“ ‘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]