Is Satan the Father of Cain?

Multiple narratives are featured on the internet with a common question, "Is Satan the father of Cain?". It has produced a series of commentaries and debates on this particular subject throughout cyberspace. Most scholars agree the theory of Satan siring Cain stems from extra-canonical texts, such as the Zohar and the Book of Enoch.

According to Hank Hanegraaff (aka: Bible Answer Man), his theory of Satan being Cain's father extends to his research of William Branham on the subject:

“Here is what really happened in the Garden of Eden. The Word says that Eve was beguiled by the serpent. She was actually seduced by the serpent….He was so close to being human that his seed could, and did mingle with that of the woman and cause her to conceive. When this happened, God cursed the serpent.” — William Branham

Branham (1909–65), a proponent of Oneness theology, taught the so-called serpent seed interpretation of Genesis 3, with adherents of this view often citing Genesis 3:15 in support of their position: “And I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (ESV).

The crux of the serpent seed view is that Eve and Satan engaged in sexual relations. Consequently, sin is viewed as sexual in nature, as opposed to the traditional interpretation of the fall as sin being disobedience to God. In addition to Branham, other serpent seed interpretations of Genesis 3:15 are found in the teachings of the Christian Identity movement, as well as, for instance, in the teachings of Arnold Murray (1929–2014) of Shepherd’s Chapel and also the Unification Church.

The Identity movement’s serpent seed interpretation clearly leads to racism, as one expert explains: “As early as the mid-1940s, Identity preachers were building a new doctrine: the Serpent Seed theory. It is a fairly simple and straightforward belief: Jews are the physical descendants of a sexual union between ‘Mother Eve’ and ‘the serpent’ (Gen. 3). The serpent is variously identified as either Satan, or a demonic representative of Satan. As such, Jews are literally ‘Children of the Devil.’ Most Identity believers claim the serpent was a physical manifestation of Satan himself.” Furthermore, Identity teachers add that Cain is the offspring of a union of the serpent and Eve, while Abel is said to be the result of the union of Adam and Eve.

Even if the serpent seed doctrine does not overtly lead to racism, the interpretation remains problematic and unwarranted.

For further reading, please visit the link: Did Eve Have Sex With Satan (Bible Answer Man)

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Another similar view comes from the website, Sefaria: A Living Library of Jewish Texts. This particular text comes from the Midrash: The Legend of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg (1909) - Volume 1:3.

THE BIRTH OF CAIN - There were ten generations from Adam to Noah, to show how long-suffering is the Lord, for all the generations provoked Him unto wrath, until He brought the deluge upon them. By reason of their impiousness God changed His plan of calling one thousand generations into being between the creation of the world and the revelation of the law at Mount Sinai; nine hundred and seventy-four He suppressed before the flood. Wickedness came into the world with the first being born of woman, Cain, the oldest son of Adam. When God bestowed Paradise upon the first pair of mankind, He warned them particularly against carnal intercourse with each other. But after the fall of Eve, Satan, in the guise of the serpent, approached her, and the fruit of their union was Cain, the ancestor of all the impious generations that were rebellious toward God, and rose up against Him. 

Cain's descent from Satan, who is the angel Samael, was revealed in his seraphic appearance. At his birth, the exclamation was wrung from Eve, "I have gotten a man through an angel of the Lord." Adam was not in the company of Eve during the time of her pregnancy with Cain. After she had succumbed a second time to the temptations of Satan, and permitted herself to be interrupted in her penance, she left her husband and journeyed westward, because she feared her presence might continue to bring him misery. Adam remained in the east. When the days of Eve to be delivered were fulfilled, and she began to feel the pangs of travailing, she prayed to God for help. But He hearkened not unto her supplications. "Who will carry the report to my lord Adam?" she asked herself. "Ye luminaries in the sky, I beg you, tell it to my master Adam when ye return to the east!" In that self same hour, Adam cried out: "The lamentation of Eve has pierced to my ear! Mayhap the serpent has again assaulted her," and he hastened to his wife. Finding her in grievous pain, he besought God in her behalf, and twelve angels appeared, together with two heavenly powers. All these took up their post to right of her and to left of her, while Michael, also standing on her right side, passed his hand over her, from her face downward to her breast, and said to her, "Be thou blessed, Eve, for the sake of Adam. Because of his solicitations and his prayers I was sent to grant thee our assistance. Make ready to give birth to thy child!" Immediately her son was born, a radiant figure. A little while and the babe stood upon his feet, ran off, and returned holding in his hands a stalk of straw, which he gave to his mother. For this reason he was named Cain, the Hebrew word for stalk of straw.

