Murder and the Bible, Part 1, Cain Murdered His Brother, Abel
Hegseth is a murderer and can never have his murderous actions erased or ignored.
(upcoming: Part 2, 1/10 of the Ten Commandments: “You Shall Not Murder”; Part 3, The Grievous Biblical Error of Making Murderers Heroes)
Abel and Cain
A myth is not a tall tale. It is a genre within folklore, a narrative that seeks to explain a supernatural, natural, or social phenomenon and may be primarily, to oversimplify, aetiological, historical, or psychological. An aetiological myth offers an explanation of how something was initially introduced into human experience.
In one of the several aetiological myths in what is now designated Genesis chapters 1 through 11, fratricide becomes the focus. How did murder enter what the Creator intended to be eternal paradise? The answer was: through the jealousy of one brother toward another.
God required that everyone even when there were very few everyones to return a tenth of any gain to God, typically via sacrifice, however utterly wasteful that was.
Abel earned his income through livestock. When the time to worship God came around, he sacrificed one-tenth of his new flocks presumably by slitting their throats on an altar where the spilled blood and bodily fats burned, but not just any tenth; he offered the firstlings, his finest animals.
Cain’s income came from his crops. When he worshiped God, he offered on an altar a tenth of his crops, but not the finest of his fruits and vegetables.
God noticed and was happier with Abel‘s offering than with Cain’s. In anger and jealousy that his brother had shown him up before God Cain killed Abel. As a punishment, God did not allow Cain to be killed in retaliation, but neither did God allow Cain ever to escape the identity he’d chosen: murderer.
The myth doesn’t specify exactly what it was, but God put some kind of mark on Cain that somehow warned people who would’ve killed him in retaliation not to, but also kept him from pretending to be someone who had not killed his brother.
This myth did not purport to describe what should happen in response to every murder or any murder necessarily. It sought to describe to a culture or a collection of cultures how murder became introduced into the human family. God‘s response in this case is rather incidental, but not to be discounted I think. There were and would be other teachings related to vengeance and retribution, even justice.
It would probably be worthwhile in another context to reflect on how misunderstandings about God drive some individuals to commit murder. For now, we know how at least one group of ancients believed murder began in human community. And we know based on the same myth that because murder cannot be undone and its effects neutralized a murderer’s deed or deeds must always follow her or him.