Am I My Brother's Keeper?
And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said,
I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?
And he [God] said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's
blood crieth unto me from the ground.
-- Genesis 4: 9-10 (KJV)
Pity poor Eve. Having been expelled with Adam from Eden, she gives birth
twice with great discomfort. On top of that, now she has to "raise
Cain."
Cain, whose name roughly signifies "smith" or "craftsman" (though he's
actually a farmer), turns out to be a rather crafty fellow indeed,
unlike his younger brother Abel, a shepherd, whose name fittingly
suggests "short-lived." Like any first child, Cain has grown used to
special treatment, so when he and his brother make offerings to God and
God pays attention only to Abel's, Cain is enraged. Thus hatred among
men (not to mention sibling rivalry) is born, and it results in another
new invention: murder.
How Cain thought he could get away with killing his own brother is a
mystery, and in a flash God is upon him. "Where is Abel thy brother?"
asks Yahweh. "I know not," Cain lies, adding the retort, "Am I my
brother's keeper [guardian]?" Cain's hypocritical (and amoral) denial of
responsibility lives on in infamy.
God, of course, has ears to hear the truth, which speaks more eloquently
than Cain. "The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the
ground," God shoots back, and the word it speaks is "sin," a word that
first appears earlier in this chapter (it never appears at all in the
story of the Fall). Yahweh condemns Cain not only to labor like his
parents, but also to live as a nomad, ever cheated by the soil of its
fullest fruit: "When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth
yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in
the earth."
Cain and his progeny are thus relegated to a restless existence in the
desert. J, the author of this passage, may have in mind a tribe known as
the "Kenites," once thought to be descendants of Cain who subsisted as
wandering metalworkers until they settled in Midian on the Sinai
peninsula. (Later to be found among the Kenites is Moses'
father-in-law.)
One problem with this theory is that the Bible will later claim we
all descend from Cain through his descendant Noah. The other
problem is that J never tells us where, if Cain and Abel are Eve's only
children so far, the other men Cain fears come from. (More on this in
the next excerpt.)
Index
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Next: The Land of Nod, East of Eden, and The Mark of Cain
Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books
on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling
Brush Up Your Shakespeare!
