Cain and Abel

The story of Cain and Able is a short one. It is fewer than 300 words. I timed myself reading it and it took fifteen seconds.

I consider myself to be well read and I can say, especially given its brevity, I do not believe there exists a more profound story than the story of Cain and Abel. There are times when I just cannot believe that someone actually wrote this story.

With this in mind, I am going to do my best to give a solid reading but can assure you that no matter how good a job I do it will be incomplete. I do not think it is possible to drain the entire wealth of meaning out of this story. It is, in many ways, infinitely deep. With that, I will do my best to highlight what to my mind is its importance both on its own and in its narrative context in Genesis and the larger biblical library.

I: Introduction

To the woman He said “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain shall you bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it;: Cursed is the ground for your sake; In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground. For out of it you were taken For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:16-19

With this we see man’s discovery of the future and the need for sacrifice. Given the axiom that we must sacrifice in order to make our lives better, the next logical question becomes clear. What is the greatest possible sacrifice for the greatest possible good? This question will be a major thematic thread throughout the entire biblical corpus.

The opening to the long and complex story about what the greatest possible sacrifice for the greatest possible good begins with the story of Cain and Abel.

So who are Cain and Abel?

II: Cain and Abel

Let’s begin with this, Cain and Abel are the first two human beings. Their parents, Adam and Eve, were made by God’s own hand in paradise. That isn’t how human beings are made. Human beings are made by other human beings in a fallen and troublesome world. Whatever Adam and Eve were, they were unlike the rest of humanity starting with Cain and Abel.

That Cain and Abel are the first two human beings is important for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons this is so important is because it is worth noting that the first two human beings in the world, in history, engage in a fratricidal struggle ending with the death of the better of them. That is the story of humans in history and it is worth spending a lot of time thinking about that. The Old Testament is a very harsh book and for some it is far too harsh to think about, but it also very well might be that it is the truth that is harsh, not the account of it.

The milieu that this story comes out of is the Mesopotamian story where humans are made out of the blood of Qingu, the worst demon that Tiamat, the goddess of chaos, could create and the leader of her demon army. The idea presented in the most ancient stories, including Genesis, is that there is something truly flawed, truly demonic, truly awful deep inside the soul of man which accounts for man’s capacity for malevolence. If you recall, it is the human propensity for evil as such that we said is the reason the serpent in the Garden of Eden is connected to Satan by the early Christians.

So who are these two brothers? Starting simply, Cain is the elder and Abel is the younger. As we mentioned in earlier posts, in the ancient world there was a privilege afforded to the eldest brother. In an agricultural society, the eldest brother inherits. The reason the only person who inherits is the eldest brother is very simple. If a man has a plot of land and five sons and distributes his land equally and if those sons have sons and they do likewise, regardless of the size of the original plot of land it will take a very short couple of generations until everyone has a single rock. So everything is passed to the eldest son and while it isn’t fair, this is the way the world works.

That Cain is the eldest son of Adam gives us some information about him, information that would have been obvious to the early readers. As eldest, Cain has an additional stake in the social hierarchy. He benefits from it. The older brother is an emblematic representative of the status quo and more likely to be in favor of traditionalist or authoritarian social order.

Younger sons, on the other hand, are more willing to try new things, change the status quo and be open to revolutionary thinking. The position of the younger son is not privileged and predetermined, as is the elder son’s, by the societal norms and so his openness to things that change the existing order is not just absent in an older brother but feared in some ways and, in some ways, owing to the freedom of the younger brother, somewhat resented.

All of this is built into a short couple of words which let us know that Cain was born first. What else do we know? We know that “Cain is a tiller of the land and Abel is a keeper of sheep.” This, naturally, makes sense. Cain, as the eldest, will inherit the land and as such he is charged with its maintenance. Abel, on the other hand, is a shepherd. Both younger sons and shepherds will play crucial roles in all of the books of the Bible.

