FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS IN THE BIBLE

Instructor: Barbara Sutnick
sutnick@internet-zahav.net

Week 8
SIBLING RELATIONSHIPS: CAIN AND ABEL SET THE STAGE

Sibling rivalry can be an everyday disaster in some families. It ranges from petty spats to murderous catastrophes. Most often, however, it is of the variety that leaves parents tearing out their hair and wondering alternatively how they will get through the day and how they have failed. Coping with it is perhaps the most challenging and perennial parenting issue. It is so difficult to decide just when, where, and how much to intervene when siblings squabble. Even the best of parents become emotionally involved themselves, sometimes showing favoritism that fuels rather than extinguishes the fires. Since the family is the arena in which children learn how to flex their verbal and their physical muscles, a certain amount of sibling rivalry is normal and even desirable. By fighting with each other, brothers and sisters prepare themselves in a relatively safe, familiar, and loving environment for contending with outsiders. But how normal is normal? How do we know when siblings are crossing the line in a way that could result in lasting physical or psychological damage? Who is responsible for safeguarding the relationship between siblings? To what extent is it even reasonable to turn to the Bible for insights into these questions?

No sooner were there siblings born into the world of Genesis then there was rivalry. On the one hand this should be an indication of how normal and human this problem is. On the other hand, the story of Cain and Abel is the absolute worst case scenario, resulting in the horror of fratricide. Let us try to understand the causes of the brothers' rivalry, the contributions of others around them, and why things got so out of hand. We will also discuss to what extent this story can serve as an instructive model for us as family members and as members of the human race. Please read Genesis 4:1-16 and begin to ponder the questions I have just raised before continuing with this lecture.

Those familiar with the song from Rogers' and Hammersteins' musical "Oklahoma!" called "The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends" know that this is in fact asking a great deal. Although the farmer and cowman exchange friendly and not-so-friendly put-downs of all kinds during the song, their problem is a basic one: They have competing interests. Farmers want to agriculturally develop the same land that cowmen prefer to leave wild and fallow for grazing their animals. If competition was intense for the vast land resources of the American West of the pioneers, imagine the rivalry between the farmer and shepherd in the hilly, thorny and rocky terrain just outside of Eden (I am, of course, thinking of the Land of Israel, more specifically the view out my window in Gush Etzion - my personal view is that could it have been no other!?!) Thus when we read that "Abel became a keeper of sheep, and Cain became a tiller of soil" (Gen. 4:2) we should recognize this as an early signifier of trouble.

The trouble begins when the two brothers each offer up their produce to the Lord as a sacrifice. God accepts Abel's offering and rejects Cain's. Cain is very distressed at this (indicating that he was by no means a "godless" person, but rather cared deeply about his relationship with God). The Lord chastises him for his disappointment and warns him that he must try to master his potential for sin. After that Cain begins to speak to Abel and then suddenly kills Abel.

Let us look carefully at the story up to this point. There are many details omited from the text and many questions generated. Why was Cain's offering rejected by the Lord and Abel's accepted? What do Cain and Abel speak or argue about before the situation becomes tragically physical? Before continuing to read, take a few moments to jot down your version of Cain and Abel's last verbal duel and/or an expanded dialogue between God and Cain. (You might also wish to ask yourself where your ideas came from. Do they reflect your own sibling/parenting experience?)

In the text itself we see that different wording is used to describe the two offerings. Abel brought "the choicest of the firstlings of his flock" while Cain simply brought "an offering". Abel does his best to please the Lord, and this is acknowledged by the Lord's acceptance of the sacrifice. Cain was content to just get by, and resents that his efforts are not appreciated by God in the same way.

