By Kristina Emmons
The story of brothers Cain and
Abel is legendary as the tale of the first recorded murder, and it was brought
about by sibling rivalry. Cain was the firstborn of Adam and Eve after their
unfortunate incident in the Garden of Eden. Prior to that life was pretty
simple. They had only to take care of the food trees in the garden, which
appears to have been light labor since a river watered the garden for them, and
there is no record of hardship or suffering. God walked with them daily in the
garden.
After Adam and Eve disobeyed
God and ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil there came a
separation between God and man. They could no longer have free access to him,
and there were other consequences. One was that the ground would be hard to
till instead of giving yield easily as it had before. Child-bearing would be
painful and eventually death would come. Death is always the consequence of
sin, according to the Bible. In all, the separation from God meant life would
contain plenty of hardship. Adam and Eve were banished from the garden and they
started a new way of life: toiling to survive. This leads to Cain and Abel. The
story can be read in Genesis 4:2-16 in the Bible.
It opens that Abel kept flocks as a
shepherd and Cain worked the soil.
Now that the land was hard to work, we can
imagine Cain put plenty of effort into growing food. Naturally he must have
been proud of his accomplishments; he might have even felt what he did was more
worthy of approval than herding animals like Abel. In any case, when making an
offering to God Cain offered from his crops and God did not look favorably on
the offering, but Abel’s offering from the first of his new flock was accepted.
There was jealousy directed at Abel afterwards. I wonder if Cain had a textbook
sibling rivalry thought, ‘He always gets it easy! Everything he does gets
rewarded but I’m always being shafted!’
God even spoke to Cain, asking
why he was angry. He told him it was his own fault for not doing right and we warned
him not to give in to sin but to have power over it. By this I can only assume
God referred to the boiling anger within that had the potential to get the best
of Cain. He must not have listened because later Cain led Abel into a field and
attacked and killed him.
God said to Cain, “Where is
your brother Abel?” and Cain replied, “I don’t know, am I my brother’s keeper?”
God replies, “What have you
done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” He
proclaims Cain is now under a curse, that even if he works the ground he won’t
be able to get anything to grow because it swallowed up his brother’s blood. He
was to be a restless wanderer from that point on and he basically had to leave
where he lived. He feared he will be killed by anyone he would come across but
God said he would spare him from that.
There aren’t listed how many other
children were born after Cain and Abel or how old they were but we can assume by
Cain’s fear of being killed that there were a significant amount of people born
by this point (after all, the Bible states a little later that Adam lived over
900 years! Human lifespan was later cut significantly). Cain and Abel couldn’t
have been very young and they had a history, likely a competitive one.
Going back to what might have been
unacceptable about Cain’s offering to God; it was customary to give thanks
offerings with the very best of the first of the flocks and crops. There were
also sin offerings with strict rules as to the animal, often a lamb, which had
to be unblemished and a first born. The
shed blood was to be a temporary payment for sin and a painful reminder that
sin has terrible consequences. With Adam and Eve, God made them clothing from
animal skins before leaving the garden, another instance of shed blood after
wrongdoing. Quoting Hebrews 9:22: “In fact, the law requires that nearly
everything be cleansed with blood,
and without the shedding of blood there is
no forgiveness.” Such offerings took place in designated Jewish temples until
the last temple was destroyed in 70 AD, but Christians believe Jesus’
crucifixion constituted the final sacrificial sin offering for humanity as the
Lamb of God.
All that said, we don’t know if Cain
was making a sin offering without an animal or if perhaps it was a stingy
thanksgiving offering made up of inferior produce. Either way Abel had nothing
to do with it but Cain still killed him, probably as a result of many years of
pent up jealousy and/or hatred. Becoming a restless wanderer afterward likely
meant Cain was at the mercy of others for the rest of his life.
Fitting after he’d been so merciless
with his brother.