So Abel is a shepherd. We spoke about shepherds in the ancient world in one of our first essays. The modern metaphor of the shepherd, dancing in the fields, playing a pipe, gentle and carefree, isn’t the ancient metaphor. In fact, it is quite the opposite. You can think of the statue of David. David is a shepherd. Michelangelo understood the ancient metaphor being made and his David is no pushover. This is a giant slaying, tough shepherd. The shepherd metaphor in the ancient world is that of the hypermasculine, tough, self-reliant man who goes off on his own, cares for a flock and protects it with his life even as he is killing lions bare-handed to protect them. The shepherd in the ancient world is an absolute beast of a man who is independent, solitary and as tough as they come.

With this we get a good sense of who Cain and Abel are and the relationship the stand to each other which would have been obvious in ancient times.

III: Sacrifice

So now that we have a backdrop for the story, we know who Cain and Abel are and the relationship that stand to one another and now we can dive in. The tale of Cain and Abel begins in earnest with their heading out to participate in the sacrificial rites. We do not know anything about the instantiation of these rites. We see, at the fall, the beginning of the sacrificial system with the awareness of the future and of mortality and now we have Adam and Eve’s children performing sacrifices to God.

A quick note on sacrifice: There is a modern, arrogant and hubristic idea that these ancient people were primitive morons sacrificing to their gods. Let me say, without poetic language, metaphor, analogy or literary device — anyone who thinks that the biblical sacrificial system is primitive is an idiot. So let’s talk a little bit about sacrifice.

After the fall of paradise, man enters history with the knowledge of his own finitude and insufficiency. He needs to figure out what to do and the answer he comes up with is sacrifice. What is sacrifice? Sacrifice is the idea that you could give something of value up in the present and that it would have a transcendent utility at some point in the future.

This is by no means an unsophisticated idea. In fact, it might be the single greatest idea man has ever had. It is the answer to the problem put forward with Adam and Eve. We became self-conscious, we discovered the future, we knew we were going to die and we knew we were permanently vulnerable, then we became ashamed, we discovered the knowledge of good and evil and got thrown out of paradise. This is a really big problem. What are we going to do about it? Sacrifice. That’s the biblical hypothesis.

Everything we do in the world is built on the back of sacrifice so it better work. Right now I am sitting in an office at a desk using a computer which is connected to the internet to write this essay. Without the sacrifice of millions of people over thousands of years this would not be possible. Resentment, bitterness, theft and murder are the alternatives to sacrifice. We really have to hope sacrifice works and maybe we can all take a second to think about how many people sacrificed and how much we sacrificed to do everything in the world we do and maybe as we do that we might say to ourselves that sacrifice is not so damn primitive after all.

 

IV: Cain and Able Sacrifice to God

And in the process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and his offering. But unto Cain and his offering he had not respect. (Gen: 4:3-5)

So, again, we have a lot to unpack here. Cain and Abel both are participating in the sacrificial rites. Cain, the eldest, the tiller of the ground, the heir of Adam, brings the fruit of the ground as an offering and his younger brother Abel, the shepherd, brings the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof. Nothing here indicates anything particularly special and I believe this is the point.

There are some modern scholars (Matthew Henry, Charles Spurgeon, John Owen) who argue that Cain’s sacrifice is insufficient because there is no blood. They often link this to St. Paul’s claim, in his letter to the Hebrews, that according to the laws blood is necessary for atonement and sacrifice. In their zeal to answer this question these scholars fail to recognize that the laws that Paul speaks of were not to appear for another thousand years. That God would hold Cain and Able to the law he gave to Moses simply doesn’t hold water.

The modern scholars who insist on this largely do so based on Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica), John Calvin (Commentary on Genesis and Hebrews) and Martin Luther (Lectures on Genesis). These Medieval and Reformation theologians which inspired modern protestant theologians, take this idea largely from Augustine (City of God) and John Chrysostom, both of who connect Abel’s blood sacrifice and a prefiguring typology of the sacrifice of Christ. However, to conflate a prefiguring typology in, say, Augustine with an ungiven law we should assume Cain was punished for not obeying renders the biblical narrative as well as the Augustinian theology ridiculous…something we cannot afford to do.

