Passage

Genesis 5.4

"Then the days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he had other sons and daughters." (Genesis 5:4, NASB95)

Immediate context (±2 verses)

ASV (ASV)

"2. male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. 3. And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:"

"4. and the days of Adam after he begat Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters."

"5. And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died. 6. And Seth lived a hundred and five years, and begat Enosh:" (Genesis 5:2-6, ASV)

WEB (WEB)

"2. He created them male and female, and blessed them. On the day they were created, he named them “Adam”. 3. Adam lived one hundred thirty years, and became the father of a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth."

"4. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years, and he became the father of other sons and daughters."

"5. All the days that Adam lived were nine hundred thirty years, then he died. 6. Seth lived one hundred five years, then became the father of Enosh." (Genesis 5:2-6, WEB)

KJV (KJV)

"2. Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. 3. And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth:"

"4. And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:"

"5. And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died. 6. And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos: ^{Enos: Heb. Enosh}" (Genesis 5:2-6, KJV)

YLT (YLT)

"2. a male and a female He hath prepared them, and He blesseth them, and calleth their name Man, in the day of their being prepared. 3. And Adam liveth an hundred and thirty years, and begetteth [a son] in his likeness, according to his image, and calleth his name Seth."

"4. And the days of Adam after his begetting Seth are eight hundred years, and he begetteth sons and daughters."

"5. And all the days of Adam which he lived are nine hundred and thirty years, and he dieth. 6. And Seth liveth an hundred and five years, and begetteth Enos." (Genesis 5:2-6, YLT)

Genesis 5:4 looks ordinary inside a genealogy but does heavy apologetic work. The single clause "he had other sons and daughters" is the textual anchor for answering "Where did Cain's wife come from?", the most-asked Sunday-school objection to Genesis. It also feeds the Sethite-line argument (Gen 6:2's "sons of God" as Seth's descendants rather than angelic beings), grounds the young-earth-creationist reading of the Genesis 5 long lifespans, and helps establish the OT's view of humanity as a single biological family descending from one couple (the basis for Paul's Adam-Christ federal headship in Romans 5.12-21). For a verse that almost no sermon ever preaches, it is load-bearing.

Setting

Speaker: Mosaic narrator (traditional authorship); literary-critical: P-source compiler
Audience: Israelite covenant community, originally the wilderness generation receiving Torah
Location: primeval-history setting outside Eden; composed during the wilderness wandering (traditional) or in stages from the monarchy to the post-exilic period (critical)
Time period: events placed in primeval / antediluvian era (ca. 4000-2500 BC on YEC reckoning; pre-history on old-earth readings); composed c. 1446-1406 BC (traditional Mosaic) or 6th-5th c. BC (critical)

Theological reading

The verse sits inside the toledoth of Adam (Gen 5:1-32), the chapter that bridges Eden to Noah by tracing the godly line of Seth through ten generations. The genealogy is highly formulaic: each entry gives age-at-fathering, post-fathering years, total lifespan, and a closing "and he died" (broken once, at Enoch, who "walked with God; and he was not, for God took him"). The verse 4 clause "other sons and daughters" is a formula repeated for nearly every patriarch in the chapter, and that repetition is the data set the apologetic uses are built on.

The Cain's-wife question. Genesis 4:17 introduces Cain's wife with no introduction, and skeptical readers have asked since at least the second century (Theophilus of Antioch addresses it) where she came from. The classic answer combines (a) Genesis 5:4's explicit testimony that Adam had many other children, (b) the implicit early-humanity sibling-marriage hypothesis, and (c) Genesis 5:5's nine-hundred-thirty-year lifespan, which gives Adam centuries to father a large number of descendants before Cain's marriage. Sibling marriage is forbidden later under the Mosaic Law (Lev 18:9), but that prohibition (1) postdates Sinai by some 2,500 years on the traditional chronology, and (2) is given as a fence around an entirely different genetic situation, the accumulation of recessive deleterious mutations after the Fall and (on YEC) the Flood bottleneck would have made first-degree-relative marriage genetically catastrophic by Moses' time but not at the founding of the human family. ris3n's Cains Wife Objection Defeater develops this in full.

