CAIN & ABEL
Let us go out to the field.
—Cain
“Listen to the difference,” said the boy. “Read that line from your book and I’ll read it from this guy who knows ancient Hebrew.”8
So the man read aloud:
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you furious? And why do you look despondent? If you do what is right, won’t you be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.”9
Then the boy read aloud:
“Why are you incensed, and why is your face fallen? For whether you offer well, or whether you do not, at the tent flap sin crouches and for you is its longing, but you will rule over it.”
“They’re a bit different,” said the man, “but the meaning isn’t exactly lost.”
“I’m not saying this particular example is appalling,” said the boy, “and I get that it’s modernized because we no longer live in tents or whatever, but who’s to say what liberties should be taken where when doing an honest translation? It’s a slippery slope, ya know?”
“I see what you’re saying,” said the man.
“Let’s keep reading from yours though,” said the boy. “I’ll follow along in this one and speak up if anything stands out.”
“Alright then,” said the man, looking down again. “Where were we?” He began skimming aloud to find where they left off. “Adam knows Eve and bears Cain, then his brother Abel… Cain offers the fruit of the ground, Abel the first of his flock… The Lord respects Abel’s offering but not Cain’s… Ah. Here we are,” said the man:
Now Cain talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass, when they were in the fiel—
“Lemme stop you right there because it leaves out a line that I have here. Listen to this,” said the boy:
And Cain said to Abel his brother, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose against Abel his brother and killed him.10
The boy looked up at the man. “Now why would they leave that out? Is the result any different? No, Abel still dies. But why take out the part where Cain invites him into the field to make it sound otherwise?”
“I really don’t know,” said the man. “But as you mentioned, the result is the same.”
“Like I said, nothing major, but we’re only a few pages into the book and they’re already taking stuff out just because they feel like it. Makes you wonder how much of that there is by the time we get to page five hundred, or page one thousand.”
“I guess we’ll see. Although at this rate,” the man laughed, “I’m not sure we’ll get to the end before I die.”
The boy smiled as he reached for his first move.
The man watched him advance a pawn before turning his eyes back to the pages:
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.”11
“I just wanna point out how manipulative God was again,” said the boy.
“What do you mean?”
“What do you mean, ‘What do you mean?’ I mean what did Cain do wrong?”
The man raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think killing your brother is wrong?”
“No, not that,” said the boy. “Before that. They both made an offering and God played favorites. Why, because He wasn’t in the mood for fruit that day? What if Cain brought Him some mint jelly to go with that lamb instead of some berries or whatever? Would God have been pleased then?”
“You have quite the imagination,” said the man. “You know, some have guessed that while Abel brought the best of his flock, Cain didn’t offer the best of his crops, but I don’t see evidence there. And someone once told me the reason for God’s partiality was based on the line, ‘Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of land.’ He said there was a heavy emphasis on the ‘but,’ meaning God preferred man to be nomadic herders, multiplying to subdue the earth rather than stay in one place to farm.”
“But wasn’t Cain following in his father’s footsteps,” said the boy, “based on the way God told Adam to till and eat from the soil?”
“Precisely,” said the man. “I don’t agree with that notion either. I think Adam likely pursued both occupations after God showed him how to make clothing from skins. And so because each of his sons chose a noble occupation in the eyes of the Lord, I see it as proof it wasn’t what they offered that pleased or displeased the Lord, but how they made their offering. My guess is that while Abel made his offering from the depths of his heart to honor the Lord, Cain offered merely to remain in God’s good graces. Some go as far as to say that Cain was inherently evil and lived a wicked lif—”
“Where are you getting that from?” said the boy.
“Well, because he goes on to kill his brother.”
“Yeah, but point to where it shows any sign of Cain being wicked before God plays favorites. He makes an offering of his profession just like Abel, so if that’s the direction you wanna go, it’s something of a chicken-or-egg scenario. I’d say it’s a leap to assume Cain was evil beforehand when there’s no evidence for it. Meanwhile we do have evidence for God’s actions causing a reaction in Cain. Who’s to say if God didn’t favor Cain that day, then Abel wouldn’t have done the same?”
“We’ll never know for sure,” said the man.
“I can’t help but to sympathize with Cain on this one,” said the boy. “Think about it. You’re one of four people on the earth back then. God obviously loves your parents because He created them, but He rejects you in favor of your younger brother for seemingly no good reason. What’s up with that? Wouldn’t you be upset?”
“I suppose I would,” said the man.
“Of course you would!” said the boy. “And then He comes at him with the old asking-questions-to-which-I-already-know-the-answers routine? Jerk move right there.”
“I take it you have a younger brother?”
“And how would Cain even know what it means to kill someone? No one’s seen death at this point, so how can God expect him to know the consequence of hitting someone over the head with a rock or whatever? Maybe Cain didn’t mean to take it that far, but God didn’t exactly offer a warning.”