This type of behavior is not uncommon between siblings. Two siblings perform the same task to different standards, and when the parent praises the better effort, the slighted child says "that's not fair!" If the under-achiever is unable or unwilling to improve and thereby earn greater appreciation, his/her anger grows. In cases where a child is UNABLE to compete with his/her sibling, it truly is unfair for the parent to withhold appreciation for his/her best efforts. This however is not the way the Lord evaluated Cain's attitude. The Lord says to Cain: "Surely if you do right there is uplift. But if you do not do right, sin is the demon at the door, whose urge is toward you, yet YOU CAN BE HIS MASTER" (4:7). The Lord gets an "A" for parenting here: He criticizes the behavior while validating the child and maintaining suitably high expectations for him.

Yet is it possible that the symbolic Parent brought "personal baggage" (so to speak) to this encounter that led Him to reject one sacrifice over the other? Remember that the Lord had just cursed the ground in Genesis 3:17 because of Adam and Eve's sin. Perhaps an offering coming "from the ground" would appear diminished from the start in God's eyes. After all, the more valuable, central Temple offerings listed in the biblical book of Leviticus come from the animal kingdom, with lesser, accompanying offerings coming from among the grains. Another consideration is that shepherds tend to be favored throughout the Bible. The patriarchs were all shepherds, as was Moses, King David and many of the prophets. It is undeniable that the shepherd is a favorable biblical image for gentle yet firm leadership. Our point, of course, is not to "psychoanalyze" God, but rather to remind ourselves that parents' own background associations can lead them to treat their children differently and thereby engender jealousy and anger. To universalize the same message, people who get less in life, especially for reasons that are not obviously related to their own performance, will usually take it out on others when they get fed up.

The Lord is of course not Cain and Abel's only parent (even though Eve exclaims "I have gained a male child with the help of the Lord" at Cain's birth). We are told nothing of the relationship between Adam and Eve and their sons, and also very little about that between Cain and Abel. The text is curt to the point of obscurity in describing their confrontation: "And Cain [said] to his brother Abel when they were in the field, and Cain arose [to] Abel and slew him" (vs. 8). This is a verse that clearly calls out DaRSHeni! ("explain me!") Rashi says that although there were many midrashim written to flesh out their conversation, the plain meaning is that Cain first started to argue with Abel, began to get rough, and then killed him.

Abel and Cain's disagreements must have begun long before. Picking up on the natural rancor between shepherds and farmers, we read in the midrash that one day one of Abel's sheep trampled over one of Cain's fields. Cain raged at his brother "what right have you to let your sheep pasture in my garden?" Abel retorted: "What right have you to use the products of my sheep to make your garments and your tents?" (Yasher Bereshit 9a) This midrash underscores the sad fact that although shepherds and farmers are natural rivals, they are also inter-dependent. The farmer needs the wool and meat that the sheep provides; the shepherd and his animals need to eat the farm produce. The division of labor that characterizes human civilization creates competing interests at the same time that it multiplies conveniences and products for all.

A series of midrashim in Bereshit Rabba (22, 16) attempt to explain what the brothers were arguing about. It all began with the brothers' effort to divide the world between them. One took the lands and the other took the moveable goods. Then one said "the land on which you are standing is mine - get off!"; and the other replied "the clothes you are wearing are mine - take them off!" In the course of this, Cain slew his brother. A second midrash sees it another way: They both took land and movables. What they were fighting about was upon whose field will the Temple come to be built. A third explanation is that they were disputing over Eve.

Nehama Leibowitz points out that these three midrashim explain what is at the root of mankind's sorry tendency toward bloodshed and murder. "According to the first, they are prompted by economic considerations; they quarrel over material possessions. According to the second, bloodshed is prompted by religious and ideological reasons, each side maintaining that the Temple should be built in his domain (it should control Holy turf) and that his religion should be favored. The third view traces the roots of bloodshed and strife to sexual passion - "they were disputing over Eve" (Studies in Bereshit, pg. 39). I would add that the third midrash could also represent the rivalry between brothers for parental love and approval, and by extension that of other authority figures. As Leibowitz says, the rabbis were not so concerned here with explaining the biblical verse as with eliciting universal truths from it. Cain and Abel represent Everyman. "They" were arguing about anything and everything, since that is what human beings do. When the stakes become very high, and the arguments grow too passionate, violence and death can be the expected outcomes.

