In the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis, we see what appears to be an initially successful act of creation,
1 followed by a cascading series of disasters that result in a cursed world dominated by coercion. It gets worse.
Most of us are probably familiar with the story of Cain and Abel in the fourth chapter of Genesis. Adam and Eve's first two children, Cain and Abel, grow up and make offerings to Yahweh. Cain, an agriculturalist, offers the produce of the ground. Abel, a pastoralist, offers animals from his flock. But Yahweh is fussy, and he prefers Abel's offering over Cain's. It isn't spelled out here, but later in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament it is made clear that Yahweh has a penchant for
Blood Sacrifice. Why a cosmological superbeing should care whether humans make offerings to it or not--much less play favorites among his children or have a fetish for bloodshed--is a mystery.
However, according to the book of Genesis, the origins of religious strife stem from Yahweh's preferential treatment of one of his children over another, and the fact that he's picky about religious observances, with only one specific sort being acceptable to him.
Were it not for this sort of doctrine, all of humanity's religions would be able to coexist peacefully. Unfortunately, each of humanity's religions teaches that gods will accept only one sort of worship and that (of course) each particular religion is the one that knows what the divine (however defined) wants, and its followers are the favored children of the gods.
The seventh verse may indicate that Yahweh had already informed his humans about his Need for Blood,
2 and that if Cain traded his crops for sacrificial animals and slaughtered those for Yahweh, that his offerings would be accepted. Still, if Yahweh is to be credited with creating a hundred billion galaxies, isn't this whole thing just a little silly? If you had two children, and one draws a picture for you and the other makes you a sculpture, would you really say, "No, I prefer drawings. If you want me to show you approval, you should have your brother draw a picture for you, and give me that"?
Out of jealousy over Yahweh's favor, Cain kills Abel. Yahweh, with his supposed omniscient foreknowledge, makes no move to prevent it. At this point, he has not even expressed a prohibition against murder. Yahweh does punish Cain for the murder by proclaiming that he will be "a fugitive and vagabond," and the land will no longer produce crops for him (4:11-12). This curse proves to be impotent. In verse 17, we are told that Cain builds a city. Cities usually depend on settled agriculture for their existence. To organize the human labor needed to build a city and have the authority to name it, Cain would have had to be the very opposite of a fugitive and vagabond: a
ruler.
The interpretation of the Genesis 1 creation account discussed in the first footnote may provide an answer to such mysteries as where Cain got his wife, what people he was afraid of (v. 14), and where he found people to build and sustain a city. In verse 16, we are told that Cain "went out from the presence of Yahweh" and dwelt in a named country, the land of Nod. Who named it? Could it be that the other Elohim made their own humans, and that these were the people who Cain feared would kill him, who ended up building his city for him? It appears that Cain was able to escape the effects of Yahweh's curse on the ground by departing from his "presence." This implies that Yahweh's rule was limited to some specific portion of the world small enough for a man to escape on foot. The other alternative is that Yahweh didn't really mean it. Maybe he made Cain a "spiritual" vagabond and fugitive, or it was a metaphor for...something.
In response to Cain's fear that other people (descended from Adam or otherwise) would kill him for murder, Yahweh makes a surprising move: he places a special mark of protection on Cain, and threatens to punish anyone who kills him sevenfold (4:15). We can only wonder why Cain suddenly receives such special divine favor now that he has become a murderer. Could it be that Yahweh accepted the murder of Abel as a human sacrifice? The author of Hebrews appears to have thought so, comparing the blood of Abel to the blood of Christ--which we all know was offered to Yahweh as an atoning sacrifice (Hebrews 12:24). Cain's descendants get the message:
And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.
--Genesis 4:24
In other words, Yahweh had established a judicial precedent that, if you kill an innocent person you will not be punished, but if you kill a murderer, the murderer's death will be avenged sevenfold.
3 As if this wasn't bad enough, Yahweh up and
leaves for over a thousand years.
