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Chapter 4
Many Doors for Opening up God's Word: Part 2
c. A Theological Door-way
The questions at the end of the previous section invite us to consider this next route into the text to find God's word for us.
The assumption that there is a link between divine acceptance and human achievement ties in with the fact that human beings are inclined to take an ethical, or generally functional, approach to matters of success and failure. But biblical narratives do not always share this overriding concern for human ways and means to do things right with God:
Attempts to demonstrate the inferiority of Cain's gift... assume that divine acceptance will always be the product of human performance... While this is often the case in biblical narratives, it is not always so. The fundamental preference for the people of Israel, for example, is not based on human performance, and Genesis 4 seems to be concerned precisely with the tension between an ungrounded divine preference and the consequences for the rest of humanity who are not graced by God's favour. [17.]
- What is this story telling us about God?
1. This is the God we also meet in the prophetic literature of the Old Testament. God's word to the people of Israel tells them that it is not so much who you are, but how you relate to other people, that matters. It's not status or wealth or age, but right relationships that count, that is, not sacrifice but justice.[18.] (This is a theological point with an ethical consequence.)
2. Perhaps this is a God who simply prefers the younger sibling, a consistent theme throughout the book of Genesis and beyond. Abel, Seth, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph are all chosen by God, or given a clear sense of God's blessing, ahead of their older siblings.
3. Another approach is to see this God as one who hears the cry of pain and listens to the voices of struggle, the God who has a preferential option for the underdog. Abel is not even called his mother's son but only ever named as 'Cain's brother' and his name, hevel, means futility at worst, a breath of air at best. Yet this is the one preferred by God when the two brothers line up with their sacrifices:
Abel's name strongly suggests that in the eyes of other people he does not amount to much. Is it more likely that Cain is envious not because Abel is more successful, but because Yahweh looks at a blunderer like Abel while ignoring Cain? [19.]
This theme continues as God hears the cry that no one else will hear, namely, the cry of blood in the ground in the seeming void of an open field. And God proves consistent in hearing Cain's cry of despair for his future [20.]and gives Cain a mark that will give enough protection to enable his life to continue and indeed find a new path.
4. Perhaps we meet a pacifist God in this text, who places a mark of protection on Cain, in order to put a block on the cycle of vengeance. Thompson contrasts the Genesis narrative on Cain and Abel with that of Jubilees. The Genesis narrative is "unflinching", he says, in its answer to the theological question it raises: "Can one now abandon Cain the murderer and still hold to the divine command of freedom that the story set out with equal logic against an innocent Cain?" God cares about Cain: "Yahweh is mankind's keeper, he is our keeper, and he accepts his role as Cain's protector. The story is pacifist." [21.]
5. But in the book of Jubilees the theological purpose is different. God in the Jubilees' narrative of Cain and Abel is a God of judgment. The one who is judged is therefore branded for life and his descendants cursed for their moral failure.
6. God in Genesis 4 will not be boxed into any rational system, just like the God encountered in the Wisdom Literature (e.g. Job and Ecclesiastes).
How do we come to terms with the God who plays favourites...whose own preference turns brother against brother...who is silent in the moment of violence...who just doesn't give answers to these deep questions?[22.]
Perhaps the problem lies with Cain's "inability to resign himself to Yahweh's inscrutable will."[23.] The very assumption that there is or should be a rational system relating actions to their consequences is what Ecclesiastes found to be as futile as 'shepherding wind'. It is only when one gets to that point of recognition, when "the belief in a grand causal order collapses," [24.] that reality is faced. then given respect it warrants and needs, if we are to live life-affirming interaction with it.[25.]
7. We also see a God who is the Creator, Sustainer and 'Advocate' for things and their connectedness. In Genesis 4 a process of alienation from the Earth begins to dominate human existence and put life at risk. With toil and sweat it was possible to get livelihood from the soil in ancient Palestine. But it needed constructive use of the knowledge of good and evil to determine what was truly beneficial. Antagonism with one's brother, with its worst-case scenario of murder, is not beneficial. It involves human beings breaking the connectedness of God's creation and separate themselves off from others, God and earth included. Cain then takes the process of alienation further:
Unable to make a living from the soil, Cain does something to emancipate himself from it: In a conscious choice Cain frees himself from the existence of a vagrant and a wanderer by building a city. He also frees himself from the burden of having to till the soil. City culture allows him to become independent of the drudgery of the life of a peasant. [26.]
8. This new start and the development of skills and crafts among Cain's descendants can be recognised as simply that: a new start. Genesis 4 shows us a God who always has a new way forward, for whom "the process of life is stronger than any of God's other acts."[27.] At the start of Genesis 4 we see this in the new life born to Adam and Eve now they live outside the garden. At the end of Genesis 4, after the tragedy of losing two sons, it is there again with the birth of Seth. And there is new life of a kind for Cain and his descendants.
