When God declares in the Bible that a conception is going to occur, he is describing something that is pre-ordained and unstoppable. This provides interesting--and perhaps very telling---considerations about his participation in human reproduction, a biological process that would seem--one would fervently hope--to result simply from the uncoerced acts of the involved persons. People have sex (or at least expose their gametes to their one-celled counterparts in the proper environments) and then sometimes conceptions occur.
In the Bible the matter is not so simple. The first description of a distinct line of human procreation is directed by God to the snake: "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed...." (Genesis 3:15, KJV). And then "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee" (3:16).
One might naturally assume that the "desire" would precede the "conception," and that it would be the "seed" of both the man and the woman who would strive with the snake. Any number of rationalizations can be produced, it is true, to explain the logic (or is it poetry?) of God's choice of words, but no mode of analysis can dispel completely the mystery surrounding human conception. This is displayed at the earliest possible juncture. After expulsion from the garden, "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord" (4:1)--("from" is usually translated as "with the help of" or the like.)
Adam does not get a mention from Eve, nor is he described much afterward, though we are greeted later with the puzzling assertion, at the start of the list of Noah's ancestors, that "Adam . . . begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth" (5:3). It is small wonder that centuries of people have postulated that Cain was some sort of sub-human or non-human creature, the progenitor of innumerable hobgoblins.
It is truly surprising, however, that the "Adam knew Eve his wife" preface is missing from the subsequent announcement of Abel's birth. All we are given is "she again bare his brother Abel," with no mention of an act of Adam's. Were Cain and Abel twins? Or might they have been twins, or at least brothers, who were alike in many ways and yet profoundly different in the things that really matter? Abel's sacrifice is held to be acceptable by God, a rather problematic assertion in Christian theology, which holds generally to the notion that no sacrifice short of Jesus' is acceptable. If Abel were a foreshadowing, or type, or "pre-incarnate" manifestation of Jesus, would it be less than fitting that Abel (the only "son" of Adam not biologically attributed to him) might have been the offspring of only the human Eve?
It would seem blasphemous, in many circles, to postulate that virgin or at least non-sexual conception happened more than once. Of course, it seems blasphemous in some circles to assert--on biblically solid grounds--that Matthew's contention ("a virgin shall be with child") is a twisting of Isaiah 7. Or would it be best to consider it blasphemous to ever consider any conception--indeed, any manifestation of creation--as anything other than miraculous?
Pregnancy is a common occurrence, and sex an even more common occurrence. Every conception, however, is predicated--if the exact molecular makeup of the resulting organism is in mind--on ultimately miraculous or miracle-prone processes. It is entirely possible that chromosomal permutations might happen to male-derived DNA strands once inside the egg and while not yet having been expressed--making the offspring to that infinitesimal degree no longer "in the image" of the father. Anything is possible.
Or rather, to use "Bible-talk," nothing is impossible to God.
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