Cain

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Cain is the first murderer of the Hebrew Bible: the elder son of Adam and Eve who, in the fourth chapter of Genesis, kills his younger brother Abel and is sent into exile for it. The story is brief and famously withholding. Both brothers bring an offering — Abel from his flock, Cain from the fruit of the ground — and God regards Abel’s and not Cain’s, for a reason the text never gives. Cain’s face falls; he leads his brother into a field and kills him; and when God asks where Abel is, he answers with the question that has outlived everything else in the chapter: Am I my brother’s keeper?

What follows is judgment tempered by protection. Cain is cursed to wander, no longer able to draw a living from the ground he has stained; yet when he protests that whoever finds him will kill him, God sets a mark on him so that no one will. The “mark of Cain” is therefore, in the text itself, a sign of safekeeping rather than of shame — a detail later readers have steadily reversed, until the phrase came to mean a brand of guilt. Genesis goes on to make Cain the founder of the first city and ancestor of the first metalworkers and musicians, so that the line of the first killer is also the line from which civilization is made to descend.

Jewish and Christian interpreters have long worried at the gaps. Why Abel’s offering and not Cain’s; what the mark actually was; how a man under sentence of wandering comes to build a city. Out of these silences grew a large body of legend, and out of one strand of it something stranger. Several early Christian heresiologists — Irenaeus among them, later Epiphanius at greater and more hostile length — described a sect they called the Cainites, who were said to honor the reprobate figures of scripture, Cain first among them, on the reasoning that the god who had rejected them was a lesser and unjust power, and that those he condemned were therefore aligned with a higher truth. How much of this reflects an actual group and how much is the polemical invention of its accusers is genuinely uncertain; the reports come almost entirely from opponents, and no writing the sect produced survives intact. What the accounts record with confidence is the impulse behind the charge — the gnostic move of reading the Bible against its grain, taking the creator’s enemies for the story’s secret protagonists.

That inversion is what gives Cain his long afterlife outside scripture. To the tradition that received Genesis straight, he is the type of the murderer and the exile, the cautionary first instance of sin between human beings. To the readers who turned the book over, he became something else: the first to be punished by a god they did not trust, and so, by that logic, the first to be secretly in the right. The figure carries both readings at once, and has never quite shed either.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (1906)

→ Related: Esau · Gnosis · Iblis