9. There is also something new in human relationships with God. However the link with God may have been understood before (whatever was involved in the brothers' act of bringing sacrifice to God, for example) human relating to God now has a clear means for expression: At that time people began to invoke the name of the LORD. (4.26)
d. Sociology as a Door-way
What is reflected in social terms in the story of Cain and Abel?
The main focus in on Cain's new option for human existence - city life - and the attitudes are varied. City living means large numbers of people living in the same place without kinship bonds. Now violence is harder to contain without close social and familial sanctions, unless it is by the greater force of the ruling powers. Violence can surface also in the need for city dwellers to extract, by force if necessary, their basic needs for living from the countryside around. But urban life is also where human creativity begins to flourish with structured economic relationships enabling craftspeople and artisans to find a niche and technology to be developed.
1. This Genesis text presents us with the basic sociological issue of difference among people, particularly in their mode of life and livelihood. It seems also in the latter part, after the banishment of Cain, to have a specific concern with how to relate to creativity, that is, to craft and technology. Paula McNutt offers a fascinating perspective on the place of marginal types in human society, which is interesting from an historical point of view but also poses questions relevant to contemporary societies.
Cain and his descendants are forerunners in the diversification of human society, "introducing to humankind some of the primary elements of civilization."[28.] But this initiative and innovation has a mixed reception. By researching comparable stories from traditional African and Middle Eastern societies McNutt identifies the "social marginality" among Cain and his descendants with that experienced by smiths and artisans. The methods and creative abilities of these people were beyond the ken of nomads and settled agriculturalists and seemed like magic to them. Yet what they were able to do, and what they produced, were "economic and cultural necessities"[29.] within a society that continued to function according to established patterns of generations of pastoralists and gardeners. The mark of Cain therefore reflects the sociological reality of the 'stigma' of people who were "basically 'sacred' in the true, ambivalent sense of the word."[30.]
- What are our attitudes to people who perform various roles within society? What roles do we set apart, both in terms of looking up to them and looking down on them, trusting and distrusting, treating with awe and viewing with suspicion?
2. Others have noticed an anti-civilisation tilt within the text. Genesis shows up some level of tension, if not conflict, between the two ways of life, agricultural and pastoral[31.], the agricultural reflecting the more developed mode. For in the mind of the narrator it is likely that Abel, the shepherd, had the advantage. [32.]
- Would human beings be better off if they lived with the values and ways of more primitive societies?
The story shows us the pluses and minuses of civilisation in its early stages. There is a positive, and potentially constructive, division of labour developing but there is a negative aspect in terms of the rivalry that ensues and the conflict that rivalry produces[33.]. We get the impression that there is an inbuilt tension in human existence, and it needs some kind of social system or mechanism to alleviate it or to contain its more violent tendencies. Perhaps the narrator gives the mechanism to achieve this in the last verse of Genesis 4: the worship of the Lord.
- What are the effective systems or mechanisms against violence in contemporary society?
3. Family life is another matter under consideration in this text. What we encounter in the Cain and Abel narrative are sibling jealousies and favouritism. Whether the favouritism is actual, or simply experienced as such because the reasons are not understood, something happens that drives a wedge between the brothers. Parental attitudes towards the first child or the younger child can be instinctive and difficult to modify. Likewise assumptions about the significance of one's place as a child within the family can also be ingrained and emotionally decisive. Jealousy and the catch cry 'that's not fair!' are deeper in our experience and memories than we sometimes care to acknowledge.
Family tensions have similar issues to those of wider social interaction. They stem from the tension between 'same' and 'different', with each of us being composed of the same basic stuff and format, but each also being different from others.
- How is 'sameness' to be acknowledged without treating it as 'identical' with oneself and effectively taking it over? How is 'difference' recognised as different without then labelling it as 'alien'?
[21.] Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History, Jonathan Cape, London: 1999, 332.
[23.] Frank Anthony Spina, "The Ground for Cain's Rejection (Gen 4):adamah in the context of Gen 1-11" Zeitschrift Grand Rapids: 1999, 49.
[24.] Michael V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes, Wm B. Eerdmanns, Grand Rapids: 1999, 49.
[26.] Gunther Wittenberg, "Alienation and 'Emancipation' from the Earth: The Earth Story in Genesis 4", in The Earth Story in Genesis, ed. Norman C. Habel and Shirley Wurst, Seffield Academic Press, Sheffield: 2000, 111-112.
[28.] Paula M. McNutt, "In the Shadow of Cain", Semeia 87 (1999), 45.
[31.] cf. Speicer in Gunn and Fewell, 21 and spina, 319.
[33.] cf. Westermann as considered by Gunn and Fewell, 23.