Things Fall Further Apart: Genesis 4.1-16

Posted on by stufffromthestuff

Before last week’s side-quest looking at how ideas of the fall and original sin evolved over time, we left Adam and Eve facing their new life outside the garden, armed with new knowledge and moral reasoning, but facing a whole new world of trouble. Today their narrative continues with the tragic story of their first two sons, Cain and Abel. It’s remarkable how quickly everything happens: in the span of a few verses, we go from Adam and Eve eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to bloody acts of fratricidal violence spurred on by jealous rage. But this murder, and its aftermath, are far from straightforward. And that’s what I’ll be looking at today

Text

I won’t copy out the text today but link to it here, and provide some introductory comment on its structure.

Structure

The story of Cain and Abel is told using a chiastic narrative structure, a common Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) rhetorical device in which the story ripples out in concentric circles from its centre;

1-5: Introduction: Cain and Abel’s births, livelihoods, and sacrifices

6-7: Confrontation: Noticing Cain’s anger, God intervenes and encourages him not to give in

8: Centre: Cain murders Abel

9-15: Confrontation: God confronts Cain and lays down consequences for his actions

16: Conclusion: Cain leaves God’s presence

Experience

I find this to be an unsettling story. It begins in joy with the birth of Cain, but quickly devolves into jealousy, envy, rage, murder, and exile. While the broad strokes of the story make sense, the details don’t fit together easily — which is surprising considering how carefully constructed the first two stories in Genesis are. I’m left with so many questions: Are we to read Eve’s exclamation following Cain’s birth as an act of faithfulness or hubris? Why does God accept Abel’s sacrifice and not Cain’s? Why is Cain so severely punished but also placed under divine protection? Where did the people from whom Cain needs protection come from?

Encounter

Genesis 4 has four important characters:

  • Eve is not a major player, but her role as a life-giver is highlighted at the start of the story (and book-ends the chapter, as we’ll see in the next post)
  • Cain by contrast is the main character of the story. He is a surprisingly nuanced character. He offers sacrifices to God from the fruit of his labour, but leaps quickly from worship to murderous rage. He lies to God about what happened to Abel and is exiled from family and land. Yet even in the face of his great punishment, he stands up for himself and ends up being placed under divine protection.
  • Abel is more a plot device than a character. His birth lacks the fanfare of Cain’s, and we learn little about him, aside from his job as a shepherd and God’s regard for his sacrifice.
  • God, here YHWH (or, ‘the LORD’ in our Bibles), is shown to be more involved here than he was in the garden. Where God was nowhere to be seen when the serpent was tempting Eve, here YHWH visits Cain to dissuade him from violence (see Carr for this ‘gap’ in Genesis 3).* And again we see God pulling punches. His punishment of Cain is severe, but merciful. Cain still lives despite killing his brother, and is given a mysterious mark to protect him from anyone who might harm him..

Explore

All this has raised a lot of questions for me. Indeed, the story seems almost to be defined by the holes in its narrative (Walton (2001), Sarna (1966) 28). The trick is not to get distracted by them, and focus on what the story is trying to tell us. So for today’s purposes I’m going to focus on the following:

  • How does this story connect, both in narrative and meaning, to Genesis 2-3?
  • Why does God show favour to Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s?
  • What’s happening with Cain’s punishment?

Genesis 4.1-16 in Context

Where Genesis 2-3 was a clear departure from Genesis 1, in origin, language, content, and theme, Genesis 4 flows freely from the preceding story. Not only is its language use similar, but its narrative is structured in parallel with Genesis 3: Both stories start from a place of peace, offer a brief description of the sin, and follow this with a lengthy description of its aftermath, including a confrontation, the denial of responsibility, a verdict and punishment that includes curse and exile, but also divine grace (Walton (2001), Carr, Sarna (1989) 30).

What’s remarkable is actually how little has changed between Genesis 3 and 4. The first family is shown to live in relationship with God: Eve recognizes God’s role in producing Cain,^ Cain and Abel offer sacrifices to God, God meets Cain face-to-face to encourage him to do good, and later offers him the chance to come clean about Abel’s fate, and gives Cain a mark of protection. (Not to beat a dead horse, but even this seems to militate against the more extreme interpretations of the impact of the fall!) In this story, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The themes of Genesis 3 — the development of humanity’s moral agency and capacity for both good and evil — are on full display in this story, as the effects of sin continue to spill out. If Genesis 3 showed the breakdown of paradise, here we see the breakdown of the family. The text tells us over and over again (seven times, in fact, tellingly) that Abel was Cain’s brother (Sarna (1969) 30, Carr). And Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”, hearkens back to Genesis 2-3, where Adam’s original job is to keep the garden (2.15; in 3.24 the same word is also used to describe the cherubim guarding the tree of life). It’s not just a cold comment about Cain’s relationship with his brother, but also an overt rejection of humanity’s original vocation to look after the garden and everything within it (Walton (2001)). His punishment — exile — further destroys the unity of the first family. It’s also telling that in the story, the son who does evil ends up with a long and ultimately successful life, while the son who not did do evil is killed young — an irony further demonstrated in Abel’s very name, which means ‘breath, fleeting, ephemeral’ (Carr). It’s almost to say that in the new human reality, there can be joy but it will be short-lived.