After the murder, the Lord asks Cain (vs. 9) "Where is your brother, Abel?" Cain says he does not know and adds the famous "Am I my brother's keeper?" The Lord is insistent, saying "Hark your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground" (vs. 10b). He then punishes Cain, condemning him to be an eternal wanderer on earth, yet at the same time putting a mark on him to ward off any who would try to kill him.

Similar to what we have seen in Lesson 1 with Adam and Eve, God approaches Cain with restraint, asking him where his brother is, even though God knows full well what happened. Unlike Adam and Eve, who had violated a direct prohibition, we must consider the fact that Cain was never commanded not to shed blood. He also really did not know his own strength. What is more, Cain had no basis on which to causally connect physical attack to the snuffing out of life. There was as yet no experience of human death in the world for him to draw upon. From this we can understand why God does not pass the death penalty on Cain. (In Genesis chapter 9, just after the Great Flood, He will specifically legislate for capital punishment in the case of murder.)

The rabbis tell us that the Lord at first spoke gently to Cain to give him an opportunity to show remorse and repent. When he does not, God points out the irrefutable evidence of the blood-soaked ground. The word for blood in Hebrew is in the plural, which of course invites commentary. The most satisfying explanation is that it is not only Abel's blood, but that of all the generations that could have sprung from him that is crying out. Indeed the slayer of Abel slew an entire potential world!

Cain's rhetorical retort shows his complete refusal to take responsibility for the crime. Midrash Tanhuma brings a beautiful parable which illustrates the spirit of Cain's remark. "A thief stole articles by night and got away. In the morning the gatekeeper caught him and asked him why he stole. To this the thief replied: It is true that I stole, but I am a thief and I did not neglect my job. You, however, are the gatekeeper. Why did you neglect your job?!" So too, Cain challenges God, with "how did You let me do this? You created me and placed within me violent impulses. What is more, by not treating me like you treated Abel, You increased my jealousy of him."

Another of Cain's excuses can be deduced from the language of the text. The Hebrew of Cain's retort translates literally as "The keeper of my brother [am] I?" The Hebrew word used for "I" in this verse is ANoCHI, which is more esoteric than the usual ANI. The most immediate association with ANoCHI is the first word of the Ten Commandments "I am the Lord...". Thus we can paraphrase Cain's remark as "The keeper of my brother [is] ANoCHI -- that is You, Yourself, Lord?!" Read this way, Cain is cleverly pointing out that God is the One indirectly responsible. He created an imperfect world, failed to warn or restrain the players, and did not look after Able. In addition, it was God who decreed that human mortality be introduced into the world in the first place. (Please note that the midrash genre is not troubled by borrowing language from the Ten Commandments, which appears much later in the Bible. Midrash works according to an extremely fluid sense of time.)

At first glance, Cain's arguments are good ones. It is true that God introduced into His creation both death and the propensity for evil. Yet He did not withhold a pivotal ingredient from humanity: the ability to triumph over one's impulses. God had already countered all of Cain's arguments very effectively even before the brothers came to blows: "you can be [sin's] master." Humans are not automatons. Their ability to choose to fight the "evil" within distinguishes them from animals, and is the banner of their dignity. However, it also takes from humans the luxury of throwing responsibility for transgression fully onto God or any other power.