While I tend to agree with Augustine and John Chrysostom (and, for that matter, Cyril of Jerusalem and Theodore of Mopsuestia), I think that Aquinas, Calvin and Luther bringing the typological argument to the literal reference frame is a huge mistake. We will talk about Abel and the typology of Christ when we discuss the New Testament. However, for the time being, I think it is good to look just at the text from Genesis 4:3-5 without the later interpretation.

It is important to note that the Cain and Abel sacrifices are part of a system that has no origin prior to the giving of the law. Further, it is not even part of the pre-law sacrificial system that Abraham, Issac and Jacob will use as there is no mention of an alter. Trying to give definitive answers to what is going on in this section with rules that do not yet exist is problematic at the least and, in my view, an attempt to force an answer to cross a question off the list.

What we do know is that the “fruit of the ground” that Cain brings, in the Hebrew, points to Cain bringing the best of what he has (Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges: Commentary on Genesis 4) equivalent, in terms of produce, to the firstlings of the flock that Abel brings. Keeping in mind that it is merely birth order and not proclivity that is behind Cain being a tiller of the land and Abel being a shepherd and that the original language specifically expressing that they brought the best of what they have there really is no reason, here in this first lines, to think that either Cain or Abel has done anything particularly good or bad. They sacrificed the best of what was in their purview to sacrifice.

The first inkling that you get that Cain has made an error is in the next line where it says that God has respect unto Abel and his offering but unto Cain he had none.

Despite thousands of years of commentary and speculation, the fact remains that the account in Genesis goes from two brothers bringing the best of what they have to sacrifice directly to God having respect unto one and no respect unto the other. There are a lot of possible reasons that the favor was given to Abel and withheld from Cain. I think that, at least to some extent, some hint at the arbitrary nature of the world is imbedded in the story. Sometimes you run afoul of God because you’ve done something wrong and sometimes you just run afoul of God. The reason is immaterial. The story of Cain and Abel is not, as we see in many other sections of the bible, an instructional manual on the art of sacrifice. Rather, it is instructive on how the reaction to arbitrarily assigned fate is of supreme importance.

There is more however. I find the Cambridge commentary incredibly instructive on this. It says:

Taking, therefore, the omission of the reason in conjunction with the language of Genesis 4:6-7, and with the general religious purport of the context, we should probably be right in inferring that the passage, as it stands, intends to ascribe the difference in the acceptability of the two offerings to the difference in the spirit in which they had been made. Jehovah looked at the heart (cf. 1 Samuel 16:7). Thus the first mention of worship in Holy Scripture seems to emphasize the fundamental truth that the worth of worship lies in the spirit of the worshipper, cf. John 4:24, “God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” This is the thought of Hebrews 11:4, “By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain..God bearing witness in respect of his gifts.

I think the commentary of the Cambridge is spot on here and points to why blood, the way it was read by Aquinas and Luther, is simply not a satisfactory answer. So what is it that the Cambridge is saying here. You know. You know you know. Cain went through the motions, but wasn’t very happy having to do it.

So while you can fall afoul of God because your sacrifices are second rate, sometimes, even when your sacrifices aren’t second rate, you can still fall afoul of God. Do you know why? That all depends on how honest you want to be with yourself. Have you ever done something because you had to, did a decent job of it but felt anger that you had to do it? Or maybe you felt it was beneath you? Maybe you just didn’t feel like it. Maybe you noticed your neighbor seems to be putting in no effort and is having a great time of it and you are struggling to do things right and everything is falling on your head.

I don’t know if anyone out there has never experienced just going through the motions, but if you haven’t and if you

are reading this….close my website. I have nothing to tell you. Just keep doing what you are doing.

