That just brings up more problems like incest and where the heck did Cains wife came from… and where is Nog and how did a town full of people just appear and what about the sign of Cain?
:smack:
A century old explanation based on millennia old sources, btw:
Abel and Cain,
The Mahometan tradition of the death of Abel is this: Cain was born with a twin sister who was named Aclima, and Abel with a twin sister named Jumella. Adam wished Cain to marry Abel’s twin sister, and Abel to marry Cain’s. Cain would not consent to this arrangement, and Adam proposed to refer the question to God by means of a sacrifice. God rejected Cain’s sacrifice to signify his disapproval of his marriage with Aclima, his twin sister, and Cain slew his brother in a fit of jealousy.
From: E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898.
Links to other versions of the Cain/Abel twin-sisters legend:
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/cain.html
http://www2.bc.edu/~mounsey/siblingrivalry.html
http://www.hiddenmysteries.com/freebook/adameve/adameve9.html
The last one above is one of several online versions of Chapter 74 of the “First Book of Adam and Eve” in which the birth of Cain and his twin sister (whose name in this is Luluwa) is discussed. Scroll back for stories of the Cave of Treasures, Adam & Eve’s alliance with the Satan, and other apocryphal pleasures.
Incidentally, the city of Kabul claims to be the burial place of Cain and the city of Nod. This is the basis of Tony Kushner’s immediately pre- 9-11 play Homebody/Kabul, incidentally.
No problems.
Cain (and Abel and all of Adam’s other children) married siblings. There was no one else.
Cain went to Nod. Nod in Hebrew, means to wander. He became a wanderer.
Where do you see a town full of people appeared? He built a city. Don’t forget that what was a major city 1000 years ago would be a quaint town today. Similarly, I’m sure that this “city” wasn’t anything (in terms of population) like New York today.
Who lived there? Two possible answers:
(1) Cain’s children and descendants
(2) Other children and descendants of Adam. There is no “date” for the Cain and Abel story in the Bible. It could have happened well after Adam had other children and other descendants.
Sign of Cain? What about it? What’s the problem with that?
Zev Steinhardt
I obviously echo cmkeller’s comments. The ancient Hebrew text is very sparse, it’s not like modern prose with lots of description. Consequently, the fact that Abel’s sacrifice has descriptive adjectives (“choicest of the firstlings of his flock” depending on your translation) and Cain’s sacrifice has no such description, leads to the interpretation that cmkeller has given – that Abel gave of the best, while Cain gave minimally.
I disagree with Duck Duck on many points.
1 - As already noted by NoClueBoy, there’s nothing inherently wrong with veggie sacrifices. Wheat and grain sacrifices are OK in later texts.
2 - Citing Nahum Sarna’s Torah Commentary on Genesis, the rules of sacrifice had not yet been given. It’s not that God told them rules and Cain violated the rules, there’s no hint of that in the text. Sarna says: “The two sons had to live from the toil of their hands, and they felt gratitude to God. Their offerings were spontaneous, not a response to divine command… And Abel [in offering the best of his produce] appears to have demonstrated a quality of heart and mind that Cain did not possess.” Duck’s notion that Cain somehow disobeyed is NOT found in the text, nor hinted.
Finally, the line that << And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell >> is a bad translation. The Hebrew is y’khar l-Kayin which expresses despondency or distress, rather than y’khar 'af which means “got angry.” Thus, the context is that Cain’s mood is depression, not anger – this is consistent with “his countenance fell.” A much better translation is, “Cain was much distressed and his face fell.”
Last post- I promise: In some versions, Luluwa is the name of Lilith rather than Cain’s sister. In some versions they are the same, though obviously these differ from the versions in which Lilith is the first wife of Adam. In yet other versions, Lilith becomes the wife of Cain after he is driven to the land East of Eden.
Cain’s demonic paternity actually has an unlikely following among a barely literate fringe sect for such an obscure bit of Hebrew folklore. The tale of Cain’s actual father forms the basis of the “Seedline Hypothesis” to which many Aryan Nation members and other white supremacist subscribe; to them, whites are descendants of Seth and the true sons of Adam, while the non-white races descend from the half-demon Cain. Definitely a lunatic and thoroughly stupid theory, but no more so than Farrakhan’s “mothership and mad scientists” theories about the origins of races or the “Gotta catch a comet” school of thought by the Heaven’s Gaters I suppose (which isn’t to imply that I’d ever have willingly shared a cab with those groups either).
Just to be clear – all this stuff about sisters and demons and such is from non-canonical sources: apocrypha, myth, legend, folk-tale and speculation. Stick to the text, says I.
On the question of the city that Cain founded and where the other people came from, please note Gen 5:4, “After the birth of Seth, Adam lived 800 years and begot sons and daughters.” So there were other people around.
