Cain, Abel, and the Politics of God

An Agambenian reading of Genesis 4:1-16

Julián Andrés González Holguín

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351731997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Critique et interprétation bibliques

The Genesis story of Cain's murder of Abel is often told as a simplistic contrast between the innocence of Abel and the evil of Cain. This book subverts that reading of the Biblical text by utilising Giorgio Agamben's concepts of homo sacer, the state of exception and the idea of sovereignty to re-examine this well-known tale of fratricide and bring to the fore its political implications.

Drawing from political theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, this book creates a theoretical framework from which to do two things: firstly, to describe and analyse the history of interpretation of Genesis 4: 1-16, and secondly to propose an alternative reading of the Biblical text that incorporates other texts inside and outside of the Biblical canon. This intertextual analysis will highlight the motives of violence, law, divine rule, and the rejected as they emerge in different contexts and will evaluate them in an Agambenian framework.

The unique approach of this book makes it vital reading for any academic with interests in Biblical Studies and Theology and their interactions with politics and ethics.

1 Cain’s evil nature

A story of otherness

Biblical interpretation is almost as old as the Bible itself, and Gen. 4:1–16 is certainly no different in this respect. Remarkably, neither Genesis nor the books included in TaNak and the Protestant Old Testament ever refer to this story that many generations of readers have found so fascinating – to great extent because of its enigmatic character.¹ Things changed, however, with the emergence of the Septuagint and other ancient translations of the Hebrew Bible, which obviously could not avoid dealing with the exegetical conundrums presented by the Cain and Abel story, and soon – as we shall see later in this chapter – Gen. 4:1–16 became the focus of intense scrutiny in both Jewish and Christian traditions. The period that followed the destruction of Jerusalem and the ensuing expulsion of the Jews from much of their land was formative for both the institutionalized Church and the Rabbinic² library. As a result, at this time the traditions around Gen. 4:1–16 expanded in every conceivable direction. On the one hand, Church fathers and rabbis seemed to be asking the same questions as contemporary readers do, such as: What is the problem with Cain’s offering? Why does God reject it yet have regard for Abel’s? On the other hand, the primary concern of the ancient interpreters was the text’s appropriation by the communities that no longer had a foothold in the cultural world of the Near East that gave rise to it. In other words, they were not interested in understanding Gen. 4:1–16 from the standpoint of the ancient Israelite writers and their audience. John Byron succinctly explains this idea by stating that, “meaning in ancient interpretation was relevant to the situation of the interpreter and the listener and not necessarily to the historical situation about which the text was written.”³ They were interested in what the narrative had to say to their own times and had no doubt that the story could, and ought to, be read on those terms. Both sets of interpreters were trying to articulate a new doctrine through their reading of the story.

The answers led Christians and Jews down different hermeneutical roads. Both shared the primary theme of the exegetical tradition prior to Augustine, that of moral virtue and vice. At the same time, only Christian exegetes saw the story of Cain and Abel in terms of the relationship between the two communities, sporadically treating the latter as a stand-in for the Church and the former for the Jewish people. This kind of typological approach is best exemplified by Augustine who, as we shall see later, uses Gen. 4:1–16 in The City of God to build his argument about the two cities in their earthly manifestation, thus fully developing the brothers as types. Augustine does not explain the story of Cain and Abel in terms of the socio-historical setting in which it was created and originally transmitted. Rather, he reads it as a message of topical (and utmost) validity, containing teachings about the proper conduct for those inhabiting the city of God and about the divine plan for both communities.⁴ Unlike his predecessors, Augustine concentrates on Cain’s punishment and his famous mark in order to develop a theology of the Jews that would influence subsequent generations, “shaping medieval ecclesial policies and attitudes toward Jews.”⁵

One could say that the exegetical tradition underwent almost as many transformations as there were interpreters. At least two factors were responsible for its flexibility. The first was external: although Cain’s “failure” to control himself and spare Abel’s life was universally regarded as an explanation for the ubiquity of evil, each successive interpreter had different questions to ask, and in providing the answers, those interpreters (un)intentionally created their own versions of the story, expanding it as they saw fit. The second factor lies within the narrative itself: as briefly described above, many of its features are extremely puzzling; the story poses more questions than it answers, and in attempting to resolve them interpreters through the ages have felt compelled to introduce increasingly far-fetched innovations into their received versions of Gen. 4:1–16.⁶ Thus, they developed a vast and complex series of elaborations, which in the Christian tradition were amalgamated in Augustine’s reading of Gen. 4:1–16.

In what follows, I shall try to present and unravel the most important of these elaborations, highlighting the question of God’s involvement in the story. In other words, in studying the ancient readers I will be primarily interested in determining how their answers to the exegetical problems of Gen. 4:1–16 are related to their view of the deity’s role in the narrative.⁷

One result of this focus is that I will address Christian interpretations more often and in greater detail than Jewish readings. Although it is next to impossible to offer any reading of the Cain and Abel story, especially a comprehensive one, without addressing the issue of divine responsibility for what happened – or failed to happen – in it, it was the Church fathers that were primarily interested in the issue and its metaphysical and doctrinal implications. The rabbis, whose theology seems not to place so much emphasis on Gen. 4:1–16, tended to concentrate more on solving its narrative problems, especially on imposing a measure of coherence upon it – something that Christian interpreters could not avoid but were not particularly interested in doing.⁸

There is little doubt that as far as the divine role in Gen. 4:1–16 is concerned ancient interpreters had their work cut out for them. Yhwh is as involved in what takes place in this text as Yhwh was in the developments recounted in the first three chapters of Genesis, yet now the outcome is disastrous, especially in contrast to chapters 1 and 2. Are we talking here about the same omnipotent deity that created the world? Jewish and Christians leaders had to face questions of this type; the ambiguous ways in which God dealt with Cain and Abel needed justification in any comparatively sophisticated interpretation of the story.

