2024-09-25_Am I My Brother's Keeper?

Genesis 4:9: And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?

Compare Adam’s response to God when He questions him sometime after Adam and his wife had eaten of the forbidden fruit. Adam and his wife already have experienced shame, and the attempt to hide from God behind the trees is in essence an attempt to turn the entire Garden of Eden into fig leaves. Adam’s attempted denial shows that, on account of the sin, he is now reduced to the status of a fool. Cain’s denial shows how the perverting effect of sin worsens as sin itself worsens. For Adam and his wife had fallen to the sly temptations of the woman’s self-conscious mind. With them, there is haughtiness and pride, but there is no malevolence, for in their self-deception they have convinced themselves that eating the forbidden fruit would turn out to be harmless. On the other hand, Cain knows that murder is malevolent, and he willingly embraces that. Therefore, as his sin is considerably worse, so he is considerably more perverse when God questions him. Instead of sliding into foolishness, like Adam and his wife presuming to be able to hide from God behind the trees, Cain does not hide from God. Cain is defiant and bitter. In Cain, there is no indication of trying to hide the shame of what he has done, nor even of feeling shame. In his mind, he is justified, and God has no right to be calling him out on this.

Am I my brother’s keeper? One interpretation is that Cain’s reference is a sick joke, since Abel had been a keeper of sheep. If this is the case, then we see the extent to which Cain is perverse on account of his sin. Premeditated betrayal and murder resemble most closely the first sin of the first sinner, Satan, though Satan failed in his attempt at regicide. For the heart of that sin is cold calculation: the misuse of God’s gift of intellection to plan a gross attack not only upon the immediate victim of one’s wrath but, in the act itself, also upon God. We are most like God with our intellection, and so in a cold, calculated sin, we are taking what is most like God and using it for the purpose of directly hurting God. By doing that, though, we are attempting to hurt, if not to kill outright, the source of that same intellection. Therefore, the cold, calculated sinner wars against his own likeness to God as much as he wars against the immediate victim. If and when he succumbs to that cold, calculated sin, and performs the sinful deed that invariably follows, the sinner has robbed himself of his likeness to God. He is more beast than man at that point, and his response to any questioning about that sin will be defiant, cruel, and subversive.

Barnes’ Notes on the Holy Bible: The interrogatory here reminds us of the question put to the hiding Adam, "Where art thou?" It is calculated to strike the conscience. The reply is different from that of Adam. The sin has now advanced from hasty, incautious yielding to the tempter, to reiterated and deliberate disobedience. Such a sinner must take different ground. Cain, therefore, attempts to parry the question, apparently on the vain supposition that no eye, not even that of the All-seeing, was present to witness the deed. "I know not." In the madness of his confusion, he goes further. He disputes the right of the Almighty to make the demand. "Am I my brother's keeper?" There is, as usual, an atom of truth mingled with the amazing falsehood of this surly response. No man is the absolute keeper of his brother, so as to be responsible for his safety when he is not present. This is what Cain means to insinuate. But every man is his brother's keeper so far that he is not himself to lay the hand of violence on him, nor suffer another to do so if he can hinder it. This sort of keeping the Almighty has a right to demand of everyone - the first part of it on the ground of mere justice, the second on that of love. But Cain's reply betrays a desperate resort to falsehood, a total estrangement of feeling, a quenching of brotherly love, a predominance of that selfishness which freezes affection and kindles hatred.

Notwithstanding the extent of perversion that Cain has inflicted upon himself, God still has not given up on whatever remains of Cain’s conscience. Hence, the interrogatory is meant to stir in Cain what little flicker of reason and empathy may remain. When God had asked Adam, “Where art thou,” God was inviting Adam to investigate his own shame and to come clean on the failure that has led to that shame. In essence, His question was, “Where is your mind right now?” God cannot use the same tactic on Cain, for Cain’s conscience is much further gone than Adam’s had been. Thus, God directs Cain’s focus out of himself and his own defiant excuses for what he has done, and redirects that focus on Abel’s death. Perhaps, the horror of what happened will snap the light of a conscience back into Cain’s soul. In Cain’s defiant response, we see that, like with Pharaoh chasing Moses, his heart already is too hardened. To the extent Cain refocuses on Abel at all, it is to make a cruel reference to the fact that Abel had been a keeper of sheep. Cain does not refocus on Abel so much as on a caricature of Abel he conjured up in his mind before taking him out into the field to slay him. It would be like Hitler refusing to see a child lying dead on the floor of one of his gas chambers, but instead imagining that he sees on that floor an antisemitic trope caricature.