For the rest of us who know exactly what it means to do a job “correctly” and not have your spirit in it…how often does it turn out that you are rewarded as you feel you ought to be when you are finished spitefully cleaning the kitchen? My guess is not very often. The real question here, for us and for Cain, is how often do we finish spitefully doing our job, not see the rewards we are expecting and then look at ourselves and realize that while the job did get done, the spite it was done with seeped into the work and it is our fault we are not being properly rewarded. This is the first of the sins of Cain.

So we have Cain and Abel sacrificing to the Lord. Abel’s sacrifice is successful and Cain’s is not. The reason is not explicitly mentioned. Because it isn’t explicitly mentioned and because the fact that they gave the best of what they had was explicitly mentioned, we are left to assume one of two things. It is either the case that Cain is just getting a raw deal because some people just get a raw deal sometimes and that’s the way the world works because whatever it is that God is up to, it isn’t even distribution of fate, or it is the case that Cain just wasn’t putting the effort in.

Either way, Cain felt aggrieved at God’s negative response to his sacrifice and, moreover, at God’s positive response to the sacrifice of Abel.

 

V: Abel at a Glance

I want to take a moment and talk about who Abel is. In just a few lines we get quite a lot of information about him. Moreover, there is a good deal more we can look at contextually. What we know from the story is that Abel is the second son of Adam and Eve and the younger brother of Cain. Able, being a second son, will not inherit and as such has less of a stake in the normative structure of society.

We also know that Abel was a shepherd and, as we discussed earlier in this essay and at length in the essay On Shepherds and Shepherding, the image of the shepherd is that of the hypermasculine, self-reliant, fierce and brave man who manages a flock and defends against beasts.

The picture of Abel begins to make itself manifest as a strong and competent man who is making his own way in the world. However, we need to add one more thing and I think that this might be the most crucial element of Abel’s character: Abel is the man whose sacrifices pay off.

What does it mean to be the man whose sacrifices pay off? It isn’t all that hard to understand. Here is Abel, strong, self-reliant and still humble and grateful. He puts effort into his sacrifice. He does it in the right spirit. Able takes himself seriously and sees his work and his sacrifices as important. He orients himself towards God properly, with humility and as such his sacrifices are respected.

I picture Abel and I see a guy who works hard and the world seems to go his way. He has a job which he believes is an important job and one that is worth doing right. He derives satisfaction from his work. He sacrifices in the same spirit, looking upward, penitent before God with serious intention of thanks and atonement in his actions.

Girls like him. He flourishes and becomes respected and adored. His parents worship him. All his friends think he is the greatest. And with everything working out his way all the time you are still forced to admit it isn’t luck or malfeasance. All the good in the world comes to Abel because Abel earned it and everyone knows it. What’s more, it doesn’t make him arrogant. He is just a likable person to boot. You’d think with everything working out for him he would have the decency to be an asshole at least, but no — as soon as someone meets Abel they think “here’s a great guy.”

Abel’s sacrifices pay off.

Finally, what is Abel? Abel is the ideal. That Abel is the ideal is something that will play a key role in the conclusion of this story.

VI: Cain at a Glance

Now let’s take a look at Cain. What do we know about Cain? Well, he is the first born son of Adam and Eve, Abel’s older brother and the first human being. He is to inherit all that is Adam’s and as such he is emblematic of the normative social order. Cain is a tiller of the land which makes sense given that he is Adam’s heir.

The thing to note about Cain is that he is the man whose sacrifices do not pay off.

Well what does that mean? We don’t know exactly why Cain’s sacrifices do not pay off. It is strongly hinted at in the story that his heart was just not into it. He was going through the motions. But it could equally be said that Cain was just the victim of the arbitrary nature of the world and its distribution of bad fate and fortune.

We do know that Cain didn’t bring a second rate sacrifice. This part is specifically mentioned in the story (though looking at the original language is necessary to see it). Like Abel, he brought the best he had.

