Family Feuds: Cain and Abel

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.

Kristina Emmons lives in greater Seattle, WA with her husband and two children. She hopes to convey a sense of community and justice through her writing.

Wife-selling customs in England

By Kristina Emmons

In England between the late eighteenth all the way on through the mid-nineteenth century there occurred a fascinating but little spoken of custom called wife-selling. There is an account of this practice in The Mayor of Casterbridge, but otherwise is not often accounted for, perhaps because it was not terribly commonplace.

Wife-selling was an illegal practice but one many people felt was their only alternative to divorce. Until the Marriage Act of 1857 was passed, it would take an official Act of Parliament to pass a divorce, along with a prohibitive price tag to the tune of around $20,000 in today’s terms. Unhappily married partners of low means eventually came up with an alternative way to separate through the process of a public sale.

In order to understand a wife-sale more in-depth, we need to keep in mind the husband was not only considered the protector and provider of his wife, but her owner. Therefore he was seen as having the right to sell her as he would any possession. The law did not support wife-selling, but in other senses it very much defined the wife as the husband’s possession. Through marriage all that was hers became his.

For an unhappily married couple, the wife-sale provided a way out of the dilemma. It was certainly more honorable than the husband deserting the woman, as many did and were sometimes prosecuted for. The husband could pass responsibility onto another willing party and the woman could come out of the deal with a hopefully more suitable partner and something of an untarnished name in the eyes of the community, which would have been an integral part of their lives. It is recorded that sometimes the man she was sold to was already her lover, or at least someone she and her husband had prearranged. But this wasn’t always the case.

 Michael Henchard, on the way to a fair to sell his wife and child,

From The Mayor of Casterbridge

Generally the custom took place in rural areas in the public marketplace to ensure as many witnesses as possible. The husband would register his wife as a good of sale and a rope was placed loosely around her neck, arm, or waist (a supposedly humorous nod to the way beasts were led to sale). She would be led up to an auction block or platform to be bid on by the jeering crowd. The crowds loved this sort of sport.

As mentioned above, generally someone was prearranged to win the bidding. But not always; sometimes the auction was truly won by the highest bidder!  Imagine you were a lonely or widowed farmer who could really use a woman’s helping hand—particularly if you had children to raise. What an opportunity!

After the winner was chosen, the auctioneer closed the sale and money or goods were exchanged along with the toll ticket that was used to register the woman for sale and the halter.  The winner would take the woman home to live with him, but before then a trip to the tavern might be in order to celebrate the transaction. Drinks were on tab of the former husband. How the woman felt at the other end of this is anyone’s guess.

A quieter way to go about a sale was through an ad in the newspaper, perhaps especially if one’s wife did not consent? Still, the law was strict in its stance that the new couple was living in adultery, both a moral and a legal transgression, and that any children born under the new union would be legally illegitimate. Prosecution for wife-selling is on the records, but overall a blind eye was turned.

To be fair, it is generally agreed upon that if the woman appeared to be in distress, the sale would be halted, but there is no way to be sure every woman consented. The practice largely petered off by mid-nineteenth century, and was very seldom recorded at all by century’s end.

So you see wife-selling was not only a solution to an unhappy marriage, it was also a playful jab at convention. However, what if the wife did not consent? And what if she was pregnant? This is something I explore in my novel, Roeing Oaks. 

Kristina Emmons lives in greater Seattle, WA with her husband and two children. She hopes to convey a sense of community and justice through her writing.