For further reading, please visit the link:  Legends of the Jews (3:1)

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While there are those that contend Satan is the father of Cain, biblical scholar, Dr. Michael Heiser passionately disagrees. In his article, Was Cain Fathered by the Devil? No, Wait — Extraterrestrials (2008), he put forth his theory in the following excerpt: 

Here’s the truth about this particular web gem. I’ll unpack each point briefly.

1. Genesis 4:1 was NOT found among the textual remains of the Hebrew Bible among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is important to realize that much of the biblical material from Qumran is partial and fragmentary. Only the book of Isaiah can be said to be virtually complete (99% of it was found at Qumran). There are portions and scraps of every other OT book except Esther. Genesis 4:1, the account of Can’s birth, is not in the Dead Sea Scroll material. Therefore, the Dead Sea scrolls don’t preserve this weird view of Cain’s lineage. Readers can check on what I’m saying through two relatively inexpensive sources: 

David L. Washburn, A Catalog of Biblical Passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Sbl – Text-Critical Studies, 2) (Sbl – Text-Critical Studies, 2) 

Martin Abegg, Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible: The Oldest Known Bible Translated for the First Time into English (Harper, 1999). 

2. Since we already know the name doesn’t occur in the biblical scrolls (the point above), I thought I’d look for it among the other scrolls material – sometimes the other material has commentaries on the biblical material. A computer search for “Sammael” (or the alternate spelling Samael) yields ZERO occurrences in the non-biblical texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is more proof that this “account” is not only absent in the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls; it isn’t present in the scrolls that covered other subjects besides copying and commenting on the Hebrew Bible. You can watch a video of me doing this search so you know I’m not making it up. (Turn your speakers up and use high speed – it’s 29 MB).

3. I knew that I wouldn’t find the name Sammael or Samael in any of the scrolls. The name does occur among the Pseudepigrapha. The video I made above includes this search and its results. Sorry, no sex between the serpent / Sammael and Eve. Boring, I know. Outside the name Sammael/Samael, and some pseudepigraphic material (4 Maccabees 18:8) the serpent gets blamed for all sexual sin, but that’s a lot different than fathering Cain.

4. Some rabbinic material does have the devil fathering Cain. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan has this idea. This translation, though, does NOT have the variant that includes Samael. The other Targums do not have this reading. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan is dated by Aramaists at roughly the sixth century A.D., or between 1500-2000 years AFTER Genesis was written (the date range depends on when one thinks Genesis was written). The Talmud relates a story that Yonatan ben Uziel, a student of Hillel (roughly contemporary with Jesus), fashioned an Aramaic translation of the Prophets. That translation is considered by some to be Targum Pseudo-Jonathan. However, the story makes no mention of any translation by him of the Torah, and so it cannot be argued that Targum Pseudo-Jonathan of Genesis 4:1 is as old as Jesus’ day. The sixth century A.D. is all the evidence allows. Targums can be very elastic translations, adding material quite freely with no Hebrew manuscript evidence at all. Everyone who does Aramaic knows this about the Targums - they can play pretty fast and loose with the text of the Bible; they INSERT all kinds of things into the translation, without regard to any prior textual manuscript history for support. IN plain language, the Targums often add made up material to the biblical text. Having Samael in Genesis 4:1 is a classic example – it was added at least 1500 years after the fact, and no other prior ancient Jewish material supports it.