In the arena of the family it is the love that siblings develop toward each other that ideally influences them to harness their greedier impulses and to behave generously and appropriately. If parents raise their children in an atmosphere that engenders such love then this will go a long way toward mitigating the primal conflicts that are inherent to the sibling bond. Here we see why the Cain and Abel story is so difficult to apply to the family. One tremendous silence in this story is the lack of perceptible evidence of love between the brothers. There are several possible reasons for this. First, the narrative is extremely terse. The brothers' more positive dealings may simply have been left out. Second, Adam and Eve had to be extremely inexperienced parents. From the Bible's viewpoint, they do not have the benefit of the Torah as their guide, or even of the Noachide laws (7 moral laws traditionally understood to have been given to Noah after the flood). Furthermore, they had never been the recipients of parenting; nor did they have any experience growing up with siblings -- or growing up at all! Cain and Abel are the first children ever to be born, and their childlike parents (consider their behavior in the garden) probably made every mistake in the book! We certainly do not see them stepping in to mitigate the hostility that Cain was harboring for Abel. A third reason why we do not see whatever brotherly love the boys may have had for each other is that Cain and Abel are flat characters. They are not developed as flesh and blood people that the reader can "feel", as are so many of the other biblical protagonists we are meeting. Their deadly rivalry is shown in stark relief. Cain and Abel enter the biblical stage for the purpose of their famous fight, act out their parts, thereby establishing an eternal paradigm, and exeunt!

We are left with this: the question of what we are to make of Cain's murder of Abel is only important if we can universalize it. It goes beyond the two brothers in question, and even beyond the family context to include the brotherhood of mankind. Perhaps the most eloquent way to illustrate a universal application of this story is to bring a powerful poem by modern Israeli poet Dan Pagis. Before continuing this lecture, please read the poem more than once (it is cyclical) and follow through in your own mind the associations it raises.

"Written in Pencil in a Sealed Freight Car"

			Here in this carload
			I Eve
			With my son Abel
			If you see my older son
			Cain son of man [Adam]
			Tell him that I [am]

Let us relate to the now-familiar symbols in the poem. The sealed freight car is, of course, an allusion to transports used during the Holocaust, history's worst mass murder. Eve, the mother of all life, is with her son Abel (whose fate, we know, is to be murdered). She tries to get a message to Cain. We know that Cain signifies "murderer", and yet Eve does not disown him as her son. With this the poet affirms that Cain too is human, and cannot be dismissed as "some monster." What is more, he is "son of man/Adam". The prophet Ezekiel, most famous for his vision of the dry bones that come to life in the end of days (chap. 37), is also called "Son of Man" repeatedly by God. (But what is it that is being regenerated here -- is it the victims, or the insidiously human specter of murder?) In Hebrew the idiom "BeN ADaM" (literally "son of man/Adam) means "a good person". Is Eve trying to remind her son, Cain, that he can do better (as did God in Gen. 4:7)? And, where is Adam in this poem? Could he represent those who share responsibility for the crime by being silent and not intervening?

Returning to the Bible, we are left with a world that is truly tainted. Adam and Eve have been exiled from the Garden of Eden because of their disobedience, and now their son Abel is no more. Cain has been sentenced to eternal wandering because of his crime of fratricide. The recently cursed earth has received the first victim of human mortality. What lessons can we derive from all of this? First of all, the Bible tells us that the world is not Eden and that people were created with a selfishness and aggressiveness that they must sometimes summon up all their strength to control. This is at once tragic for mankind and comforting to parents. It is not because parents have done wrong that their children fight; but because all the emotional, economic and sociological cards are stacked in a way that sets the scene for conflict. The Bible has no shortage of illustrations of the ugliness of sibling rivalry, nor of the murderous desires of humanity. We will look at some of these in the lessons that follow.

All rights reserved. No part of this lecture may be reproduced for distributuion except by permission of the Instructor.

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT

1. To what extent is the story of Cain and Abel instructive to those wishing to understand sibling rivalry? In what ways is it inapplicable?

2. Cain gives in to his furious passions immediately. Why do you think God's warning to Cain was ineffective?

3. Are you convinced by any of Cain's midrashic arguments that God should share responsibilty for his crime?

4. Do you think the Dan Pagis poem identifies the Holocaust as a logical or necessary outcome of the story in Genesis? Why or why not? Would you agree or disagree with such an identification? Explain.

5. What role would you give to God in Dan Pagis' poem?

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