Post number three in my ongoing series, “God couldn’t be bothered to Google ‘good parenting techniques,’ and it shows. A lot.” This week, the Cain and Abel story. Aside from inspiring an awesome transport and warehousing service, this story is that of two brothers, the sons of Adam and Eve, a story which I will now tell. I’d like to call myself out for using inconsistent tenses in my first two posts, leaving my inner English teacher screaming at me and crying himself to sleep, so I’ll now apologize and switch permanently to the literary present. Cain is a farmer. Abel is a shepherd. The two of them give God some ground-fruit and sheep, respectively. God is all about the sheep, but I guess ground-fruit isn’t really his thing. Guess it’s true what Christians say… God loves ewe. I’ll wait for the laughter to die down.
So now Cain is sad because God doesn’t like his ground-fruit. God gives him His trademark mystic “just deal with me” speech, and Cain is having exactly none of it. Only, instead of doing something constructive or maybe at least talking it out with God, he flips out and kills Abel, presumably by beating him to death with a gourd. Then God banishes Cain, which probably would hurt more if the place he’s been staying in weren’t basically a punishment given to him and his parents because Eden is too good for them. Then God tells Cain that he’ll wander the earth forever, but in exchange he gets ultra mega divine protection. So Cain goes off and wanders forever until he di- ha, I’m just messing with you. A wife materializes out of nowhere, and he settles down with her in a cute-sounding place named Nod. You sure showed him, God.
There’s a couple of points I want to make. According to my footnotes, Nod translates as “wandering.” Meaning, Cain settled down in a land called “wandering” with his wife. That’s deep and beautiful if you ask me.
Oh, and the wife? A lot of people ask where the heck she came from. My theory is something along the lines of something my father once said: he sees the creation story as being representative of the creation of all of humanity, with a bunch of little groups all having their own struggles and sins and God moving them all along. Adam and Eve are just an example of typical people at the time. It’s sort of like how, if you’re reading a novel, you take the cast of characters to be simply a set of characters available in the setting of the book, but there are other yet-unnamed characters in the book’s world who can be introduced at any time.
So what’s my big message this week? Well, I think my big one is kind of a scary message from a scary story: you can do bad things. “God” isn’t going to stop you. And, since this is for my non-religious audience anyway, let’s get deep here: when I say “God,” I don’t usually mean God. “God” is a metaphor for everyone else. He will absolutely look at what you give Him and move on, then eagerly lap up what your brother gives Him. If you get upset with this injustice, the most He’ll do is tell you not to do anything rash. He definitely won’t try to make you feel better. If you ignore Him and lash out, He’ll find out, and He’ll punish you. But also, you’ll live, and you’ll learn to deal with it. And yes, there are instances where these things don’t work out the way I just said they do, where there’s a clear right and wrong, and where the bad guy always gets punished. That’s the ideal situation, which is what we like to pretend God/”God” gives us. But what we’re learning here is that “God” doesn’t give us the ideal situation. We focus a lot on Cain, but look at Abel. He did everything right, and he still died. Sometimes life sucks, and the world’s best guess at an answer can be to try to even the score a little bit.
“Um… that’s really depressing and not at all helpful. I come here to feel like I can live my life better after reading this blog.” I hope someone thought that; that’s the kind of reader I want at least one of. Yes, it is really depressing. We live in a world that can be really awful sometimes, and this story shows that really clearly. But it all started when someone lost control of himself and did something to hurt someone else. And I know you don’t plan on killing people. I hope you don’t, anyway. But we all lose control sometimes in this crazy world and do things that hurt people. Do less of that. Talk to your Abel and ask him for help. And if you do kill your Abel, don’t be afraid to ask your “God” for a lighter sentence. You might get one, and, trust me, you’re going to get punishment enough with that. And if you’re the “God,” accept the ground-fruit, or, if you can’t, try to help your Cain take up shepherding. It’s the least you can do.
Buy more Heath bars! Thanks for your time.
Some of you may have been slightly angry about the verses last week. It is a little irritating to think that all of humanity is burdened with sin because two people ate some fruit. Worry not! The human race escalates pretty quickly when it comes to sinning. In one generation, we go from disobeying our father’s orders and public (if we can call Eden that) nudity to murdering our brother. Yay, us!
The story of Cain and Abel is a haunting one. The deterioration of humanity is disturbingly fast. But this story also just makes me sad. Here we are at the dawn of the human existence, and we are already killing each other. And the bloodshed certainly does not end here, in the Bible or history in general. I digress.
So what provokes Cain to kill Abel? God favors Abel’s sacrifice, and Cain gets pissy. He takes his brother into the field and kills him. Jealousy can lead people to do some pretty terrible things, and the Bible does not lack in examples.
God punishes Cain for what he has done by condemning him to be a wanderer. Cain fears that anyone who finds him will surely kill him. Here we have one of the Bible’s plotholes: who the heck is Cain afraid of if he is one of four (er…now three) living humans? Some say that Adam and Eve have had more “daughters and sons” than we are introduced to in the Bible, while others argue that God may have created other races of humans as well. (This same question is posed when we discover that Cain takes a wife and has children by her. Most likely she is a sister.) Nonetheless, God protects Cain by marking him. Any who kills him will suffer vengeance seven times over (yikes). The rest of the verses are dedicated to describing Cain’s descendents and clarifying that we cannot all trace ourselves back to this fratricidal figure: Adam and Eve have another child, Seth, and his line will produce the fathers of the Jewish faith.
There are two sections of this chapter that I think are of particular note, and they’re the ones that stay with me. God’s words to Cain before he kills Abel are as follows: “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.” God can see in Cain that sin tempts him. And these words apply to all of us. We must master sin, or it will consume us.
When God asks where Abel is, Cain replies with a particularly haunting line as well. He says, “I do not know…. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Aside from being full of sass and passive-aggression, Cain’s question begs for an answer. Are we the keepers of our fellow human beings? Must we take care of each other? For me, the answer is a resounding yes. We must, as members of this human family, be one another’s keepers. However, if we forget or reject this role, as the story of Cain and Abel illustrates, it is frighteningly easy for us to tear each other apart.
Hosanna in the highest. Thanks for reading!
