Cain said unto his brother, 'Come let us go out into the field' and when they were in the field , Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.
The Bible puts forth the killing of Abel by his brother Cain as the first murder in history, which foreshadows the eternal struggle between the farmer and the cowman.
Cain is the first man born of woman in the bible, and a second generation farmer–already lazy and living off the dole. His goody-goody younger brother, Abel, was the first Sheeple in history and an insufferable brown noser. Abel decided to one-up his older brother and gain favor with God by sacrificing one of his fat young lambs–mmmm baby lamb tastes good–making him the first enemy of PeTA. Cain, not to be outdone had to make a sacrifice too, but since he was getting paid to not plant (as is the custom) he couldn’t really come up with a suitable sacrifice and he didn’t really want to burn those subsidy checks because all that fire would cause greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere.
Of course, God found favor in Abel’s sacrifice of a fat lamb and was unimpressed with Cain’s offering of a meager organic crop: eat that vegans, God eats baby lamb and thinks “organic” sucks. Then God went all passive aggressive on Cain for not being more like his younger brother, so Cain kneed Able in the groin and beat his head in with the jawbone of that lamb Abel sacrificed: poetic justice for the evil baby lamb killer! Thus, Cain is also the first eco-terrorist and murderer in history.
God, who totally fell for Abel’s ass kissing, was devastated and cursed Cain to never grow crops again (funny, we keep ‘cursing’ our farmers to do the same and they’re so pious they get all uppity when we even suggest that they can go back to doing their job and grow something) and like all trust fund kiddies, God suggested that Cain get a Europass and go backpacking in the East to find himself. But Cain wasn’t happy and told God that “they’ll totally hate me in the East” and God said “tell them you’re from Canada, they won’t know the difference.”
But since everyone likes the Canadians and since Cain was such a douchebag, God knew that the ruse wouldn’t cut it and so he placed upon Cain a mark such that anyone who saw it would know that they shouldn’t kick his ass. OR SO YOU WERE TOLD!
The truth is, if you look at the original Genesis passage, God didn’t place a mark upon Cain, he gave him a dog! At least according to one rabbinical scholar in the Midrash:
And the Lord set a sign for Cain.R. Judah said: He caused the orb of the sun to shine on his account. Said R. Nehemiah to him: For that wretch He would cause the orb of the sun to shine! Rather, He caused leprosy to break out on him, as you read, And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, etc. (Ex. iv, 8). Rab said: He gave him a dog. Abba Jose said: He made a horn grow out of him. Rab said: He made him an example to murderers. R. Hanin said: He made him an example to penitents.
Rab’s interpretation sounds sort of like Pit Bulls and Parolees, no?
See, taking that backpacking trip around the old country isn’t so entertaining when you’ve just killed the only other guy on the planet who isn’t your parents. Without some young German chicks (since neither Germany nor chicks had been invented yet) staying in the same run down hostel to provide some companionship, Cain needed a good dog to keep him company in his forced solitude and to protect him.
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Sounds exactly like Pit Bulls and Parolees, except no woman marries the murderer and then is shocked that he winds up in prison for theft.
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Enforced federal regulations could have changed the whole story.
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I enjoyed your reinterpretation of the Genesis story. And it is nice to learn that a Rabbi in the Midrash wrote that God had given Cain a dog. It makes me want to learn Hebrew, to see if the word for “mark” has the same consonants as the word for “dog” and if the word could have been written or interpreted that way.
I would like to be a sorry stickler for detail, though, and say that the earliest parts of the Midrash were written in the 3rd century CE and a large portion of it was written from about the 9th-12th centuries CE (I wanted to check the date of the part you were quoting from, but unfortunately the link no longer works), whereas the dates of the authorship of genesis and the other first five books are said to be around 800-600 BCE according to modern bible scholars. Quoting the Midrash as evidence for what the Torah originally said therefore would be like quoting medieval exegetes for what Jesus originally said – they’re not being deliberately misrepresentative, and as medieval scholars they may have had good insight, but they’re not exactly evidence in themselves, unless considered among other sources.
That said, I don’t mean to spoil the fun of reliving bible narratives in modern terms. And you probably already knew about the late dating of rabbinical sources anyway.
I’ve been really enjoying your blog by the way, especially your posts about pedigree dogs and the tensions between different groups of dog owners and breeders. Keep up the good work.
I don’t suspect the argument is based on philology, but more an abstract interpretation what sort of sign or mark God could have used.
If you google the quoted block of text from the article, you should find several more sources on the internet now than when I posted the article. The source I linked to is an older text, instead of a modern quote like you’ll find, but here it is:
https://archive.org/stream/RabbaGenesis/midrashrabbahgen027557mbp_djvu.txt
We don’t have Rab’s original explanation (at least that I have found), but the source above goes on to explain the dog a bit more:
“Translating: And the Lord made Cain (direct object) a sign (to others) — according to Rab, of the fear that haunts a murderer, so that he needed a dog to protect him”
“Rab,” Abba Arikka, was a rabbinic scholar who lived in Babylon from 175–247 AD. So we’re talking about a millennium after the writing of Genesis. Your point about temporal distance and “accuracy” is well taken. But I don’t take biblical scholarship as divination of divine truth, so it’s sort of a distinction of subjective interpretation of literature to me, not historical truth.