The man raised another eyebrow. “Did you hit your brother with a rock?”
“Or maybe God offered a warning off-screen that the narrator didn’t mention. Maybe God says, ‘Thou shall not hit someone over the head with a rock, for if you do they’ll surely die.’ And Cain rolls his eyes and thinks, Suuure, God. The old ‘surely die’ trick again, just like you played on our mother. You know what I’m sayin’?”
The old man smiled. “Let’s suppose God was being as unfair as you’re implying. Perhaps their offerings are equal in the sense that each man brings the best of his trade. But maybe God recognizes an underlying jealousy in Cain, so He creates a situation that will probe at his character. Cain is jealous because he thinks God favored his brother, but perhaps the offerings were never about a lamb or fruit of the ground at all, but rather a test for Cain to pass.”
The boy’s fire seemed to melt as the idea sunk in.
“The questions He asked are, ‘Why are you furious? And why do you look despondent? If you do what is right, won’t you be accepted?’ He’s asking Cain to do the right thing, and if he doesn’t, He warns him that evil will surface and there may be consequences. God doesn’t immediately reject Cain. Just like He asks Adam why he hid to give him a chance to repent, God asks Cain why he’s angry so he can recognize his jealousy and amend it.”
“Yeah, well, maybe,” said the boy, calmer now. “Where did this idea of offering a sacrificial lamb come from anyway? Seems so barbaric.”
“Well that’s not as primitive as you make it out to seem,” said the man. “In many ways, it’s far more sophisticated than the mindset we have today.”
“How so?”
“Well, let’s consider it in the context we unpacked with Adam and Eve. We’ve become conscious of our vulnerability, cast from paradise, and now we have to sacrifice the present to work to ensure our preparedness for the future. The idea of sacrificing something valuable in order to remain in God’s good graces is by no means an unsophisticated notion. Because what is the alternative to ensure preservation? Murder and theft perhaps, or something else along the evil path. Unless you would’ve had a better idea, this may have been one of the greatest ideas humans ever came up with.”
“I see what you’re saying,” said the boy. “I guess I wasn’t thinking about it in the context of the times.”
“Today you order pizza to your door and never think twice. You probably don’t offer any kind of thanks to whoever delivered it, or who made it, or who farmed and raised the ingredients you topped it with. I’ll guess you don’t even pray before your meals either, do you?”
“No,” said the boy. “There’s truth in all of that.”
“When have you offered a degree of thanks even close to the slaughter of an animal? My guess is never.”
“Also true,” said the boy.
“Have you ever killed an animal by your own hand to put food on the table?”
“No,” said the boy, “I haven’t.”
“Well, son, not only are we on different pages, but we’re not even in the same book.”
“I take it you have?”
“I grew up on a farm,” said the man. “My father had me slaughtering pigs by the time I was eight years old.”
“Wow,” said the boy. “That’s intense.”
“It’s a different level of connectivity with your food and the relationship with the world around you.”
“I see your point,” said the boy. “And I guess there must be something to the idea if it’s cropped up in numerous cultures around the world.”
“Making sacrifices is part of the human experience,” said the man. “You’ve just been raised in a time where it appears irrelevant.”
The boy stared into the old man’s eyes, nodding in silence. To break the tension, he pointed to the man’s book and said, “So what does God say to Cain next?”
The old man looked down at the page to find his place again and read:
“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.”12
“Here it says, ‘A restless wanderer shall you be,’” said the boy. “Which, again, is a subtle difference, but a fugitive is someone who escaped from prison or whatever and is on the run. Cain wasn’t on the run from some Johnny Law that didn’t exist back then. He was exiled, which is different.”
“I can agree with that,” said the man.
“Anyway, keep going.”
So the man read on:
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.”13
“Who are they talking about?” said the boy. “Cain is the only human other than his parents at this point.”
“I guess that’s a detail the Scripture leaves out,” said the man.
“Detail,” said the boy. “Hole,” he added, balancing the words with his hands like a scale. “Anywa—”
“Well hold on,” said the man. “Let’s not just brush over that criticism you made.”
“I didn’t really mean anything by it,” said the boy.
“But you didn’t hesitate to point it out either,” said the man. “I hear remarks like this and I wonder, is that really the best you can come up with to attack a literary masterpiece? And moreover, does it really matter? Take the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ example you brought up yesterday. One could easily say, ‘Well that’s silly. Wolves don’t talk.’”
“Hmm,” said the boy. “I see what you’re saying.”
“Critics of the Bible get so caught up in the details that they try to discount the whole Scripture as nonsense, but they’re missing the bigger picture. No, wolves don’t talk, but it doesn’t mean a lesson on moving through life with caution can’t be derived from the story either. And perhaps there’s an inconsistency here or there in the biblical texts, but it doesn’t diminish the lesson from a tale of two men that ends in the death of the best one of them, a story that’s played out in history time and time again because we never learn.”
“Very true,” said the boy.