To read this article in its entirety, visit this link: Was Cain Fathered by the Devil? No, Wait — Extraterrestrials

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It would seem the debate about "Satan being the father of Cain" will continue among the scholars and theologians with no common consensus being reached on this subject. But, it does leave one wondering ... Who's ? Right.

The Return of Paganism

Maybe there actually is a genuinely post-Christian future for America.

By Ross Douthat, Opinion Columnist

Dec. 12, 2018

Here are some generally agreed-upon facts about religious trends in the United States. Institutional Christianity has weakened drastically since the 1960s. Lots of people who once would have been lukewarm Christmas-and-Easter churchgoers now identify as having “no religion” or being “spiritual but not religious.” The mainline-Protestant establishment is an establishment no more. Religious belief and practice now polarizes our politics in a way they didn’t a few generations back.

What kind of general religious reality should be discerned from all these facts, though, is much more uncertain, and there are various plausible stories about what early-21st century Americans increasingly believe. The simplest of these is the secularization story — in which modern societies inevitably put away religious ideas as they advance in wealth and science and reason, and the decline of institutional religion is just a predictable feature of a general late-modern turn away from supernatural belief.

A Brooklyn bookstore gathered witches, Wiccans and local residents to perform a hex ritual.
(Photo Credit: Emily Molli/NurPhoto, via Getty Images)

But the secularization narrative is insufficient, because even with America’s churches in decline, the religious impulse has hardly disappeared. In the early 2000s, over 40 percent of Americans answered with an emphatic “yes” when Gallup asked them if “a profound religious experience or awakening” had redirected their lives; that number had doubled since the 1960s, when institutional religion was more vigorous. A recent Pew survey on secularization likewise found increases in the share of Americans who have regular feelings of “spiritual peace and well-being.” And the resilience of religious impulses and rhetoric in contemporary political movements, even (or especially) on the officially secular left, is an obvious feature of our politics.

So perhaps instead of secularization it makes sense to talk about the fragmentation and personalization of Christianity — to describe America as a nation of Christian heretics, if you will, in which traditional churches have been supplanted by self-help gurus and spiritual-political entrepreneurs. These figures cobble together pieces of the old orthodoxies, take out the inconvenient bits and pitch them to mass audiences that want part of the old-time religion but nothing too unsettling or challenging or ascetic. The result is a nation where Protestant awakenings have given way to post-Protestant wokeness, where Reinhold Niebuhr and Fulton Sheen have ceded pulpits to Joel Osteen and Oprah Winfrey, where the prosperity gospel and Christian nationalism rule the right and a social gospel denuded of theological content rules the left.

I wrote a whole book on this theme, but in the years since it came out I’ve wondered if it, too, was incomplete. There has to come a point at which a heresy becomes simply post-Christian, a moment when you should just believe people who claim they have left the biblical world-picture behind, a context where the new spiritualities add up to a new religion.

Which is why lately I’ve become interested in books and arguments that suggest that there actually is, or might be, a genuinely post-Christian future for America — and that the term “paganism” might be reasonably revived to describe the new American religion, currently struggling to be born.

A fascinating version of this argument is put forward by Steven D. Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego, in his new book, “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac.” Smith argues that much of what we understand as the march of secularism is something of an illusion, and that behind the scenes what’s actually happening in the modern culture war is the return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity.

What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.

This paganism is not materialist or atheistic; it allows for belief in spiritual and supernatural realities. It even accepts the possibility of an afterlife. But it is deliberately agnostic about final things, what awaits beyond the shores of this world, and it is skeptical of the idea that there exists some ascetic, world-denying moral standard to which we should aspire. Instead, it sees the purpose of religion and spirituality as more therapeutic, a means of seeking harmony with nature and happiness in the everyday — while unlike atheism, it insists that this everyday is divinely endowed and shaped, meaningful and not random, a place where we can truly hope to be at home.

In popular religious practice there isn’t always a clean line between this “immanent” religion and the transcendent alternative offered by Christianity and Judaism. But clearly religious cultures can tend toward one option or the other, and you can build a plausible case for a “pagan” (by Smith’s definition) tradition in Western and American religion, which in his account takes two major forms.