Biblical scholarship is more like mythology scholarship instead of anything that ascertains a historical truth vis-a-vis what the text says. Why is any of this actually evidence at all? It’s not as if any of this is anything more than myth. There was no Cain nor Abel nor God that told them what to do or placed any marks upon them. Any real history here is the history of mankind writing about their conceptions of religion, not actually documenting sky gods sending messages.
Oh, thanks for correcting the dates for me. 🙂 Hebrew literature is something I would like to get in to, but isn’t my specialty at the moment. I’m more comfortable with Latin and Greek literature.
I hope you didn’t take me harshly. I’m thankful that, in both of our countries, we are at liberty to disagree – about whether God or “sky god” exists, about whether he takes notice of humans, about whether he communicates through influencing the oral history and/or written compilation of a particular holy book or tradition.
None of those theological differences need prevent me from enjoying what you have to say about the Bible. It’s cool to hear that a Rabbi in the Midrash said that Cain was given a dog as a sign of protection when he was cursed to be a wanderer.
I guess the only reason I would even bring up the Bible and the concept of the text, is because of the way it was framed in the original article.
Since you encouraged me to “look at the original Genesis passage”, I wanted to see if traces of the dog theory could be found in the text itself.
Ah, it’s too bad that the vocabulary of the passage, or at least “Cain” (qain) and “mark” (oth), don’t seem to share the consonants of the Hebrew for “dog” (kelev), although Cain does sound close to some of the roots for dog.
Your instinct to look at the Hebrew is apt though, as that’s what originally lead to this post. I was looking at the etymology of the word “dog” through history (which ties in to the bit I found about hound being one of the preserved ancient
http://www.border-wars.com/2007/08/ancient-language-of-dog-2.html
It’s not a huge stretch to ask if /KUAN/ is an ancient word for dog, could the name Cain itself have an etymological affinity for that word as well. It seems that the most popular interpretation is that Cain means “spear,” but the connection is interesting enough to look at further just out of interest.
There “mark” in the “Mark of Cain” is actually an interesting word (‘Oth) that isn’t particularly narrowly defined especially in its use in that passage.
אות
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%95%D7%AA
I’ve looked at online biblical sources which use hebrew/greek to see what spellings were used for the few other dogs mentioned in the bible and I don’t believe they had a close similarity with “oth” but it’s worth looking at again.
http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/56_home.html
The name Cain appears thusly:
Hebrew: קין “qain” or “Qayin” (to strike, spear)
Greek transliteration: Kain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain_and_Abel
Most people who try to talk their religion to me, assume the bible was written in English or that translation from a dead language is easy.
Merely trying to read English from old writings is hard. People often spelled words how they guessed the word should be spelt (no official dictionary had been invented yet), and no one spelling could be said to be the correct one.
One teacher told me that we spell “knight” that way because, at one time every letter was pronounced. So the “k” “g” and “h” were once pronounced. So if you could go back in time to the days of the Knights, you wouldn’t know what they were saying, and they wouldn’t recognise your English as English.
The books of the bible are much much older than that (but the date where various books were collected into The Bible is not so long ago). Add to that the fact that Genesis had to be handed down orally until written language and paper and ink were invented, and it is easier to understand translation problems.
I am told that people didn’t use to learn to read, or to use written words in the same way that we do now. Rather, people learned various stories and facts by reciting them orally, perhaps around a campfire at night when it was too dark to work.
Tales were written like notes. Just enough to help recall what you already had memorised. So most of the well known and often recited tales were written with just constanants. They were never meant to be read as we would read today.
People whose language is written with each sound having its own letter, and each letter always having the same sound, and each letter being pronounced, often question why English is written with so little logical sense.
The books of the bible need to be decoded more than simply read. Even people who study the language of the bible books, do not agree on their translation or meaning. That is one reason why we have so many different religions that all follow the same books.
So it is possible that one translation could be read to say that Cain was turned into a dog as punishment for killing Able. That Cain was the link between dog and wolf. That the wife that Cain found in the land of Nod was a wolf.
That makes more sense to me than him not being punished at all except that a mark was put on him so that nobody would kill him, and he had to leave home.
It’s interesting to hear your experiences with religious people. Sometimes I meet people who take English translations for granted… some people really underestimate the effect of translating words, especially words like “heart” that have such particular connotations in English but do not necessarily have the same ones in the ancient languages.
But then, it is also possible to be too pessimistic about the possibility of translating something. I think that as human beings, there is something human in language, and that while the cultural barriers are real and present major difficulties, so much of the time we find ourselves thinking about the same things over and over again.
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Where you find miner-blacksmiths, you’ll find wolf/dog too. Ex; wolfram, name of elements, and mineral/ore such as Tungsten. Domesticated dogs predates everything, Including Gobekli Tepe, and Biblcal Eden/Edin timeline – if carbon 14 dating can be believed.
I did find Cain’s dog in Kabbala descriptions.