“These stories are so compact that picking out trivial details defeats the purpose. ‘Who are these other people?’ is a simple-minded question that distracts from how far jealousy can push a man to kill not only his brother, but the best part of himself as well, not to mention his relationship with God moving forward.”
“Alright, alright,” said the boy. “I was being simple-minded and take back what I said. Can we move forward?”
“We sure can,” said the man. “I’ll let you do the honors.”
So the boy read from his text this time:
And the Lord set a mark upon Cain so that whoever found him would not slay him.14
The boy looked up from his book and said, “Do you think that’s to spare him from a rough encounter, or make his punishment worse by denying him from being put out of his misery?”
“I think those are one in the same,” said the man. “In spite of the fact that God is displeased, He still reveals a core dimension of His nature, which is mercy. But to take it a step further, we glossed over God’s line, ‘When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you.’ This is important because God robs Cain of his purpose in life as a farmer. And now as a man without a purpose, he’s been outcast as an aimless wanderer, as your book says. Painful in its own right, but by marking him, God extends the longevity of his purposeless existence.”
“Ahh,” said the boy, “I missed that part.”
“The mark also reminds others that evil should not be repaid by evil,” said the man. “Those who came across Cain may have wanted revenge for having gone against God’s will, for causing the pain that he caused, for killing a valuable member of society as a shepherd, which, in those times, was an important and difficult task. But knowing they’d receive God’s vengeance sevenfold would have caused anyone to think twice about whether or not it was worth it. It would have made them realize that killing Cain would only cause more suffering, not to mention punishment for themselves.”
“Riiight,” said the boy. “I overlooked that as well.”
“Easy to do with these stories,” said the man. “Brief as they are, there’s a lot to absorb.”
The boy nodded and read on:
And Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and dwelled in the land of Nod east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch.15
The boy began paraphrasing and said, “Then Enoch has a son who has a son who has a son who has a son named Lamech, who takes two wives and knocks ’em both up. I’m just breezing over this because I wanna hear you read Lamech’s speech here.”
“Very well,” said the man:
“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice. Wives of Lamech, pay attention to my words. For I killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain is to be avenged seven times over, then for Lamech it will be seventy-seven times!”16
“He’s bragging about killing a boy and taunting God with a higher bounty, right?” said the boy.
“That’s what I gathered, yes.”
“Just making sure. So then we jump back to Adam, who knocks up Eve again, and she pops out Seth as a replacement for Abel.” The old man smiled and shook his head. “Then Seth wastes no time having a son himself, and then in my version there’s the line that says, ‘It was then that the name of the Lord was first invoked,’ which I was hoping you could clarify.”
“Here it’s, ‘Then men began to call on the name of the Lord.’ And I’ve heard this one debated,” said the man, “but I’ve always read into it as a line to emphasize the lineage of Cain versus Seth. Cain’s line seems to be deviating from the path, becoming violent and taking up polygamy. So when Adam and Eve start a new line by giving birth to Seth, there becomes a more righteous and faithful line that God favors, as we’ll see unfold in the coming story.”
“Ah, okay,” said the boy. “I guess that makes sense.”
“At least that’s my opinion,” said the man.
“Next they list Adam’s genealogy and begin by mentioning God created man in His likeness. Then it says Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years before he had Seth in his own likeness. We’ll put the lifespans of these early people aside, but you think these parallel ‘in likeness’ lines are to further differentiate Seth’s line from Cain’s?”
“I do,” said the man.
“I will say that Adam’s time was a pretty good run,” said the boy, “but a tad anti-climactic when all we hear is ‘and he died.’”
“Again, I think it’s one of those details left out for brevity’s sake,” said the man. “He played his role in the story and we’ve learned from him all we can.”
“With the time span these people lived back then, it makes you wonder if Adam didn’t sneak a teensy piece of that tree of life on his way out the door.” The old man smiled as the boy said, “Poor Eve though. Mother of all living things and her death isn’t even mentioned.”
“I’ll admit the biblical stories leave something to be desired regarding women at times,” said the man, “but this is all we have.”
“Well,” said the boy, letting out a big sigh, “she bore sons, so at least she served a purpose.” The old man rolled his eyes. “Speaking of Eve,” said the boy, “the rest of this chapter lists out their line and how many hundreds of years they all lived. Is there any significance to this other than the fact we land on Noah, who ‘will console us for the pain of our hands’ work from the soil which the Lord cursed’?”
“It gives us a timeline of how many years passed before the flood,” said the man. “But once we get to Noa—”
“Actually, can we save that for tomorrow?” said the boy. “I’ve gotta get going.”
The old man pointed at the board and said, “But I haven’t even taken my first move.”
“I know, I know, but I’ve got some kind of family dinner thingy I’m supposed to go to and I still need a shower.”
“Alright,” said the old man, “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”
The boy folded his book shut and stuffed it in his pack. Then he stood up, giving the old man a salute, and wandered off down the path.