When Adam was expelled from Eden, God sentenced him to till the now "cursed" earth, and Cain was the one who continued Adam's labor as a farmer. In contrast, when Abel was born, Eve doesn't explain why she gave him that name. Abel doesn't follow in the "family business" of battling thistles and weeds by the sweat of his brow but raises sheep instead. Yet when Cain, the beloved firstborn child, offers God a sacrifice of the hard-won fruits of his harvest, God rejects it.
Seemingly ignoring the "family history" of the expulsion from Eden and the cursing of the ground for Adam's sake, God turns up his nose at Cain's paltry produce and finds favor instead with the animal sacrifice of the second-born Abel, literally a "nothing man" who doesn't even utter a word in Genesis.
From Cain's perspective, he had every reason to be "wroth. Ornstein sees an important lesson here. Yes, it's unfair that Cain, as a farmer, inherited his father's curse. And yes, it's cruel that God rejected Cain's offering without giving a good reason and found favor in his brother's instead. But one of the morals of this ancient story is that no matter how justified you are in being angry, even when your life circumstances seem cruel and unfair, there is still no excuse for lashing out and hurting others.
It's also not an accident, adds Ornstein, that Adam and Eve are almost completely absent from Cain and Abel's story. Again, the authors of the Torah may have been trying to drive the point home that the experience of Cain's parents and their interactions with God aren't at issue here. When the two brothers are standing alone in that "killing field," says Ornstein, "all of the other stuff is stripped away" and all that matters is what Cain chooses to do.
In common usage, the phrase "mark of Cain" is usually understood as a punishment and therefore someone branded with the "mark of Cain" is an unforgivable outcast. But that's a false reading of the text in Genesis, which clearly explains that God marked Cain for his protection. As it says in Genesis 4, verse And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. The nature of this mark isn't clear, though, and it's been hypothesized as everything from a word tattooed on his forehead, to a horn and even as dark skin.
In the 18th to 20th centuries, some American Christian churches falsely rationalized their support of slavery or segregation of parishioners by equating black skin with the mark of Cain. What's important to Ornstein is recognizing that God didn't destroy Cain as punishment for his crime or cut Cain off from His presence.
Instead, the mark of Cain was a symbol of God's mercy. The book of Genesis is a full of dysfunctional sibling relationships, whether it's the twins Esau and Jacob , Joseph and his 11 brothers , or Moses and his brother Aaron. Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning author and human rights activist, summed up the message of Cain and Abel, the first murder, with one phrase: "He who kills, kills his brother.
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Third son of Adam 4. Green of "Robot Chicken" 4.
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