Galatians 5:14: For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

The Summary of the Law is the opposite of Cain’s rhetorical question. In answer to the question Cain poses, Our Lord says: Yes, and not only in the bare minimum of not doing violence on your neighbor, but even more so in affirmatively caring for the temporal and spiritual health of your neighbor. We are called to be our neighbor’s shepherd, which is to say, to look after their lives as much as we can and at the very least to pray for God’s grace to keep them within the fold or to find them when they have wandered off from the fold and to persuade them back. Our Lord calls us to live radically interdependent lives, first with the faithful whom we are to view as our brothers and sisters in the faith, and then as much as possible with those not yet in the faith. In this radical interdependence, the faithful undo the estrangement that Cain brought about and defiantly justified when confronted by God.

Genesis 4:10: And he said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

Hebrews 12:24: And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.

Abel’s blood cries out for vengeance. Our Lord’s fallen blood cries out for “better things than that of Abel,” for Our Lord’s blood cries out for reconciliation. Abel is the victim of a crime, to be sure, but the vengeance his blood seeks will turn Cain’s sin into a cycle of sin which will be repeated throughout history. Is it justice to avenge sin in a way that magnifies the effect and the duration of the sin? Is it justice to avenge arson by burning down the house of the arsonist especially when that house burning is going to ignite a fiery conflagration that will spread unto the uttermost parts of the earth? If the answer is no, then we need to differentiate what may be vengeance suitable to the original crime from justice. God makes that distinction, for even though He hears and responds to the cry for vengeance, He responds not by spilling the blood of Cain but by banishing Cain to live as an outlaw.

In the original Hebrew, blood and crieth are both plural. Therefore, some have said that it is the blood of all the generations of righteous men who would have flowed from Abel’s seed, but do not on account of Abel’s death, who are crying out for vengeance. Only God can hear the cries of generations that never are, for in God, what could have been, but is not, is just as knowable as what is. Just as God knows in His eternal present the choices we make; He knows also all the choices we could have made but did not make. Similarly, He knows the generations that live on the earth, and He knows the generations that never live on the earth for one reason or another.

Jeremiah 1:5: Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.

Therefore, if Jeremiah had been aborted, let us say, God still would have known him before he had been conceived, and He still would have ordained him to be a prophet before he had been born. History is impacted as much by the generations or the individuals never born as by those who are born. Perhaps, by today, there would be a cure for Alzheimer’s but for someone being aborted a hundred years ago. We see this as an unknowable missed opportunity, but God in His eternal present sees this as an option not taken because the man God had intended to find that cure is prevented from doing so by an exercise of human free will.

Genesis 4:11-12: And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

Ellicott’s Commentary: Cain was the first human being on whom a curse was inflicted, and it was to rise up from the ground, the portion of the earth won and subdued by man, to punish him. He had polluted man’s habitation, and now, when he tilled the soil, it would resist him as an enemy, by refusing “to yield unto him her strength.” He had been an unsuccessful man before and outstripped in the race of life by the younger son; for the future his struggle with the conditions of life will be still harder. The reason for this follows: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” Restless and uneasy, and haunted by the remembrance of his crime, he shall become a wanderer, not merely in the adâmâh, his native soil, but in the earth. Poverty must necessarily be the lot of one thus roaming, not in search of a better lot, but under the compulsion of an evil conscience. 