The “mark of Cain” (see Gen 4:15) was to protect Cain. There is this notion that the “mark of Cain” designates him as a murderer, but that’s not what the text says. The text says the mark was put on Cain as a protection – he had been judged and punished by God, and this mark would protect him against being lynched by others.
That’s why this should be treated as an allegory and not fact.
What is this stuff about the agriculturists being hard workers and “hunter/gatherers” not having to work hard. I was always taught that when agriculture came along, the population grew; everybody wasn’t needed for the growing of food, so other trades were possible; and the people were able to settle in one area (its a real bitch to have to move all the time). Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but domestic animals were also part of the agricultural society and thus shepards were not “hunter/gatherers”. Still you might get one of those crocked staffs shoved up your ass, if you told a shepard he was lazy. :eek:
Quinn’s thesis was that agricultural required more ergonomic input for relatively small gain. Hunter-gatherers worked less and actually had a greater variety in their diet. Pastoral cultures also have a lower ergonomic requirement (plowing a field without a horse is infinitely more labor intensive than sitting around looking at some sheep) and they got to eat meat instead of grain.
A lot of contemporary anthropologists, archaeologists and historians believe that the agricultural revolution had more to do with beer than with food.
Agriculture was not yet agrarian, so there were no domestic animals.
The concept of “laziness” did not exist in ancient cultures. One did as much work as one had to. Anything more was considered pointless. There was not yet any virtue associated with working your ass off.
I didn’t mean to imply that the Hebrews were hunter-gatherers. I was trying to point out the Cain and Abel story is a variation of older Mesopotamian stories in which the “good” son was sometimes a hunter-gatherer, (and the God was a Goddess).
I’m interested in the pastoralist/agriculturalist interpretation as well. That was the explanation I read as well, in some works of Orson Scott Card. Admittedly, those were fiction, but Card has at least some background in history and archaeology.
He argues that a lot of the stuff in Genesis reflects the early Israelite bias against agriculture and city living. The story of the destruction of the Tower of Babel, for example, he claims reflects their prejudice against living in cities as opposed to the nomadic herding lifestyle.
I’m not claiming this is true beyond the fact that I read someone who says it is, but I feel it is a credible assertion. I’d be interested to hear what the more Biblically asture Dopers think of this.
[QUOTE]
- Originall posted by C K Dexter Haven*
Just to be clear – all this stuff about sisters and demons and such is from non-canonical sources: apocrypha, myth, legend, folk-tale and speculation. Stick to the text, says I.
True, but ANY answer to the issue of his wife and the mark has to be from non-canonical sources since they don’t address the issue at all. The apocryphal sources are the most ancient known sources to discuss the question and derive from practitioners of the same religion and speakers of the same languages as those who authored Genesis/Bereshit, so it’s interesting to hear their opinions.
Besides, it’s not like they actually existed, so who’s to say?;j
To me, the most important aspect of the myth isn’t so much the first fratricide as the first act of forgiveness. Also, the whole issue of “timshel” (that of course forms so much of the basis of Steinbeck’s EAST OF EDEN) is the first notion of “free will” as something of which God approves stands discussing.
The other big question: from whom was Cain’s mark (or horn) to grant him protection.
An interesting comparison/contrast is the Jacob/Esau legend much later. In that tale, the “good son” to the father is Esau, the hunter, while the non-hunter and younger son (if only by a few minutes) is Jacob, who is the “good son” to the mother. In that tale, the hunter is disgraced before the father by a felonious act of the non-hunter, though it is the non-hunter who is forced to flee. (In the pseudepigrapha, the issue of sons born with twin sisters who later married their brothers is also used again.)
[hijack]A repeating strand of ancient myth that interests me is the “seventy sons” myth. In the Old Testament, Gideon is the father of seventy sons, all of whom are murdered by one of their brothers. King Ahab is the father of seventy sons (and has a Baal worshipping queen), all of whom are murdered upon his death. Heracles fathered seventy sons in one night, about whom there were once cycles but they’re mostly now lost. The goddess Asherah bore seventy sons to El (sometimes associated with Baal and whose nomenclature is often the same as that of the Hebrew god). What is the connection? Is the killing of the seventy sons symbolic of the destruction of goddess worship?
I recently finished Freud’s MOSES AND MONOTHEISM and while not at all seamless recommend it highly, incidentally. He believes the historical Moses was an Egyptian nobleman killed by the Hebrews and mythologized into being one of them, but I’ll leave that for another thread.[/hijack]
Nice example of an another variation on culture clash motif. It’s also interesting that the name "Esau, " in Hebrew means “hairy.” Compare this to Enkidu in the Gilgamesh epic who was described as a “hairy” wild man who lived outside the city "as the animals, " in contrast to Gilgamesh, the divinely descended denizen of the city.
I forgot to say-- Freud’s Moses theory is intriguing, but I agree that it’s fodder for a separate thread. I’d be happy to participate in such a discussion, though, should you choose to open one.