In this Based Camp Tract, Malcolm and Simone Collins tackle one of their most provocative religious questions: What does it actually mean to be “human” in God’s view?

They dig into classic Genesis puzzles—Cain’s fear of being killed, the sudden appearance of his wife, the city of Enoch, and the strange language of Romans 5:12-14—and argue that the Bible may not treat every Homo sapiens as a full moral agent. Drawing on a techno-puritan reading, they place the Adam and Eve story at the dawn of moral accountability and civilization roughly 10,000 years ago near the Tigris-Euphrates, link it to the sudden explosion of human development, and explore what this means for death, the Tree of Life, pre-Adamite populations, and the difference between biological humans and those God holds accountable.

Along the way they examine traditional explanations (incest, rapid population growth, pure allegory), Isaac La Peyrère’s pre-Adamite theory, Genesis 1 vs. Genesis 2, early urban death rituals, God’s treatment of groups like the Egyptians and Canaanites, and modern implications—including NPCs, civilizational decline, and fertility collapse as a kinder “second flood.”

A spicy, wide-ranging conversation about moral agency, civilization, and what the Bible might be saying about who counts as fully human.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Simone, I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we might be doing one of our most offensive religious episodes, because it’s a thought that came to me so for people who like sort of Bible mysteries one of the ones that most people are broadly aware of as like a fun little rabbit hole to go into is it appears from the perspective of Genesis that there were other humans around at the time of Cain and Abel.

[00:00:31] Mm-hmm. So four lines that suggest this. Genesis 4:14, “Whoever finds me will kill me.” If only Adam’s immediate family existed, who would pose a threat to Cain afterwards? ‘Cause he’s saying this to God. Cain’s wife she appears, but isn’t given a genealogy. Yeah. In, in the Bible, you’re not supposed to sleep with your sister.

[00:00:52] This is, like, one of the rules that God sets up. And it’s never put out that there’s, like, an exception here. Mm-hmm. Now, he was doing this before that law was set out, but that law still would have applied to all of the sons of Ad- kids of Adam and specifically Romans 5:12-14, no matter how you interpret it means it would apply.

[00:01:13] The the city in Genesis 4:17 it mentions Cain building a city, the city of Enoch. Now the word used for city here in ancient Hebrew can mean, like, a fortified collection of dwellings, but it still requires, you know, some people, more people than we are aware of at this time.

[00:01:33] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:01:34] Malcolm Collins: Then, and this is not as seen by people, but we’ll go into it, because then it is actually interesting.

[00:01:38] Some read Genesis 1:26-27, humanity created male and female, as a different event from Genesis 2:7, Adam formed from the dust, and then Eve formed from a rib, right? Then there is Romans 5:12-14. So this isn’t just in the Old Testament where you find this weird stuff. If you go to Romans 5:12-14 and note here I’m also gonna go through all the traditional explanations to try to get around this.

[00:02:04] But the correct explanation I think is so - spicy and I am so excited to drop it, because it makes so many other things make sense.

[00:02:14] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:02:14] As soon as you said this to me I was like, “Ah, of course.” ‘Cause I’m reading Genesis again, or I just read Genesis again and was so confused. Just was like, wait, ‘cause y- all these descendants, you know, so and so and then they had this kid, but then, and then they married so and- like, wait, where did they come from?

[00:02:29] Well, we, we

[00:02:30] Malcolm Collins: could- Yeah ...

[00:02:31] Simone Collins: huh?

[00:02:32] Malcolm Collins: So , if we start here, “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and in this way death came to people because all sinned, to be sure sin was in the world before the law was given. But sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law.”

[00:02:54] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:54] Malcolm Collins: “Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a, a pattern of the one to come.” Hmm. So the problem here being is there are two ways to read this both have problems. One is that, well, even though Moses hadn’t handed down the commandments yet, right? You were still capable of sinning before that period, right? That said it doesn’t really make sense in context., If you think about the line as it’s put out here, him pointing out that death entered the earth through sin entering through Adam, then the law he’s talking about here must be the law handed to Adam, right?

[00:03:46] If that’s the case, then it’s implying that people were sinning but without a law, without somebody telling them not to, before Adam came to existence. So I’ll, I’ll read it again so you can see how you can get this [00:04:00] interpretation. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people because all sinned, to be sure sin was in the world before the law was given.

[00:04:12] But sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is the pattern of the one to come.”

[00:04:28] On rereading, this is by far the weakest of these claims, but this verse is still important because what it lays out is that the rules set out within the mosaic laws are what counted as sin even before those laws were laid out, even if you take the most traditionalist reading of them, which has a lot of importance in just a second

[00:04:48] Malcolm Collins: So That creates a problem, right? If there were other humans around during this period, how did they get there? Mm-hmm. And we’ll, we’ll get to this as well, but what, what do we know about Adam and Eve, first of all? Because if people are aware of the techno-puritan framing around all of this what we generally believe is we think the Bible, and you can watch our episode on this, does a very good job, a, a supernaturally good job of setting out the evolutionary timeline.

[00:05:18] Mm-hmm. Of describing that in a way that a person of that period, a cave Jew, could understand that would make any sort of rational sense to them, that would be able to be transmitted. And then it lays out in the story of Adam and Eve mankind beginning to... Because I, I don’t think that God would actually punish humanity for trying to learn right from wrong.

[00:05:39] That seems psychotic to me. Like it seems like God would want us to know right from wrong, right? Yeah. Yeah. But I point out that we know from the story that that’s not really what Adam was punished for. Because the moment he eats the... Well, he doesn’t eat, touches, which is also important. See our original episode on that if you want us to go deeper on it.

[00:05:58] Or has the intent to disobey God. It’s not even touches. It, it, it’s reaching out for it. It was the intent to disobey God around that fruit that made that fruit important. It was not the fruit itself. The fruit didn’t actually need any magical powers. The fruit was set apart in that it was the only thing that God had made any sort of a ruling around at that point in human history, right?

[00:06:20] Mm-hmm. And, and the thing that Adam did that was special there was to go against what God wanted him to do with that. And I was like, a- and we know this because the first thing that Adam does is tries to clothe himself which doesn’t make any sense. Because it said that he they, they, they...

[00:06:36] God let Adam be naked in the garden. Like, clearly God didn’t think it was a problem. And in nowhere in any Bible, in any Old Testament would any, either in ration or in Christian or Judaic tradition is it sinful to be naked in front of your wife and God. That’s like the very thing you’re supposed to be naked around, right?

[00:06:59] Like, that is not a, a... He’s not like in a city or something, right? Like, so it’s showing that he what is meant by knowledge of good and evil is a knowledge of good and evil in opposition to God’s knowledge of good and evil. Like man thinking that he knows more than God about what is good and evil to the extent that he would do stupid things.

[00:07:23] So the moment Adam gained the capacity to think in terms of morality, like, “This is what I should do, this is what I shouldn’t do,” all of, like, what laws applied to him and made up sin at this point in time,

[00:07:38] that line in Romans tells us it’s the

[00:07:41] mosaic law that would be handed down later.

[00:07:44] So the question is, why didn’t God, like, give Adam a list of the rules, the Mosaic laws, as he was leaving the Garden of Eden? , And I think the answer to this is he thought they were so obvious that any sentient entity, , now that man had [00:08:00] gained true sentience, should have been aware of them. , I mean, they’re, they are really quite basic stuff, like not stealing, not murder, stuff like that.

[00:08:10] , But being aware there is a God, but then worshiping other gods above Him. , But then, , Adam and Eve leave. They have a kid, and right away, the kid goes ...