Earlier, God had cursed the serpent, but he had not cursed Adam and his wife. Instead, when rendering judgment upon them, God simply acknowledged what they had inflicted by their sin upon themselves and, for that reason, their unsuitability for Eden. He had banished them from Eden first and foremost to keep from them the Tree of Life, lest they succumb to sin again, eat of the Tree of Life, and experience the hellscape of immortality as sinners. There is considerable mercy in rendering judgment upon Adam and his wife, as indicated by God making for them the animal skin clothing that will be more suitable for their lives outside of Eden. Moreover, God is setting up in his judgment and mercy the basis for their salvation, namely, the sacrificing first of beasts and then of the Son of God. The animal skins foreshadow that they and their sins will be covered by the sacrifice of another. With Cain, the sin is much worse, and he remains as defiant as ever, and so God curses him like He did the serpent. We recall that the serpent existed inside the Woman’s self-consciously developing mind. He was the other side of a self-conversation at the base of the forbidden tree that justified a sensual indulgence of disobedience. His curse is in slithering upon the ground as a reminder of the fallenness of the mind when unrestrained by a pious will. The curse is an outward expression of what befalls the person who gives up God and self-restraint for intellectual, then sensual, decadence. The person who does that becomes like that serpent, slithering beneath the heel of the boot, a twisted shadow of former glory. Thus, in cursing Cain, God makes Cain to be a reminder unto future generations of what befalls the man who embraces cold, calculated betrayal and murder. He breaks the fabric of society and makes himself unsuitable for brotherly coexistence with others. The vengeance for which Abel’s blood cried out would have been in shedding Cain’s blood, but God’s justice is in banishing Cain. For in banishing Cain from family and social, God is making it clear that Cain has perverted his intrinsic humanity into something much less than that. The justice is not in “eye for an eye,” but in using Cain as an example for others so that, perhaps, some good may come from Cain’s banishment.

Genesis 4:13-14: And Cain said unto the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.

Ellicott’s Commentary: My punishment (or my iniquity) is greater than I can bear. —Literally, than can be borne, or “forgiven.” It is in accordance with the manner of the Hebrew language to have only one word for an act and its result. Thus, work and wages are expressed by the same word in Isaiah 62:11. The full meaning, therefore, is, “My sin is past forgiveness, and its result is an intolerable punishment.” This latter idea seems foremost in Cain’s mind and is dwelt upon in Genesis 4:14. He there complains that he is driven, not “from the face of the earth,” which was impossible, but from the adâmâh, his dear native soil, banished from which, he must go into the silence and solitude of an earth unknown and untracked. And next, “from thy face shall I be hid.” Naturally, Cain had no idea of an omnipresent God, and away from the adâmâh he supposed that it would be impossible to enjoy the divine favor and protection. Without this there would be no safety for him, so that he must rove about perpetually, and “everyone that findeth me shall slay me.” In the adâmâh, his native soil,  Jehovah would protect him; away from it, men, unseen by Jehovah, might do as they liked. But who were these men? Some commentators answer, Adam’s other sons, especially those who had attached themselves to Abel. Others say that Adam’s creation was not identical with that of Genesis 1:27 but was that of the highest type of the human race and had been preceded by the production of inferior races, of whose existence there are widespread proofs. But others, with more probability, think that Cain’s was a vain apprehension. How could he know that Adam and his family were the sole inhabitants of the earth? Naturally he expected to find farther on what he had left behind; a man and woman with stalwart sons: and that these, regarding him as an interloper come to rob them, and seeing in his ways proof of guilt, would at once attack and slay him.

Cain’s punishment ultimately is in presuming that other men are like him. As he had lied in wait, had calculated what to do, and had murdered his brother, so he imagines a world out there like the world in his mind. As sin perverts the man, so does sin pervert the man’s perception, and he comes to see that forgiveness and grace are not possible. This blindness is the worst affliction in man, which is why even when salvation comes to man in the form of the Incarnation of God, so few have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Genesis 4:15: And the Lord said unto him, therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

Again, God renders judgment with mercy, and so even in cursing Cain, God renders the mercy of a mark that will keep people from doing to Cain as he did to his own brother. The mark is not a sign of the curse, but rather a sign of God’s enduring protection notwithstanding the curse. It is a sign of God’s grace even upon a murderer. We shall see later that that grace abounds, as it is inclined to do. Cain finds himself a partner and builds a city with his own. God makes fruitful where there is even the smallest possibility of redemption.