“The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair.”
These spiritual beings gave up the prerogatives of angelic life, having been seduced by the flesh. “Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain.” [Prv. 31: 30] But the true Son of God, moved by the neglect of our spiritual natures, became Incarnate of a chaste Virgin in order to lift us up above the angelic realm, so that we might become the new adopted ‘sons of God’.
“I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer.”
The wandering mind is a sign of unrepented anger and envy. “There is nothing more disposed to render the spirit inclined to desertion than troubled irascibility.” [Evagrius, Praktikos 21] It is notable that, when the murder of Abel is discovered, Cain issues no apology to God. Indeed, he challenges God and implies that God did nothing to stop him from committing murder. Cain’s wandering is a further consequence of his own willfulness, rather than an ad hoc punishment devised by God. As usual, the punishment is simply the effect of the sin upon the sinner.
Even without Cain’s repentance, God is merciful and listens to his plea for protection, ironic since Cain accused God of failing to protect Abel. This is surely a dynamic we all fall into in our relationship with God.
Compunction breaks the hard ground of the heart, allowing us to till it and sow the virtues. Cain’s failure to repent is projected onto the failure of the ground to ‘yield…its strength.’ [4: 12] We see that, paradoxically, the practice of compunction, which often has the appearance of weakness, is in fact a source of strength for those willing to admit falling short of the glory of God. This allows us to draw our strength, not from the material resources of our earthly natures, but from inexhaustible divine graces.
“ ‘The ground…has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.’ ”
The language here is intentionally sacrificial. In murdering his brother, Cain has not merely offended against an abstract moral precept, even if one ordained by God. He has, perhaps unwittingly, offered a sacrifice to the ‘chthonic’ gods of death, paid them homage, obeyed their arrogated prerogatives. Behind the failure of Cain’s initial offering of ‘fruit of the ground’ [4: 3] there may lie some kind of pact with the ‘gods of the ground’ which made the offering unacceptable to God. Notice that the text at 4: 3 does not specify that these are first-fruits, whereas Abel’s sacrifice is of a firstling. Had Cain already offered fruits of the ground to fertility gods?
And who would these pseudo-gods be? Have we even heard of such beings, at this early stage of Genesis? Or am I reading a supplementary mythology into this account? Certainly, the mythologies of the creation and fall are not told in full in the first chapters of Genesis: we do supplement these chapters with other notices regarding Leviathan and the fall of Lucifer. However, we should return for a moment to the curses of Genesis 3. There are two: the serpent is cursed and made to go about upon his belly (on the ground); and the ground itself is cursed. Instead of the ground naturally obeying God’s plan to be fertile, it now brings forth ‘thorns and thistles’, and the man will have to do battle with the ground to get his food. Finally, at death, the man and woman will return to the (cursed) ground, indicating that death itself is a type of covenant with the cursed ground, the realm of the serpent.
The man will be forced to ‘eat the plants of the field’ [3: 18]. This means that the ease of and beauty of the garden give way to the uncultivated wilderness as a place of back-breaking work. The wilderness, in many ancient urban-centered cultures such as Israel, is the place of un-creation, where demonic activity runs unchecked by God’s creative shalom or order. It seems to be the place where Cain is doing his work. And it seems to be the place where he has premeditated the immolation of his brother. He reveals this (in the Greek and Syriac version) by luring Abel out: “Let us go out to the field.” [4: 8]
“In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant (siah) of the field was yet in the earth and no herb (ēsev) of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground; but a mist went up from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”
Genesis 2: 4b-8
“Thou hast one daughter/Who redeems nature from the general curse.”
King Lear IV.vi.205
Here, we have, in the Hebrew mindset, the true ‘state of nature’, one rather different from the Hobbesian ‘red in tooth and claw’ version. Scholars of the Pentateuch, who typically regard the book of Genesis as a compilation from different sources, point out that in the previous chapter, ‘vegetation (deshe’)’ and ‘plants (ēsev)’ were already created by God. Since in chapter 2, there is said to be no plants or herbs in the fields, this is taken as evidence that the original story given in chapter 2 was written without any knowledge of chapter 1.
However, Rabbi Umberto Cassuto, in his work criticizing the ‘documentary hypothesis’, argued persuasively that the reference is to two different classes of plants. In chapter 1, we have plants in the ‘state of nature’, which God pronounces ‘good’. In chapter 2, the denial that there were plants and herbs ‘in the field’ does not deny the existence of all plants. Rather, ‘the field’, which connotes the wildness that was introduced into nature as part of the curse of Genesis 3: 17-19, does not contain any of this wild growth, including the specific genera of plants referred to as siah in Hebrew.
This rare word appears here and in three other instances in the Old Testament. In Genesis 21: 15, when Sarah convinces Abraham to drive out Hagar from the household, Hagar in desperation places her son Ishmael under ‘the bushes’. This is again in the wild, in the inhospitable ‘field’ (which, incidentally, is also where Cain lures Abel to murder him).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the other two instances of siah occur in the book of Job. These ‘bushes’ (or ‘shrubs’) appear in 30: 4 and then again in verse 7, and appear once more in ‘dry and desolate ground’, in a place where people are ‘driven out from among men’.