The common denominator of the vast majority of responses to the difficulty described here is the tendency to dissolve the issues besetting the characterization of God into those concerning the characterization of Abel and especially Cain. One might even say that many if not most of the readings discussed below originated in the need to explain away the difficulties of Gen. 4:1–16 in such a way that the problem of God’s seeming ineptitude, capriciousness, or malice is circumvented or never presents itself. Thus, ancient interpreters establish an “observable” connection between Cain’s nature and his actions; in other words, since the story never explains Cain’s motivations, interpreters reconstruct his supposedly evil or at least imperfect character based on what he is reported to be doing. The plot is augmented by educated guesses (or what passes for them) that are read into it but all or almost all of these augmentations concern the two brothers who are thus forcibly moved into the spotlight. Hermeneutics⁹ as well as homiletics¹⁰ provide grounds for interpretations in early rabbinic and Christian readings. Cain needed to be the outsider in the primeval family in order to ascribe to him an evil nature. The theoretical alternative of reconstructing the deity’s nature based on its actions remains out of the question because assumptions about both are sacrosanct: no matter how it looks, the behavior of God must be benevolent.¹¹ The traditional assumption is that Cain, not God, should bear the ultimate responsibility for Abel’s death because humans can be evil – maybe even are evil by nature – while the deity cannot be and is not. Moreover, the locus of human evil can be determined with a high degree of certainty: it resides in the communities for which Cain is a stand-in and which can be expected eventually to become objects of God’s vengeful justice. Cain then is as much a victim in the story as is Abel because, as we will discuss later, the lack of detail and the grammatical, syntactical, and linguistic ambiguities of the tale, added to Cain killing Abel, transformed Cain in the “archetypal scapegoat for generations of interpreters.”¹² This study challenges this assumption.

Othering Cain: pre-Augustinian interpretations

In this section of the study I will explore the two main branches, Jewish and Christian, of the ancient exegetical tradition around Gen. 4:1–16 that crystallized prior to Augustine.¹³ The order in which I present the readings does not reflect any assumptions concerning the vectors of their mutual influence; while I recognize this influence and its contribution to the significant overlap between the traditions of different communities, it is not my intention to examine these matters here. Rather, the presentation of the material will for the most part follow the narrative as it appears in Gen. 4:1–16 and the order of exegetical issues raised above. I will also avoid historical-critical questions, such as those of manuscript evidence, focusing strictly on the questions raised by the text under discussion and the answers provided by its ancient readers.

Who’s your daddy?

The emphasis on Cain’s strangeness begins with questions about his parentage. The first exegetically difficult passage that a reader encounters in Gen. 4:1–16 is Eve’s highly ambiguous declaration that immediately follows the report on Cain’s birth and seems to offer a (somewhat strained) etymology of his name. The problem centers especially on the meaning of the phrase את־יהוה. Ancient translators were bothered by the ambiguity produced by the use of the particle את. In Hebrew, את is commonly the marker of the verb’s definite direct object, for example in the same verse האדם ידע את חוה, “And Adam knew Eve.” If the same strategy is used for Eve’s exclamation about Cain’s birth, it could be translated “I have acquired a man, (who is) YHWH,”¹⁴ instead of the traditional modern rendering “I have acquired a man (from/with the help of) the Lord.”¹⁵

The Septuagint translates את־יהוה as διὰ τοῦ θεοῦ, “through God,” connoting a divine intervention of some sort but refraining from any specifics. For subsequent readers, however, even this noncommittal construction proved problematic due to its theological implications regarding the interaction between humanity and the divine. Should “through God” be understood as meaning that God not only made Eve’s pregnancy possible but actually was its cause? In other words, is there a hint – especially given the possibility of a sexual innuendo lurking in the preposition “through” – that Eve had intercourse with God? Philo of Alexandria clearly saw this semantic potential, as suggested by his vehement denial that the phrase should be understood instrumentally:

And therefore we must make our protest against the Mind, which thought the offspring engendered by union with his own possession, called it Cain and said, “I have gotten a man through God.” Even in these last words he erred. You may ask how? Because God is the cause not the instrument, and that which comes into being is brought not into being through an instrument, but by a cause.¹⁶

Didymus, following Philo’s reading, also argues that the best way to understand Eve’s cryptic statement is by modifying the Greek phrase διὰ τοῦ θεοῦ to παρὰ τοῦ θεοῦ “from God.”¹⁷

By insisting on a causative reading of διὰ τοῦ θεοῦ, Philo and Didymus could simply be trying to prevent the reader from concluding that with regard to sexuality Yhwh is not that different from the male deities of the Greco-Roman pantheon, such as Zeus, known for his escapades not only with goddesses and other supernatural females but also with human women.¹⁸ Yet, it is also possible – the two purposes could, actually, be mutually complementary – that for Philo, ruling out Cain’s divine paternity was a way of removing a major obstacle to seeing him as an outsider, a stranger in the Kristevian sense.

Some ancient texts go much farther in this direction by claiming that Cain was actually sired by an evil divine being.¹⁹ According to 1 John 3:12–13, Cain belonged “to the evil one” – that is, the devil. Similarly Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: “Eve … had conceived from Sammael, the angel of the Lord”; this angel is, mutatis mutandis, the Jewish equivalent of Satan in the Christian tradition.²⁰ The paraphrastic translation thus plays on the basic meaning of the Hebrew verb ידע in the beginning of the verse – “to know.” The vast majority of interpretations, both traditional and scholarly, constru...