Yet I Loved Jacob

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

Genesis's sustained meditation on the idea of chosenness begins with the story of Cain and Abel in Gen 4. Several aspects of this disturbing and enigmatic episode directly or indirectly touch on the issue of election. As most readers know, the story is set immediately after the first couple's expulsion from Eden due to their failure to obey God's command. In a mere two verses Eve gives birth to two children, Cain the elder, who becomes a farmer, and Abel the younger, who becomes a shepherd. Each brings an offering: Cain, produce from the ground, and Abel, some firstborn of his flock. When God accepts Abel's offering but not Cain's, Cain is troubled. God and Cain have a rather cryptic conversation in which Cain appears to be advised not to let his rejection lead him to any rash acts. But in the very next verse Cain kills Abel. The story ends with God's indictment and punishment of Cain, which are slightly tempered by God's promise to protect Cain from anyone seeking to kill him.

The story line appears rather straightforward, but its terseness raises a number of issues, many of which will not receive attention here because they are not of direct relevance for this investigation into the biblical concept of election. Thus, one might wonder how the brothers know that God had accepted one offering and not the other when all the text says is that God "had regard for" or, more literally, "looked upon" Abel and his offering but did not look upon Cain and his offering. Did fire come from heaven as in Lev 9:24 or 1 Kgs 18:38? Did the glory of God appear as it did in Lev 9:23 or Exod 40:34? Do Abel's cattle prosper and Cain's crops not? How quickly is this known? These types of questions, while interesting, are secondary to the focus of this book.

However, four questions are highly pertinent to any attempt to understand what this narrative might contribute to our view of the idea of election. (1) Were Cain and Abel not only siblings but actually twins inasmuch as Abel's birth is prefaced with the words "next she bore his brother Abel," rather than the expected fuller formula "Adam again knew his wife and she conceived"? (2) Was God's acceptance of Abel's sacrifice and rejection of Cain's due to the fact that Cain brought an inferior offering and, thus, Cain had no one but himself to blame? Several interpretive possibilities attribute YHWH's rejection of Cain's offering to some deficiency in its type or quality. The strongest of these is the notion that while Abel brought from "the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions," Cain just brought "fruit of the ground," not the most select vegetables or the firstfruits. But another possible explanation is that Cain's vegetable offering was doomed to fail either because God preferred meat offerings over vegetable ones or because vegetables were tainted by God's earlier curse upon the ground (Gen 3:17-19). (3) Is it possible to grasp the meaning of the conversation between God and Cain in verses 6-7, especially since verse 7 contains a number of unsolved grammatical and textual problems? This conversation may help illuminate what, if anything, Cain did wrong before he killed his brother, and what his relationship to God was in the short period after his sacrifice was rejected and before Abel's murder. (4) What is the nature of Cain's punishment, and what does it reveal about Cain's status at the close of the narrative? Is Cain utterly cut off from God, or is he still within the pale of God's mercy?

Are Cain and Abel Twins?

The first question about whether Cain and Abel are twins is relevant to the discussion of election in that if Cain and Abel are twins, the issue of who is the firstborn and who is the younger child turns on a few short minutes. This would heighten the rivalry between the siblings by stressing their near equality. Furthermore, it might lead one to see this narrative and the Jacob and Esau account as a pair of narratives that should be read over against each other. Unfortunately, whether Cain and Abel are twins or just brothers is not a question that can receive a definitive answer from the language of the verses themselves. The possibility that these brothers are twins is raised by the fact that there is only one verb indicating Adam had sexual intercourse with Eve ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in Gen 4:1) as well as only one verb describing a single conception ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in Gen 4:1), but each birth is described separately (4:1 using [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] and 4:2 using [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). The ambiguity is that the second use of the birthing verb may have been just a shorthand way of summarizing Abel's conception and birth.

While many commentators assume that Cain and Abel are siblings rather than twins, some favor the idea that they are twins based not just on the ambiguous language of verse 2, but because they recognize that this story shares a host of similarities to the Jacob and Esau episode. That story also contains two siblings born from the same mother in very close temporal proximity who each take on different vocations, with one receiving God's favor and the other not. And there the elder almost kills the younger, but the younger is the one driven into exile, albeit not for a whole lifetime. The close relationship between these two narratives may be a textual signal that one should assume that Cain and Abel were indeed twins like Jacob and Esau. My suspicion is that Cain and Abel are not twins, but that the author(s) of the text may have been purposefully ambiguous in order to have the first story of brotherly struggle serve as a paradigm for all the subsequent ones—those about twins like Jacob and Esau and those about regular siblings as in the Joseph story. Thus, while the Cain and Abel story will surely be helpful in illuminating various aspects of the later sibling stories, particularly the Jacob and Esau narrative, the argument for using evidence from this latter narrative to solve a textual ambiguity in Gen 4 is less compelling.

Why Might God Not Have Accepted Cain's Sacrifice?

The second question mentioned above, about whether Cain's offering was defective in some way, is perhaps the most pivotal issue in connection to the concept of election raised by this passage. This is because it directly relates to the Bible's view of how people are chosen. Is election primarily a divine decision with little or no human input, or one that is strongly influenced by a variety of human factors (i.e., can God's choice be rationalized)? Some scholars argue for the latter position by claiming that Abel's sacrifice earned God's favor and/or that Cain's displeased God. As indicated above, numerous theories propose exactly what Cain might have done wrong or what Abel did correctly. Two weaker hypotheses center on the fact that Cain brought a vegetable offering, either arguing that such an offering was inherently inferior to a meat sacrifice, or claiming that while a vegetable offering became acceptable later in the biblical period, at this point the ground is still under the curse it received in Gen 3:17-19. Such theories draw additional support from the widespread acknowledgment that this narrative's oldest kernel is likely an etiological tale explaining the eventual cultural triumph of shepherds over farmers. But while an older etiological tale about...