the world. Humans screw it up again. Babel. Empires. Wars. Sin. Disease. Death. Eventually everything gets so terrible that Jesus has to come back and clean up the mess.

It’s not difficult to see why genetic decline feels at home there. The theology already says creation is deteriorating, so of course the biology should deteriorate too.

Adam gets the luxury DNA. We get Ozempic.

The Fall explains everything now. Why bodies age, why disease exists, why animals kill each other, why earthquakes happen, why people don’t live for nine centuries, and apparently why marrying your sister is no longer medically advisable. Sin ruined everything, including the family tree.

Christianity’s Favorite Slippery Slope

Fundamentalist Christianity loves the slippery slope. Allow this one thing and civilization will collapse. Change that one moral standard and eventually nothing will mean anything. Accept gay marriage and somehow, several rhetorical moves later, somebody will be marrying a toaster.

But the entire worldview is built around one. Eden sits at the top. Revelation waits at the bottom. Everything between them is humanity gradually sliding away from God’s original design.

Things used to be better. Then corruption entered. The corruption keeps spreading. Eventually things become so terrible that only divine intervention can fix them.

That’s not merely an argument fundamentalists make about culture. It’s the architecture of the story.

Which means every new catastrophe can become evidence. War? Signs of the times. Disease? Signs of the times. Political chaos? Signs of the times. People leaving church? Definitely signs of the times. Taylor Swift releases another album? Give somebody five minutes on YouTube.

A worldview that predicts deterioration is hard to disprove in a world where bad things occasionally happen.

The First Family Reunion Must Have Been Awkward

Which brings us back to Cain.

The funniest part is that the incest itself really isn’t the problem. Ancient religious stories contain plenty of strange genealogies, cosmic events, miraculous births, talking animals, giant people, gods, monsters, impossible lifespans, and family arrangements that would make Ancestry.com look more like Pornhub.

Read Genesis as ancient theological literature and Cain’s unnamed wife isn’t especially interesting. The story simply isn’t trying to give us a complete census of early humanity.

But insist that Genesis is a scientifically precise account of how the human species began, and suddenly Mrs. Cain needs a medical chart.

Now Adam and Eve need engineered genetic diversity. Their children need mutation-free reproductive systems. Incest needs to be temporarily safe. Human DNA needs to deteriorate. Nine-hundred-year lifespans need biological explanations. Noah’s family needs to repopulate the planet all over again. And somehow all of this has to fit inside a few thousand years.

That’s an impressive amount of biology to pull from a book that never mentions DNA.

So yes. In the beginning, incest was the best.

Then the mutations kicked in.

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About Stuart Delony

I’m Stuart Delony, a former pastor who walked out of the church but couldn’t shake the ways of Jesus. These days, I host Snarky Faith—a podcast and platform that wrestles with faith, culture, and meaning from the fringe. I’m not here to fix Christianity. I’m here to name what’s broken, find what’s still worth keeping, and hold space for the questions that don’t have clean answers. If you’ve been burned, disillusioned, or just done with the noise—welcome. You’re in good company. You can read more about the author here.

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