Genesis 4:1-7
Now Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” Next she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard.
So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. The Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”
We started out last week talking about the biblical concept of justice – specifically in the Old Testament. I was expecting to come back today and look at some of the prophets who are especially known for their passionate calls for justice – but somewhere along the line this past week I discovered something that led me to bump those prophets up to next week’s discussion while we take a brief side trip.
Last week I casually mentioned my almost life-long frustration with trying to understand the story of Cain and Abel, when even as a child it seemed to me that it was God who was unjust in this story. I only mentioned this as an aside at the time and never intended to go any further in that direction.
But then, on Tuesday last week, for some reason – call it blind luck or divine intervention, whichever you prefer, I noticed a book sitting right at the front of one of my many bookcases. Once I noticed it I realized it had probably sat there in that spot for much of the 30 years we’ve lived here.
The book is titled “Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis.” It was written by Robert Graves, British poet, army officer, highly respected historian, and recognized expert on translating Greek and Hebrew poetry while maintaining its historical integrity. A man of many, many talents.
So – while I was puzzling about Cain and Abel and God’s odd preferences, possible answers to my many questions had been sitting right beside me as I drank my morning tea every day. How weird is that?
According to Graves, all pre-Biblical sacred documents in Hebrew have been either lost or purposely suppressed. Epic accounts of the Israelites’ desert wanderings and their invasion of Canaan apparently once existed but have been lost. We still have snippets of these which pop-up in the Bible now and then. Perhaps that is what this short story of Cain and Abel and murder is – a brief remnant of a much longer, now-lost story.
It would be, at a minimum, a year-long study to see all that this newly-found book has to offer and I really don’t intend to go there (though it is tempting) but I want to run quickly through two or three pages that focus on the stories (and there are many) of Cain and Abel.
The discoveries of Graves, along with his co-author, Raphael Patai, offer multiple differing versions for Cain’s rage and Abel’s death – versions they apparently scrapped together from fragments of other writings of later scholars and priests, seeking themselves to explain this original story.
Among these are one which states that God accepted Abel’s gift and rejected Cain’s because Abel had chosen the best lamb from his flock for his offering, while Cain had only set a few paltry flax seeds from his plants on the altar. When Cain asked Abel why God accepted his offering, he answered simply that “My offering was accepted because I love God; yours was rejected because you hate God.” Not an answer Cain wanted to hear.
One story tells that when the brothers were of an age for marriage Adam told Eve that Cain should marry Abel’s twin sister and Abel should marry Cain’s twin (there are other long stories as to where these two sisters came into the story) In this version Cain murdered Abel because he wanted his own twin sister for himself, even though that would be incest.
These alternative tellings of the Cain and Abel story are sometimes brutal and sometime just silly, and there are a whole lot more than the few I’ve listed here. Storytellers and scholars have tried to make sense of this tale for centuries, each creating some sort of version that made sense to them. If we follow the when and the who, the story is always shaped to match the story-tellers. To temple worshiping folks in later days this story would have made sense as told because in the temple system, meat was always seen as a much more valuable offering. It is unlikely they would ever even have questioned God’s choice.
The story I was given years ago is that this was an allegorical tale to describe the conflict between hunters/herdsmen and the growers. It has always been the herdsmen who have invaded and driven out the growers. Think of the tales of our Old West – following the ending of the Civil War and even still today. The cattlemen still think they deserve more land and aren’t always shy about taking it – remember the Bundys and their armed stand-off against the BLM a few years ago? Just the way it’s always been.
We may not always have all the details that connect a story to a particular people, but if we dig deep enough there’s always a connection. The oldest stories in our Bible read much more like mythology than history, and whoever put a particular story together always gets to be the hero.
This is an important point to remember whenever we are reading any biblical text. Who wrote it? Why did they write it? What is their point in writing it? Who benefits by telling it this way? There will be truth – but whose truth? Such things matter.
Last week I casually mentioned my almost life-long frustration with trying to understand the story of Cain and Abel, when even as a child it seemed to me that it was God who was unjust in this story. I only mentioned this as an aside at the time and never intended to go any further in that direction.
But then, on Tuesday last week, for some reason – call it blind luck or divine intervention, whichever you prefer, I noticed a book sitting right at the front of one of my many bookcases. Once I noticed it I realized it had probably sat there in that spot for much of the 30 years we’ve lived here.
The book is titled “Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis.” It was written by Robert Graves, British poet, army officer, highly respected historian, and recognized expert on translating Greek and Hebrew poetry while maintaining its historical integrity. A man of many, many talents.
So – while I was puzzling about Cain and Abel and God’s odd preferences, possible answers to my many questions had been sitting right beside me as I drank my morning tea every day. How weird is that?
According to Graves, all pre-Biblical sacred documents in Hebrew have been either lost or purposely suppressed. Epic accounts of the Israelites’ desert wanderings and their invasion of Canaan apparently once existed but have been lost. We still have snippets of these which pop-up in the Bible now and then. Perhaps that is what this short story of Cain and Abel and murder is – a brief remnant of a much longer, now-lost story.
It would be, at a minimum, a year-long study to see all that this newly-found book has to offer and I really don’t intend to go there (though it is tempting) but I want to run quickly through two or three pages that focus on the stories (and there are many) of Cain and Abel.
The discoveries of Graves, along with his co-author, Raphael Patai, offer multiple differing versions for Cain’s rage and Abel’s death – versions they apparently scrapped together from fragments of other writings of later scholars and priests, seeking themselves to explain this original story.
Among these are one which states that God accepted Abel’s gift and rejected Cain’s because Abel had chosen the best lamb from his flock for his offering, while Cain had only set a few paltry flax seeds from his plants on the altar. When Cain asked Abel why God accepted his offering, he answered simply that “My offering was accepted because I love God; yours was rejected because you hate God.” Not an answer Cain wanted to hear.
One story tells that when the brothers were of an age for marriage Adam told Eve that Cain should marry Abel’s twin sister and Abel should marry Cain’s twin (there are other long stories as to where these two sisters came into the story) In this version Cain murdered Abel because he wanted his own twin sister for himself, even though that would be incest.
These alternative tellings of the Cain and Abel story are sometimes brutal and sometime just silly, and there are a whole lot more than the few I’ve listed here. Storytellers and scholars have tried to make sense of this tale for centuries, each creating some sort of version that made sense to them. If we follow the when and the who, the story is always shaped to match the story-tellers. To temple worshiping folks in later days this story would have made sense as told because in the temple system, meat was always seen as a much more valuable offering. It is unlikely they would ever even have questioned God’s choice.
The story I was given years ago is that this was an allegorical tale to describe the conflict between hunters/herdsmen and the growers. It has always been the herdsmen who have invaded and driven out the growers. Think of the tales of our Old West – following the ending of the Civil War and even still today. The cattlemen still think they deserve more land and aren’t always shy about taking it – remember the Bundys and their armed stand-off against the BLM a few years ago? Just the way it’s always been.
We may not always have all the details that connect a story to a particular people, but if we dig deep enough there’s always a connection. The oldest stories in our Bible read much more like mythology than history, and whoever put a particular story together always gets to be the hero.
This is an important point to remember whenever we are reading any biblical text. Who wrote it? Why did they write it? What is their point in writing it? Who benefits by telling it this way? There will be truth – but whose truth? Such things matter.
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