To return now to Genesis 2, we read that the Lord had not yet sent rain upon the earth. Indeed, the first time that we can say without contradiction that it does rain, is in chapter 7: ‘The windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.’ During this time, every creature of flesh not in Noah’s ark perished. Thus it is implied that rain is part of the ‘fallen’ dispensation, producing these wild shrubs and other plants ‘of the field’. Human beings were meant, in the original purity of creation, to dwell in a garden, in which water was supplied by this mysterious mist that went up from the earth. Why would this detail be mentioned about the earth being watered (literally ‘given to drink’) if there were no plants?
It is also worth noting that there is no man to till the ground, and yet God makes it fruitful. The Fathers of the Church, particularly in the Middle Ages, saw this detail as presaging the Incarnation of the divine Word of God. The fruitfulness of the earth immediately after its creation, despite there being ‘no man to till’ it, finds its mystical fulfillment in the conception of Christ of the Virgin Mary, who knew no man. For this fruitfulness, which depends entirely on God (and not on the ‘will of man’—John 1: 13), the ground must be pure, untouched in any way by the future ‘general curse’ that will mark the beginning of the rains, the thorns, thistles and shrubs of the field.
Today is the feast of SS Joachim and Anne, parents of Our Lady. Their ‘one daughter’ was a ‘new creation’, a ground that needed no purification to become fecund at the overshadowing, the brooding of the Holy Spirit of God. Akin to the temple, from which mystically flowed the waters which recall the mist and streams of Genesis 2, she is the true ‘ark of the covenant’, fit to be the dwelling place of the Dominus vivificans, the Lord, the Giver of Life, and to give God’s Son a body and a Mother. She too, required no purification for this to take place, other than the anticipated grace of our Lord’s passion, death and resurrection, ‘which [God] foresaw’, as the collect for Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception phrases it. Which is to say that God, in preparation for His definitive act of salvation, quietly prepared His triumph in the humble marriage bed of SS Joachim and Anne. Happy feast day to all!
hashomer achi anochi?
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
The Hebrew word order places a square emphasis on the word ‘I’. The sense then is, “Is my brother’s keeper supposed to be me?”—with the possible additional implication that God should have prevented the murder of Abel, since He knows everything. It can’t be stressed enough that the use of questions by God in the early chapters of Genesis should not be understood in a ‘folk’ sense of an anthropomorphized ‘god’ who doesn’t know what is happening and so needs to inquire. Rather, these question need to be seen as a pedagogical tool that God is using to educate the first human beings.
Cain’s counter-accusation suggests a kind of bitterness. It is as if Cain were saying, “Abel is Your favorite, after all. You accepted his sacrifice and not mine. If You cared about him so much, why didn’t You find a way to protect him from me?”
Indeed, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai makes just this observation: “When God asked Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ Cain answered “Am I my brother’s keeper? You are God. You have created man. It is Your task to watch him, not mine. If I ought not to have done what I did, You could have prevented me from doing it.” This reads like the victim mentality so prevalent in our world today.
“So Cain was very angry (vayyichar l’qayin m’od), and his countenance fell.”
More literally, this reads, “Great wrath was to Cain”; or “Cain had great wrath.” Anger here undergoes a kind of substantiation; it appears as something real and substantial. The serpent has gone underground and no longer appears directly to human beings, but instead influences at the periphery of consciousness. God warns Cain about this: “Sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” [4: 7] That is to say, we must learn to guard the door of our thoughts and not allow in sinful suggestions. If we are not vigilant, these thoughts become a part of us and seem insurmountable. But this is an illusion based on past negligences.
“The Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this…”
God does not ask the serpent why he did what he did, as God asked Adam and Eve in turn. This is an indication that the serpent cannot be taught. God does not adopt a pedagogical tone toward the serpent as He does toward Adam and Eve. This is another hint of the ‘proto-evangelion’: God is against the serpent but for humankind.
“The woman that You gave me.”
It is remarkable how passive Adam turns out to be. The one who boldly named all of the animals now finds himself, or at least portrays himself, as a hapless victim: “You gave me…she gave me…and…I ate.” Already toil, thorns, and thistles have entered! “The sluggard says, ‘There is a lion in the road! There is a lion in the streets!’ (Proverbs 26: 13) Poor me!
“Who told you that you were naked?”
We perhaps hear God speaking in an angry tone, which is unfortunate, since the text indicates no such thing. The fact that no one answers the question should be taken, not as an indication of God’s ‘impatience’, but as representing fearful silence on the part of Adam and Eve.
Who told them that they were naked? No one, of course; they simply became aware of this terrible fact. They needed no one to tell them; nor does God need to find out. Again, I suspect that we tend to hear His following question (“Have you eaten…?”) as God piecing together the crime, but this is clearly absurd. Why, then, does God ask this?
God does all things for the purpose of teaching and forming His creatures toward fullness of life and understanding. Adam and Eve, pondering this question, would have to answer as we did above: “No one told us that we were naked. We discovered it after eating the fruit.” It is true: they now know good and evil for themselves.
“God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
This is perhaps evidence of a primordial fall of ‘the gods’ (the serpent would also be evidence), the fall not recounted directly in Scripture, but referred to by Our Lord (Luke 10: 18). These ‘gods’ (the Hebrew word elohim can mean either ‘gods’ or ‘God’) wanted knowledge of the forbidden, ultimately so as to go beyond good and evil and establish their own rule against the Creator God. The serpent, speaking of their eyes being opened, knows of what he speaks. The fact that he seems not to be dead (at least in a literal, bodily sense) also supports his contention that disobedience will not result in (literal) death.