4 When he returns, he is shocked--shocked!--to find a violent society (Genesis 6:5, 11). The violence of this antediluvian society is so extreme that Yahweh regrets creating people (6:6). All the clues in the narrative point to Yahweh himself as the cause of this violence.
First, there is the Cain Precedent. And note that the issue over which Cain killed Abel was:
what sort of offering is acceptable to Yahweh? One of the core teachings of Judaism and Christianity is that the blood of an innocent being must be shed in order to atone for "sins," that this is in fact the only way to have "sins" forgiven. The Cain Precedent establishes, by Yahweh's own words, that the killer of an innocent person is "covered," and it is not permissible to kill them in retaliation.
While the antediluvian society is described as extraordinarily violent, the violence is not random. The antediluvian patriarchs are described as having enormous lifespans. Even with a superhuman resistance to aging, this would not make narrative sense if the streets ran with blood and every trip to the store involved epic battles to the death. Noah is able to build his ark with impunity. Constructing such a large ship would require a division-of-labor society. Some people mine metals, others forge iron into tools, nails, etc., others cut timber, and others hew it into lumber, others (like Noah) learn the building trades. This can't happen in a society under the pall of extreme random violence. The person who makes nails can only do this if he can be confident that someone else is producing food, clothes, etc., and that he will be able to exchange his nails for the other things he needs. A half-built oversized wooden ship isn't going anywhere, so Noah has to be safe to stay in one place for the duration of the project.
New Testament passages (Hebrews 11:7, I Peter 3:20, II Peter 2:5) attribute to Noah the role of prophet, condemning the sins of that society and warning of the destruction to come. Moral critics and prophets of doom are never popular with those they inveigh against. The Genesis account does not attribute this role to Noah, but the lone prophet railing against the evils of a doomed society is a common Biblical trope.
The ultimate authority for Christians is Jesus. According to the Gospels, he described the environment of the antediluvian society as one of
normalcy:
They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe [sic] entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all.
--Luke 17:27
The implications from the Genesis account (the story of Noah) as well as the traditional view implied by the statements of other Biblical authors indicate that the legendary violence of the antediluvian society, though extreme, was regulated in such a way that things like superhuman life spans, division of labor, family life ("marrying and giving in marriage") and a perception of normalcy (so that the End of the World comes as a shock) were possible.
How would a society based on the Cain Precedent work? Since there would be a high demand for innocents (verified non-murderers) for sacrifice, parents would need to be extremely vigilant in protecting their children. Yet, when those children began to reach adulthood, it would be necessary for them to get their hands on someone to sacrifice, as a kind of "coming of age." This would represent a significant challenge, since they could not kill the defending parents (who are presumably already "blooded") without bringing Yahweh's sevenfold punishment down on themselves. The parents, however, would be free to kill them, knowing they are not "blooded." The young person on a quest for a victim would have to be able to subdue the parents without killing them. While the rich might be able to purchase slave children or breed them from their own slave stock, the slaves themselves, as well as peasantry and anyone unable to afford slaves (slaves would probably be more expensive in a Cain Precedent society) would have to seize a victim. It might even be a point of honor, if providing the proper sacrifice to Yahweh required one to face mortal danger.
Does the narrative provide any evidence for such a custom? Look again at Lamech's pronouncement to his wives:
And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.
--Genesis 4:24
The "to my wounding" and "to my hurt" in the King James English means "for wounding [me] and "for my hurt," i.e., Lamech killed the young man because the young man attacked him, "wounding" and "hurting" him. The Hebrew word for "wounding" is
petsa (Strong's #H6482).
5 It comes from the root
patsa' (#H6481) meaning "to bruise, wound, wound by bruising (or crushing)." That is, blunt trauma. The word translated "hurt" is
chabbuwrah (#H2250), which refers to a "stripe," or the wound made by a whip. The implication is that the young man was attacking him with non-lethal force (i.e. not a sword or spear that would create a cutting or piercing wound).