First, there is a tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism that includes figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman, and that’s manifest in certain highbrow spiritual-but-not-religious writers today. Smith recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and even Ronald Dworkin to this club; he notes that we even have an explicit framing of this tradition as paganism, in the former Yale Law School dean Anthony Kronman’s rich 2016 work “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.”

Hundreds of druids, pagans and revelers gathered in June at the Avebury Neolithic henge monument in England for sunset and sunrise during the summer solstice. (Photo Credit: Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

Second, there is a civic religion that like the civic paganism of old makes religious and political duties identical, and treats the city of man as the city of God (or the gods), the place where we make heaven ourselves instead of waiting for the next life or the apocalypse. This immanent civic religion, Smith argues, is gradually replacing the more biblical form of civil religion that stamped American history down to the Protestant-Catholic-Jew 1950s. Whether in the social-justice theology of contemporary progressive politics or the transhumanist projects of Silicon Valley, we are watching attempts to revive a religion of this-world, a new-model paganism, to “reclaim the city that Christianity wrested away from it centuries ago.”

These descriptions are debatable, but suppose Smith is right. Is the combination of intellectual pantheism and a this-world-focused civil religion enough to declare the rebirth of paganism as a faith unto itself, rather than just a cultural tendency within a still-Christian order?

It seems to me that the answer is not quite, because this new religion would lack a clear cultic aspect, a set of popular devotions, a practice of ritual and prayer of the kind that the paganism of antiquity offered in abundance. And that absence points to the essential weakness of a purely intellectualized pantheism: It invites its adherents to commune with a universe that offers suffering and misery in abundance, which means that it has a strong appeal to the privileged but a much weaker appeal to people who need not only sense of wonder from their spiritual lives but also, well, help.

However, there are forms of modern paganism that do promise this help, that do offer ritual and observance, augury and prayer, that do promise that in some form gods or spirits really might exist and might offer succor or help if appropriately invoked. I have in mind the countless New Age practices that promise health and well-being and good fortune, the psychics and mediums who promise communication with the spirit world, and also the world of explicit neo-paganism, Wiccan and otherwise. Its adherents may not all be equally convinced of the realities that they’re trying to appeal to and manipulate (I don’t know how many of the witches who publicly hexed Brett Kavanaugh really expected it to work), but their numbers are growing rapidly; there may soon be more witches in the United States than members of the United Church of Christ.

What ancient paganism did successfully was to unite this kind of popular supernaturalism with its own forms of highbrow pantheism and civil-religiosity. Thus the elites of ancient Rome might reject the myths about their pantheon of deities as just crude stories, but they would join enthusiastically in public rituals that assumed that gods or spirits could be appealed to, propitiated, honored, worshiped.

To get a fully revived paganism in contemporary America, that’s what would have to happen again — the philosophers of pantheism and civil religion would need to build a religious bridge to the New Agers and neo-pagans, and together they would need to create a more fully realized cult of the immanent divine, an actual way to worship, not just to appreciate, the pantheistic order they discern.

It seems like we’re some distance from that happening — from the intellectuals whom Smith describes as pagan actually donning druidic robes, or from Jeff Bezos playing pontifex maximus for a post-Christian civic cult. The 1970s, when a D.C. establishment figure like Sally Quinn was hexing her enemies, were a high-water mark for those kinds of experiments among elites. Now, occasional experiments in woke witchcraft and astrology notwithstanding, there’s a more elite embarrassment about the popular side of post-Christian spirituality.

That embarrassment may not last forever; perhaps a prophet of a new harmonized paganism is waiting in the wings. Until then, those of us who still believe in a divine that made the universe rather than just pervading it — and who have a certain fear of what more immanent spirits have to offer us — should be able to recognize the outlines of a possible successor to our world-picture, while taking comfort that it is not yet fully formed.

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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The NY Times since 2009. He is the author of several books, most recently, 

“To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism.”

You can follow him on Twitter: @DouthatNYT