Below
are some notes from a study that I am working on now. In this section, Cain is
burning with anger against his brother Abel. God had just provided Cain with
the wisdom, that if Cain did it, would have given him power over his anger and
revealed the image of God through his actions. But, the Bible has also revealed
prior to this account, that through man’s freewill, he has the power to act
like a wild predatory animal. In the scene below, Cain comes face-to-face with
his brother Abel. What will he do?
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Cain,
like a wild predatory animal, rose up and attacked his brother. Cain committed
the first murder in the Bible – and it
was brother against brother. Here, the Bible is expressing one of the most
profound, if saddest, truths in the history of religions when it shows how an
originally well-intentioned act of divine worship became the cause of the loss
of human life.[i] Again, we
do not know how much time passed between the murder and what took place next:
And YAHWEH said to Cain, "Where is Abel your brother?"[ii]
Cain’s
answer has become one of the most famous verses of the Bible:
And he said, "I do not know. Am I my brother's
keeper?"[iii]
As
pointed out above, the word “brother”
appears in the section seven times, a stylistic feature that focuses
specifically upon the fraternal relationship. The biblical text clearly
establishes emphatically this moral principle:
Man is indeed
his brother’s keeper and all homicide is
at the same
time fratricide – the act of killing one’s brother.
The
culpability of Cain rests upon an unexpressed assumption of the existence of a
moral law operative from the beginning of time as we saw in the first account –
life is the highest value of the Creator. [iv] Now
we learn YAHWEH values human life above religious rituals.
Cain’s
famous answer to YAHWEH, in addition to originating the great tradition of
answering a question with another question, its substance suggests that Cain
realized he had done something so
terrible that he would deny it even to YAHWEH.[v]
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SHALOM
& Be Empowered!
Jim
Myers
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