Lamech expects that Yahweh will reward him with an extra-special degree of protection, avenging him "seventy and sevenfold." This implies he has strong reason to believe that the youth was not himself under the protection of the Cain Precedent. This makes sense if the boy
6 himself would represent a pleasing offering to Yahweh--"extra credit," as it were, for Lamech, who would already have gained his sevenfold protection/atonement for "sin" in his own coming-of-age rite. The act of killing the boy is a good thing, something to gather the wives together and proudly boast about.
And finally: what is the one thing that would make parents willing to endure living in a society where their children (arguably their sons in particular, since Abel was a male and girls generally don't count for much in the Bible) were always in danger of being kidnapped and murdered by intruders who could not be punished if they succeeded? Religion. Compare with the Islamic cult of suicide bombing, in which parents raise small children with the ideal of martyrdom, dressing them in little suicide bomber costumes for special occasions. Or the medieval Christian reverence for self-inflicted torture by people hoping to imitate the "sufferings of Christ."
All of this is a lot to read into these few verses. It is possible that the author of Genesis did not mean to imply an antediluvian society centered on the belief that each individual needed to sacrifice an innocent in order to have salvation and win Yahweh's protection from other killers. What is clear however, is that Yahweh established two precedents in the fourth chapter of Genesis: 1. Blood sacrifice is the only acceptable type of offering. 2. If you kill an innocent, Yahweh will avenge you sevenfold if someone kills you. Yahweh's protective mark on Cain would only be useful if the news of it were spread far and wide, and passed down to Adam and Seth's descendants. Lamech's tale indicates that the Cain Precedent was passed down from generation to generation, and believed.
It is the only reason available in the narrative for why the antediluvian society would have been marred by an extreme degree of violence not known in any society the Biblical authors and redactors would have been familiar with--including the notoriously savage Assyrian Empire. By issuing the Precedent without any sort of clarification that it applied uniquely to Cain for some reason, and then going on a thousand year vacation, Yahweh set into motion the ideas and events that led to the violence of the antediluvian society. All beginning with his rejection of non-violent vegetable offerings in favor of blood sacrifice. We will also see that it is only after the Flood that Yahweh finally acts to put an end to the Cain Precedent.
NOTES:
1. A good case can be made that Yahweh does not deserve credit for the successes of Genesis 1. First, the word translated "God" is "Elohim," a plural: that is, "Gods." The Elohim create in a very direct, assertively powerful way. Their stated intentions translate directly into desired results. "Let there be...and it was so." In contrast, Yahweh appears by name in Genesis 2, "creating" by means of manipulating pre-existing materials. He sculpts from the dust of the ground, breathes in "the breath of life" to animate his creations, engages in surgical operations, and so on. His intentions must pass through a stage of physical work before he sees results, and his efforts end in failure. The Elohim create man and woman simultaneously (1:27), initiate their relationship to humans with a
blessing rather than a command (1:28), offer no threats or prohibitions (1:28-30), and are fully satisfied with their creation (1:31)
2. While I will generally try to avoid imposing later (especially post-Torah) theological doctrines into the text of Genesis so that the narrative may be permitted to speak for itself, concepts from the Mosaic sacrificial law (e.g. "clean" animals) do make an anachronistic appearance in the Flood narrative.
3. How someone who avenges a murder can be killed seven times is unclear.
4. The length of time varies depending on which ancient text you use to calculate the time from the Cain and Abel incident to the Flood. The number of years between father and son in the genealogy of Adam's third son Seth differ from one text to another.
5. The Strong's Concordance numbers Hebrew and Greek words separately. The "H" in this notation stands for "Hebrew." The "H" does not appear in Strong's Concordance; rather, the Concordance writes the number for a Hebrew word in standard form, and italicizes a number for a Greek word.
6. Hebrew,
yeled, "child, boy, offspring, youth," Strongs #H3206.
