the truth about cain and abel

Cain

Both men, you’ll remember, offer sacrifices to God.  Cain’s is an offering of crops, whereas Abel offers a blood sacrifice.  God likes Abel’s offering but rejects Cain’s.  Cain, angry, kills Abel.  Taken as a simple historical narrative, the story yields little.  We don’t learn why God prefers flesh to fauna.  God comes across as both bloodthirsty and ungrateful.  The standard moral of the story? Don't kill your brother just because God doesn't like your prize-winning marrows. 

It’s only when we begin to speculate about the wider significance of the story that things get interesting.

The anthropologist Rene Girard, for example, thinks that the story is about the original meaning and function of sacrifice, namely the channeling (and therefore the containment) of violence in human societies.  As modern ethology has shown, thwarted violence always seeks a surrogate victim, and so in societies that (unlike ours) don’t have centralised, powerful, theoretically impartial judiciaries and police forces, acts of violence can lead to orgies of recrimination, intractable blood feuds, geometric escalations of bloodshed.  Violence is like a plague, and in order to contain it, societies have treated those things associated with violence as taboo.  Girard’s overwhelmingly powerful argument is that blood sacrifice, in all tribal societies throughout history, has served as a means by which communities’ pent-up violence can be discharged in a ritually contained manner.  The positing of ‘gods’ as beneficiaries of the blood sacrifice essentially conceals the mundane functions of sacrifice from the community, and legitimises the operation.

For Girard, the Cain and Abel story – irrespective of whether it refers to an actual historical event – captures the whole meaning of the sacrificial system: Cain’s sacrifice does not involve violence, and so it does not absorb his animosity towards his brother.  His murder of Abel somehow necessitates the formal institution of the violence-limiting sacrificial cult that becomes Hebrew religion, and which God ordains in order to create social order.  (Note that God later claims to hate these sacrifices, which supports the view that sacrifices were a necessary evil.)

It could be that stories like that of Cain and Abel encapsulate seismic cultural shifts in microcosmic stories involving a small number of characters who may or may not have also been real historical people.  When we try to force them (for non-biblically warranted reasons) to conform to a straightforwardly ‘historical’ model of truth, we rob them of their vast scope, just as we would if we argued that Jesus’s parables are all literally true.  The irony is that a reading like Girard’s reveals the full historical significance of the bible passage rather than diminishes it.  The story of Cain and Abel is (among many other things) the story of how Judaism – as a matter of historical fact – became, by necessity, and as an act of divine wisdom and mercy, a sacrificial religion.

Look at the story of Abraham and Isaac that Christopher Hitchens finds so morally revolting.  God asks Abraham to kill his own child to prove his faithfulness.  Isaac is then put through a hideous ordeal of thinking his own father is going to stab him to death.  What's not to like about that?  True, we can read this as an instructive example of someone putting God first and demonstrating faith.  But look: how would we really feel if a faithful, sane Christian at our church turned up one Sunday and confided in a shaky voice that that God had asked him to stab his son to death?  Would we urge him to be faithful?  Would we even think it possible that the man was right in believing that God wanted him to do this?  Heaven forbid!  We would tie the guy to a pew and call the police.

What if, like the story of Cain and Abel, the story of Abraham and Isaac captures in capsule-form the truth (historical and otherwise) of a seismic shift in culture, a new stage in God’s relationship with humans?  We know that many civilisations exalted human sacrifice over non-human sacrifice (even those that didn’t exalt human sacrifice have tended to ‘anthropomorphise’ the animals they sacrificed – see Girard again).  What if the story of Abraham and Isaac describes the momentous revelation that came to the Jewish people, perhaps originally through a real man named Abraham, that the worthiness of a sacrifice depends not on what is killed, but on the inward, personal sacrifice made by the sacrificer?  The story shows, in capsule form, the historic shift from a focus on the external form of worship to a focus on the internal motive - a shift that has developed throughout the history of the Jews.  This was the momentous shift that served to preclude human sacrifice from Jewish religion.

We fundamentalists believe that all scriptural stories are rooted in real encounters between God and real humans: to affirm this is just to affirm the Judeo-Christian tradition.  But the historic changes that occur on the basis of these cataclysmic encounters can be captured in capsule form without diminishing their historicity.  It’s a matter of literary convention.  We can argue for the truth – and yes, the infallibility or inerrancy – of the bible without acting as though it’s nothing but straight reportage.