The Sethite-line argument. Genesis 6:1-4 ("the sons of God saw the daughters of men") admits three classical readings: (a) the angelic-cohabitation view (LXX, 1 Enoch, Jude 6, most patristic writers); (b) the Sethite view (Augustine, Calvin, most Reformed exegetes); (c) the dynastic-kings view (modern minority). The Sethite view depends on a clean Seth / Cain bifurcation, the "sons of God" are Seth's godly line, the "daughters of men" Cain's worldly line. Genesis 5:4's "other sons and daughters" complicates this by reminding the reader that the two lines were not pure family streams. The view's strongest backing actually comes elsewhere (Gen 4:26's "men began to call on the name of the LORD"), but verse 4 is regularly cited in the discussion.

The YEC longevity reading. Genesis 5's lifespans (Adam 930, Seth 912, Methuselah 969) are taken by young-earth interpreters as straightforward historical claims about pre-Flood human biology: a pre-Flood vapor canopy or different atmospheric pressure or genetic perfection extended human life until the Flood narrowed the gene pool and stripped protective conditions. Old-earth readers typically take the numbers as symbolic or as numerically stylized (the prominent role of 7-multiples, 60-multiples, and the famous lifespan-total patterns is well documented). Verse 4's eight-hundred-year fertile window is a focal example for both readings.

Adam as historical individual. The Pauline argument of Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:21-22 presupposes Adam as a historical individual whose act has federal consequences for all his descendants. Genesis 5's genealogy treats Adam exactly that way: the same formula applied to him is applied to Noah, with no genre shift signaling that one is mythological and the other historical. The verse 4 testimony to "other sons and daughters" reinforces the historical reading: Adam fathered specific named and unnamed children, in specific year-counts, in the same way later patriarchs did.

Key words

H0120 - adam, adam, "man, mankind, Adam." In Gen 5:1-2 the word functions both as proper name and as the species term; 5:4 names the individual Adam as the founder of the line.

Theological themes

Single biological family. All humanity descends from one couple, the textual basis for the unity of the human race and for Paul's Adam-Christ federal headship.
Sibling marriage in earliest humanity. Forbidden later under Mosaic Law, presupposed at the founding generation; the genetic rationale for the later prohibition only obtains after mutation accumulation.
Antediluvian longevity. Pre-Flood lifespans are a YEC anchor and an old-earth interpretive crux; verse 4 supplies the eight-hundred-year post-Seth window.
Genealogy as historical claim. The toledoth form treats Adam's reproduction the way it treats Noah's, the same way it treats Abraham later (Gen 11), arguing against a genre-shift between "myth" and "history" inside the patriarchal record.
The unnamed many. The "other sons and daughters" formula appears in nearly every Gen 5 entry; the patriarchs are not just Bible-named-individuals but founders of populations, the textual frame the world of Cain's wife requires.

Cross-references

Genesis 4.17, "Cain knew his wife", the verse the Cain's-wife defeater is replying to.
Genesis 1.27, "male and female He created them", the original creation pair from whom the Gen 5 descendants come.
Genesis 5, the full toledoth of Adam in which 5:4 sits.
Romans 5.12-21, Paul's federal-headship argument, which presupposes Adam as the biological-and-covenantal ancestor of all humans.
1 Corinthians 15.21-22, the Adam-Christ contrast premised on Adam's historical fatherhood of the race.

Quoted in

Why these four translations

ris3n chose ASV, WEB, KJV, and YLT for two reasons together. They are the most literal English translations available (formal-equivalence: word-for-word renderings that preserve the Hebrew and Greek grammar rather than smoothing it into modern dynamic-equivalence idiom). And they are in the public domain in the United States, which means fair-use quotation at any length requires no publisher license. Modern licensed translations (NASB95, ESV, NIV) restrict volume of quotation under their copyright terms, so they are not used at stub-level coverage here. NASB95 appears only on hand-curated rich passage hubs under Lockman Foundation's fair-use allowance.

The four:

ASV (American Standard Version, 1901). The basis of the modern critical-text English tradition.
WEB (World English Bible, contemporary). Public-domain revision in the ASV line, in current English.
KJV (King James Version, 1611). Reformation-era, Textus Receptus base.
YLT (Young's Literal Translation, Robert Young, 1862). Hyper-literal preservation of Hebrew and Greek grammar; useful for word-study work even where English reads stiff.

See Bibles for the full per-translation history, translators, textual basis, strengths, and weaknesses.