01 July 2013

Congratulations, it's a boy! Episode 1: Adam and Eve

Evan Ringuette at StaticDespair.com posted this on twitter.



And it got me to thinking. What percentage of the bible's babies were boys?

So I started at the beginning of Genesis and went through the bible counting male and female babies.

It's going to take me a while to get through them all though, so I decided to do it in a series of posts.

Here's the first one.

Adam and Eve

It didn't take long for Adam and Eve to get down to business after leaving the garden of Eden. In the next two verses they had two kids, both boys, named Cain and Abel.
And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD. And she again bare his brother Abel. Genesis 4:1-2
Six verses later, Cain killed Abel.
Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. Gen 4:8
130 years after that, Adam and Eve decided to make a replacement for Abel. God cooperated by giving them another boy, named Seth.
And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew. Gen 4:25
Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth. Gen 5:3
So apparently, Adam and Eve disobeyed God's command to "be fruitful and multiply" (Gen 1:28)  by having only three kids in 130 years. But after abstaining from sex (or practicing some killer form of birth control) they finally had some more kids in the next 800 years or so.
And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died. Genesis 5:4-5
Since the Bible didn't bother giving theses latter day babies names, sexes, or numbers, I won't either.

So the score for this episode is: boys 3, girls 0.

3 comments:

teavee said...

Your Quiverfull post has quite a few boy/girl offspring counts listed:
http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2010/09/who-wins-bibles-quiverfull-prize.html

This web page should help a lot (OT only it seems):
http://www.d.umn.edu/~jbelote/bible2.html

Add in the genealogy of Jesus and that should cover almost all of it.

Steve Wells said...

Thanks teavee. I'll refer to all of them as I go along. And be sure to check my numbers and make sure I don't leave any out.

Any guess about what the total will come to?

teavee said...

I expect the boys will outnumber the girls but the 99% figure in the post seems quite skewed.