i saw Cain’s name on the forum askin the name of his kids so i remember this question i had.
Which side do u take on this, was Cain justified or he shouldn’t have killed his brother?
I think he was
I think he was too.
you think killing ones brother can be justified?
let’s hear it then… it’s been long for me… what exactly was the excuse for taking a life this time?
willem
The story in which Cain, one half of the dualistic constitution of man, the half that is godless and faithless and that personifies brute nature, error, the irrational, materialism, man’s inhumanity to man, evil volition, and vice, and that sets itself against its better other half, the higher noble nature as personified by Abel, all that is divine, holy, sacred, truthful, ideal, god-loving, good and virtuous…
But the story is surely an illustration of the weakness of man and how he always succumbs to the demands of the base passions and the desires and aversions. He may pay lip service to higher ideals, to the good and the virtuous, but when it comes to the crunch he invariably, i.e., without fail, acts with cowardice and follows the herd.
Each one of us destroys the Abel within in every conceivable way. We are all sinners and murderers, and each one of us is reluctant to begin even to effect a change in ourselves and to plant seeds of truth and establish her reign within.
And our Higher Self speaks to us yet we fail to listen, and over, and over, and over again…
Read the book ‘Ishmael’ by David Quinn. He’s got an incredible take on this story - namely that its a parable for the events immediately following the agricultural revolution (the Fall of man) and growers in the hills wanted more territory and came down and slaughtered the peaceful herders. Simply an incredible book - if you wanna have knowledge on the subject, definitely turn here …
Sweet !! I never knew That Daniel Quinn talked about that. I picked up those ideas from an englisher at London School Of Economics, a fella named Colin Tudge - Neanderthals, Bandits, and Farmers.
There’s a lot going on in the Cain-Abel story. Enemy brothers (Think about Oedipus’ boys, Eteocles and Polyneices), the relationship between ranchers And farmers, the relationship between violence and the sacred. I mean, shit, Elohim basically tells Cain to kill Abel. What sacrifice is even greater than the fat of the lamb’s thigh? The fat of a human thigh. I think in the original story, before it got “redacted”, Cain killed Abel because Cain’s sacrifice was worthless before The Lord, not because Cain didn’t give up the best crops, but because The Lord didn’t recognize mere crops as worthy of being sacrificed. From a Girardian perspective, Cain was A plaything in the face of contagious violence that sacrifice is supposed to thwart. Cain’s sacrifice didn’t prevent the violence from tearing apart society and so he was forced to sacrifice his own brother, that surrogate victim valuable to him. After this sacrifice, the farmer is forced to become a wonderer, a nomad, the antithesis of the sedentary agriculturalist, a walker across the untamed face of the wilderness. Yet, Cain founds a city. He seems to be the violent king, the Romulus figure in the Indo-European pair of sovereigns (Although this is only be analogy, as the Hebrews ain’t indo-european).
Regarding the idea that Cain represents the base animal nature of man, whereas Abel represents the noble aspirations towards the divine, I seriously doubt that the Hebrew tribes before the Exile would have believed in such an obviously Persian - ie Manichaean idea. The Hebrews weren't the dualistic - hell satan barely exists in the OT. I think that this light/ dark dualism is anachronistic and better applies to a gnostic christian interpretation of Cain and Abel, not how the Hebrews thought about Cain and Abel.
Well Quinn paints it quite a bit differently than that. Basically, the beginning of agriculture coincides with Adam eating of the Fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and a generation later those followers (those that thought they should control the phenomena of nature, and thus, having knowledge of what is good or not) decide to take everything for themselves, and ramsacked the hunter-gatherer villages.
I’d definitely recomment it - I only finished it two days ago but it’s already making me re-think alot of what I think of the world …
interesting, historically it’s the other way around, with the moving attacking the sedentary. Check out Colin Tudge’s work as well as the Muqaddimah by Ibn Khaldun (a book I have only flipped through, but that outlines the relationships between the nomads and the cities)
Hmm … well I might have to check that book out. A quick google search pulled up some reviews …
“Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers is too speculative for my tastes. (…) (Colin Tudge) admits that “this is indeed only a hypothesis” and that evidence is scant. I would go further and say that the theory is baseless …” @ complete-review.com/reviews/ … atlse2.htm
Though it’s obvious that new evidence will be scant for either position, what is the historical perspective, of whom attacked whom? It would seem the hunter gatherers would have little interest in attacking a peaceful, stationary village without being preempted. And here we have two writers (to spare the term ‘scholars’) claiming opposite sides.
But I’ll probably look into that book. A professor of mine once mentioned that our kind probably killed off all the Neanderthals, and that these can be interpreted from ancient folklore of cyclops (larger beings but with less intelligence - they see from one persective [one eye] as opposed to our advanced skills) and it really caught my interest at the time.
And a further search news.harvard.edu/gazette/200 … yosef.html shows a Harvard University professor’s claims of these ancient times, without relating them to ancient literature, such as Greek mythology (Neanderthal Cyclops’) or Hebrew parables (Cain and Abel and Fall of Man.)
This would show that the more technologically advanced Cro-Magnon man, came out of the Middle East (not shown in the quote but claimed in the article) to “colonize Neanderthal-dominated Europe.”
Thus, the Neanderthal is the Abel, the innocent, in the story, and we are all the descendants of Cro-Magnon, the Cain, and thus inheritors of the curse upon Cain’s children. It seems this goes much deeper than one might think …
The Agricultural Revolution was the Fall of Man, and the Industrial Revolution was what killed God.
I think he was because it had to become an example in the Bible, it was his destiny.
The situation was that Cain was being greedy and God warns him, sin is crouching at your door, but you must master it.
He didn’t, instead killed Abel.
See, it was the example of human rebellion against God that was leading to worldwide wickedness which lead to the disaster of the flood.
It was a great lesson, on rebellion and how God handles it.
Life didn’t start out in sin death suffering and hatred,it was rebellion against God that brought it on. Yet through Abraham, through Moses ultimately in Jesus, God is hard at work to make things right.
So for me, its an example of rebellion which God had to adress because it affects us even today, everyday.
on this note…anyone read Demian by Hesse? Cain is considered to be a positive figure and the mark of Cain shows itself in people who are special, set apart from most