We are left with a picture of Abel cheerfully bringing the best he has to be sacrificed to God in gratitude for the many blessings bestowed on him in humility and with grace, but not Cain. Cain is bringing the best he has as well, but he isn’t happy about it.

How do I picture Cain? Cain is angry and resentful. He sacrificed, just like Abel sacrificed, yet where Abel’s sacrifice paid off his did not. Cain feels there is something inherently wrong with being itself. How can we live in a

world where two brothers make sacrifices and one is given honors and rewards and the other is looked down upon. I see Cain as a brooder. Back at home, waking up to do his work in the fields, coming home to eat, going to bed and all the while just brooding, like a vulture on an egg, about his own misfortune and misery. Cain is full of resentment, anger and a nihilism that comes with blaming the structure of being itself for your own misfortune.

Cain will never look inwards. To Cain, his lack of reward for the sacrifices he has made is Abel’s fault, it is Adam’s fault, it is the world’s fault, it is God’s fault. It’s unfair and abhorrent to him.

It is important here to keep in mind that God’s punishment to Cain which we will see in short course is not for the sacrifice he brought, but for his reaction to God not showing favor, in the manner he did with Abel, to his sacrifice.

VII: The Aftermath

And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell. And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. Genesis 4:5-7

There is just so much in this short little verse that I find it astonishing. The Cambridge, once again, does an excellent job of getting us started. It says:

The passage illustrates the progress of sin in Cain’s heart. Firstly, disappointment and wounded pride, aggravated by envy of his brother, lead to anger; secondly, anger unrestrained, and brooding sullenly over an imaginary wrong, rouses the spirit of revenge; thirdly, revenge seeks an outlet in passion, and vents itself in violence and murder.

And this is exactly right. Cain’s anger exists in a nested hierarchy and progresses from disappointment to murderous rage almost instantaneously as it travels through the levels spurred on by unchecked emotions.

God tells Cain the one thing someone in Cain’s position wants to hear least of all, “if thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted.” There is an echo of this later on in the book of Job when Job questions, essentially, the very structure of being in a world such that a sinless man may be so punished and God asks him if he was there when the foundation of the universe was laid. What God is telling Cain is “hey, before you go criticizing the structure of being for not getting what you want maybe you should examine your own motives, desires and frame references.”

God, after questioning why Cain is wroth as it is his own fault that things are not going well for him, says a most peculiar thing. He says “sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” I have looked at dozens of translations of this line as well as dug deep into the actual Biblical Hebrew both from the Stong’s Concordance and the excellent resource website www.hebrew4christians.com and while it took some time I really feel I got a handle on it.

Sin is crouched at Cain’s door. This is the first use of the word sin in the Hebrew. The metaphor here is that of a savage animal. There is the notion that this savage animal is in Cain’s power to overcome, but rather than doing so he invites it in and as such “you (Cain) shall be his desire.” There is no pretty way to put this and the Bible was not edited by a committee worried about safe spaces and trigger warnings.

Sin is a sexually aroused predator beast which is at Cain’s door and Cain opened that door and allowed the beast to have his way with him. The sexual metaphor is important as the evil that comes from it is seen as the offspring from the marriage of Cain and sin….sin which he invited in. We see this throughout lore — for instance, you have to invite vampires in.

It is not merely that Cain “sins.” He enters into a creative union with the principle of sin itself, violent and untrammeled, invited in and the fruit of this creative union  is murderous rage. Think about spending 10, 20, 40 years just brooding on perceived slights and allowing it to consume you to the point where the world presents itself to you in relation to the anger your feel towards those perceived slights. This is Cain. He is possessed by his resentment and anger and just how “unfair” it all is and then he looks and sees Abel, Abel from whom sacrifices all work out, and his rage becomes focused.

This is important to remember: Abel is the focal point of Cain’s rage precisely because Abel is the ideal that Cain blames God for his inability to attain.

