CAINAN (ka-rnan), (Heb. ItT., kee-nawn', pos sessor); correctly written Kenan in i Chron. i:2.
1. Son of Enos and father of Malialaleel (Gen. v:9-14; i Chron. i:2).
2. Son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem, and father of Salah.
His name is wanting in the present copies of the Hebrew Scriptures, but is found in the Sep tuagint version of Gen. x :24 ; xi :12, and in Luke iii :36. As the addition of his generation of 13c years in the series of names is of great chron ological importance, and is one of the circum stances which render the Septuagint computation of time longer than the Hebrew, this matter has engaged much attention and has led to great dis cussion among chronologists. Some have sug gested that the Jews purposely excluded the sec ond Cainan from their copies, with the design of rendering the Septuagint and Luke suspected ; others, that Moses omitted Cainan, being desirous of reckoning ten generations only from Adam to Noah, and from Noah to Abraham. Some sup pose that Arphaxad was father of Cainan and Salah, of Salah naturally and of Cainan le gally; while others allege that Cainan and Salah were the same person, under two names. It
is believed however, that the name of this second Cainan was not originally in the text of Luke, but is an addition of inadvertent transcribers who, remarking it in some copies of the Septuagint, added it (Kuinoel, ad Luc. zzi :36).
Upon the whole, the balance of critical opinion is in favor of the rejection of this second Cainan. Some of the grounds for this conclusion are : (1) That the Hebrew and Samaritan, with all the an cient versions and targums, concur in the omis sion ; (2) that the Septuagint is not consistent with itself, for in the repetition of genealogies in Chron. i :24 it omits Cainan and agrees with the Hebrew text ; (3) that the second Cainan is silently rejected by Josephus, by Philo, by John of Antioch and by Eusebitis; and that, while Origen retained the name itself, he, in his copy of the Septuagint, marked it with an obelisk as an unauthorized reading.