The book of Genesis continues its
history of the way the world works with the story of Cain and Abel.
The foreshadowing begins right away when we realize that Abel's name
in Hebrew (Hevel) means “nothingness”. This is not a man who will
go far in life.
The jealousy between the two brothers
seems to be a feud that American historians should know well. The
farmer, Cain is envious of his brother the rancher. God seems to
approve of the herder rather than the gift of the farmer. Verses 6
and 7 have a cryptic oracle from God to Cain that seems to warn the
man about his state of mind when Cain's offering is not accepted. The
oracle seems to indicate that if you do wrong, you should strive to
do better, because if you don't, then sin is waiting to pounce on you
to rule over your life. You can overcome sin but the implication is
that you should not tangle with sin at all. Cain pays no heed to this
oracle and in a truncated verse 8, where it is unclear the situation
that caused the two brothers to be together, Cain kills his
brother.
God immediately calls Cain to task for
killing Abel but we have to pause here for a moment. What exactly is
Cain's crime? Since no person in the world had died yet, there is no
reason to think that Cain understood what “killing” was all
about. How can Cain commit murder if death was unknown in his world?
Still God needs to do something about this taking of a life. After
all, Abel’s blood “cries out to Me from the ground.”
There are Bible critics who wonder why
God asks Cain about the whereabouts of his brother. After all,
doesn't God know everything? God knows what Cain has done. Why does
he ask Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” As I have said many
times, when the Bible asks a question like this, it is also asking
us, the readers, to answer this question. We can say that this
question is one of the central questions in the Book of Genesis. Over
and over, the stories of this book deal with the relationship between
brothers. Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers.
We can also see that, since this particular story is about the first
brothers, that the question can be as broad as “Where is your
brother human being?” Cain's famous answer, “Am I my brother's
keeper?” has an obvious and direct answer, “Yes” we are
responsible for each other. Not just in our family but in the family
of human beings.
The punishment of Cain is that he will
never settle down but wander his whole life. This is a serious
punishment for a farmer. What follows is a genealogy of Cain, one
that includes the first city, the first man to take two wives, the
first nomadic herder, the creation of musical instruments, the
inventor of copper and iron tools, and the first man to kill another
in a fight. This genealogy indicates that
Cain's line is a “dead end” for humanity. There will be a new genealogy beginning with Cain's younger brother that will lead to the great heroes of the Bible.
Bible critics also fault this chapter
when Cain and his family marry women; the question asked is where do
these wives come from? Adam and Eve have only three children. Cain,
Abel (who dies) and now Seth. If God created Adam and Eve as the
first human beings, where does Cain find a wife for himself and for
his son? The Bible has no answer for this question because it is not
interested in being a history of the world. It is a chronicle of the
moral education of humanity. There is much that goes unanswered in
the Bible because the explanations are not important to moving along
the themes that the Bible wants to teach. Cain's killing of his
brother leads to more killing. That is a dead end for humanity. The
chapter then rewinds and goes back to Adam and Eve who give birth to
another son, and this one's lineage will hold out hope for humanity
in a way that Cain's lineage does not. The birth of Seth's son, Enosh
marks the beginning of religion in the world as “men began to
invoke the Lord by name.” The name they start to use,
interestingly, is the four letter unpronounceable name of God.