Cain broods on his misfortune and enters the desert wilderness of his own mind, obsesses over his ill fortune and nourishes his resentment. In Book II of John Milton’s paradise Lost (starting at line 382), Milton beautifully expresses what is going in in Satan’s Soliloquy where he says:

But from the author of all ill could spring
So deep a malice, to confound the race
Of mankind in one root, and Earth with Hell
To mingle and involve, done all to spite
The great Creator?

And just like that we see Cain, in congress with sin, brooding on his own misfortune, seething in resentment prepared to spite God himself for his plight.

VIII: Crime and Punishment

Now Cain talked with Abel; his brother; and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him. Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” And He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground. So now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. A fugitive and a vagabond you shall be on the earth. Genesis 4:8-12

Of note here in the punishment of Cain is the claim “you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to revive your brother’s blood…” The ground (ha-adamah) (cf. Stong’s, Cambridge) is where the emphasis lay. It is not that the curse is from the ground to Cain, but that Cain is driven by God’s curse from the ground. This is the ground (the field) where Cain slew Abel, the ground where he tilled the fruits which he later offered for sacrifice to God. We know from Numbers 35:22 that blood pollutes the land.

That Cain is to be a fugitive and a vagabond is an impossibly difficult translation to make from the Hebrew. The original is the alliteration of two words, n’a va-nad, and is legendarily difficult. In the Septuagint, the Greek is rendered στένων καὶ τρέμως which means groaning and trembling. The Cambridge suggests that rather than a translation this is an attempt to capture the spirit of the Hebrew. The Latin, vagus et profugus, is equally toothless to the English it gets translated into.

In the end the take away here should be that Cain is sent from the cultivated soil, soil he himself has cultivated, and banished into the desert. He will be neither tiller nor shepherd. Further, it is important that this punishment is not the result of Cain’s conscience, but it is a Devine sentence. Whereas Adam was banished from the Garden to till the soil, now that soil will refuse its fruits to cain. He is to live the nomadic life — homeless, insecure and restless.

It is also worthy of note that as a result of this sentence, Cain builds the first city and his descendant, Tubal-Cain, is the first artificer of weapons of war. It is as if there are generational echos of the crime of Cain.

The story concludes:

And Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Surely you have driven me out this day from the face of the ground I shall be hidden from Your face I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, and it will happen that anyone who finds me will kill me.” And the lord said to him, “Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord set a mark on Cain, lest anyone finding him should kill him. Genesis 4:13-15

 

As we mentioned earlier in this article, Abel was more than just Cain’s brother. Abel was Cain’s ideal. The heart of the anger that Cain feels is that he is not Abel. Cain, unlike Abel, doesn’t have his sacrifices work out for him. He

sees in Able all that he wants but cannot have but rather than reflect on himself he broods on it and lets it become resentment. Cain kills Abel and in doing so he kills his own ideal. This is why the punishment is more than he can bear. How is it possible to live once you have slaughtered your own ideal? There is no longer a compass which points north.

So Cain wanders on, marries, gives birth to Enoch and builds a city and names it for his son. Not able to till the land, nor to be a shepherd he is the first who builds a city. From this, as I mentioned before, his line goes on to create the first weapons of war and several generations later the Tower of Babel.

It is in the story of Cain and Abel that we see the two modes of attunement to the world. We see Abel who is representative of an attunement of gratitude and Cain who is a representative of an attunement of resentment. This binary, that of gratitude and resentment, presents itself continuously throughout the biblical corpus.

One important take away we should hold on to dearly is that it is not so much that some people are like Abel and some people are like Cain. Cain and Abel are two manifestations of the self in the world. Regardless of how much like Cain you are, there is always at least the opportunity, through the expression of gratitude, to be more like Abel. And no matter how Abel you are, you will always be a little cain. Sin for all of us lies crouched at the door, so the biblical narrative informs us, and it is up to us to be its master rather than to allow it in to enter into a creative union with us.