This post & the 3 below (no, make that above...) go together are related to a post on The Vicar's Page about the City, especially as referenced in Gen 4.
The Cain & Able story doesn't make clear why God accepted Able's offering but not Cain's. As far as I can tell Cain made a good faith offering & God rejected it. That bothers me, and if I were Cain, I would be even more upset about it. But would I go kill my brother over it? I don't think so.
The more I think about it the more it seems that at some point thousands of years ago the tellers & hearers of this story must have had a context that gave them more, or at least different things, to go on to understand the story. Reading a few things I could quickly find raises some interesting ideas (the story might related back to a Sumerian mythology, it might be a priestly statement about what kinds of offerings are prefered, it might represent a conflict between hersmen & agrarian oriented people, there's midrash about Cain & Able's conflict having been over women, there are implications about the names & occupations of Cain's children, .....etc.) Interesting and worthwhile, but it hasn't left me with clarity about how to grasp on to this text.
The reference to a city in the text had not stuck in my memory before. What does it mean? Why was it included in the text? I'm not sure. But with that disclaimer, I'll forge boldly ahead to my next post about what I pick up on with my own 2008 perspective.
2 comments:
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