The story also expands on the theme of sin. When God intervenes against Cain’s anger, he describes sin as “crouching at [Cain’s] door”; the grammar of this is strange and suggests an additional metaphor is at play, with the two likely options being either a lurking demon or a judicial figure arriving to deliver his verdict (Carr, Walton (2001), Walton & Keener). Sin is also said to “desire” Cain, using the same word chapter 3 used to describe the woman’s desire for her husband (Carr). It’s an effective image, not only of sin as lusting after the human heart, but also as an invitation (in the strongly gendered thought-world of the ANE, and anticipating the later pop psychology of ancient Greece and Rome) for Cain (and the reader following him) to ‘be a man’ and resist sin’s ‘womanly’ temptations.

So then, Genesis 4 is strongly connected, in language, structure, and themes, to Genesis 3 and shows the further impact of sin in human relationships. But, as Walter Brueggemann notes, it also looks ahead, introducing the theme of sibling rivalry and the narrative’s preference for younger sons over the firstborn, which will become a major plot point in the patriarchal narratives and beyond (Brueggemann).

Cain and Abel’s Sacrifices

One of the biggest questions in this story is God’s apparent rejection of Cain’s sacrifice. This is the inciting incident of Cain’s murderous anger, and yet goes completely without comment in the text. One popular suggestion has been that it shows a preference for blood sacrifices over grain sacrifices, since Abel was a shepherd who gave of his flock, while Cain was a farmer who gave of his produce. The problem with this interpretation is that both of these kinds of offerings played an important role in Israel’s sacrificial system; they have different functions, but one is not ‘better’ than the other (Walton & Keener, Carr, Barker et al). Similarly, there’s nothing in the Old Testament to suggest the story is about a struggle between pastoral and agricultural ways of life: the two coexist quite happily in the Bible, and, if anything, the Law establishes Israel as a predominantly agricultural society. It would also be very odd indeed for God to create Adam to work the land, then reject Cain for doing so (Carr, Sarna (1966) 28)!

In light of this mystery, many interpreters posit a difference in the piety of the two men (Sarna (1966) 30, Barker et al). This is either simply read into the text, since there needs to be some reason for God’s different response to the two sacrifices, or inferred from the detail that Abel gave the firstfruits of his flock, while Cain simply gave ‘the fruits’ of his produce (Sarna (1966) 29). Certainly, the timing of Israelite agricultural festivals links them with the first of the harvest, showing that the firstfruits was an important concept in Israelite religion. This is not spelled out in the text, however, and certainly sacrifices from later in the harvest were not generally unacceptable. But, if we’re looking for something in the text to suggest what Cain might have done wrong, this is likely our best bet.

David Carr, however, offers a different solution that I think is quite compelling. It takes as its starting point the fact that this whole section of Genesis anthropomorphizes God; God is not shown as an omniscient, omnipresent, Spirit, but as an embodied being who sculpts, performs surgery, walks, and speaks to people face-to-face. With this in mind, Carr suggests that there was nothing wrong with Cain’s sacrifice at all, but that God simply noticed Abel’s because of the alluring smell of grilled meat. This is actually a more literal reading of the text, since the verb used to describe YHWH’s response to the sacrifices primarily means ‘notice’ or ‘pay attention’, and is not one of the typical words used to describe God’s approval or disapproval of an offering (Carr). In this reading, Cain’s jealousy comes not from God rejecting his sacrifice, but because God didn’t notice it — like a kid upset because his dad was paying attention to his brother instead of him. This interpretation changes how we read the subsequent interaction between God and Cain. In the typical interpretation, it reads as God urging Cain to do better next time (without telling him what he did wrong), but in Carr’s reading, it becomes God urging Cain away from his anger and warning him of where that anger could lead (an interpretation also taken by Sarna (1989) 33).

Punishment and Grace

In the aftermath of Abel’s murder, God confronts Cain about what he’s done. Rather than come clean, Cain is petulant and outright lies, saying he does not know where his brother is. God’s punishment is, once again, not a death penalty, but exile. Cain is cursed ‘relative to the ground’, and sentenced to a life of wandering in the wilderness. Carr notes that in light of how important family connections and community were in surviving the harsh climate of the ANE, expulsion was often as good as a death sentence, but one that absolved anyone from having the individual’s blood on their hands. Furthermore, ANE society, whether urban, agricultural, or pastoral, was strongly died to place; from a perspective like this, losing connection to one’s land is a horrible, uncivilized, fate (Carr, Walton & Keener). Later in the Old Testament, exile from the land will be the consequence for Israel’s breaking of the covenant of Moses (Deuteronomy 28.16ff, Isaiah 26.21 and 27.8-11). An interesting detail about Cain’s exile is that it includes banishment from God’s presence — something not part of the fall narrative (Walton (2001).

Yet, there is still mercy here. Cain is not killed, and, when he expresses concerns that he’ll be a target of violence, God gives him a special ‘mark’ of protection, declaring that any violence against him will be avenged sevenfold (i.e., perfectly). And, as we’ll see next time, he ends up leading a very successful life by the standards of his day.

Expand

The Cain story has a troubling legacy that merits a ‘Challenge’ section, but I’ll leave that for next time. For now, it’s time to wrap things up by reflecting on how this study has expanded our awareness of the story and its impact for own life of faith. This study reinforced to me the idea that there is more continuity than discontinuity between life in the garden and life outside it. The fall did not mean that God abandoned humanity; if anything, YHWH is more active and engaged with the characters here than he was in the previous chapter. Yet, the consequences of sin continue to roll out. Envy and jealousy lead to anger, which, if not checked, can lead to things we can’t take back.

But despite everything, God remains gracious.

 

* Please see the series bibliography for details

^ While out of scope for today, there is considerable debate about the meaning of Eve’s declaration. See Walton (2001), Carr, Barker et al for discussion about this.