Genesis Chapter Four

A Month Later ...

I finished the fourth chapter of Genesis Wednesday Jan. 11th, 2012. After nearly a month of working on everything but this project, I expected my work to be less than perfect. However, I found that I was able to finish the chapter in about two hours, which is exactly how long each of the last three chapters took me to write out. Since I am copying line for line, consistency of letter size and word spacing is crucial. I found this to come with much less effort than my last venture. It is encouraging to realize that I am already better at this than I was on the first page.

The Story

In Chapter four, Adam and Eve begin having children. "Manchildren" to be specific. They seem to be going on with their lives all right, even in the freshly cursed world. But then one of their sons kills the other one. The reasons that Cain killed Abel: jealousy that God favored Abel's offering and not Cain's. Abel was a herder, so he gave some "fat portions" of what he had. Cain grew food from the ground and gave from what he had. He finds out that God prefers the meat.

Then, God gives Cain an interestingly similar punishment to the one Adam and Eve received: banishment. Part of the "curse" God puts on Cain is a promise of protection in the form of a promise to avenge sevenfold anyone who dares to kill him. Then he is cursed to be a "vagrant and wanderer." But then he settles and marries and starts a family and builds a city.

The story takes a plot break to mention some genealogy and then focuses a small bit on Lamech, who had two wives, Adah and Zillah. Lamech tells his wives in a cryptic speech that if Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech should be avenged "seventy-sevenfold" because he killed a man AND a boy. Leading into chapter five we learn that Adam and Eve are still making babies: Seth replaces Abel for Eve and she gets a line expressing gratitude to God for it.

What I think

God's use of favoritism becomes more and more apparent. I use the word favoritism in the most anthropomorphic way possible. God chooses humans over all other creation, then he chooses man over woman and then he chooses Abel over Cain. When God sees that favoring Abel "and Abel's offering" has upset Cain, God says a few sentences, but never really addresses the issue. The vague warning of sin crouching at the door is not enough to keep Cain from killing. But as it seems, there were still no rules other than the one that had already been broken. So, its hard to know to what "sin" God was referring here.

God's favoritism here seems absolutely random and pretty confusing until the perspective from which it was written is taken into account. The authors were men who were banking on God's preference of animal sacrifice. That really is all they had to offer, because they were desert nomads at this point. It begins to become clear that these are stories for the Israelites in the desert. They were lessons. They were meant to instruct. For example, "animal product is an acceptable sacrifice, but grain is not" and "thank God for manchildren."

Another very obvious result of the authors' world view is the status of womankind. So far woman is credited for A) downfall of humanity, B) bearing "manchildren." Though it mentions that daughters are being born, they are a necessary byproduct that happens while trying for a boy. As God had ordered earlier, men "rule" women.

Reading chapter four is similar to watching a new parent fail at raising a child. It elicits the same uneasy feeling I had as a kid at my best friend's house. As a child, he was a hellion by any measure and I would watch as his timid mother consistently failed to effectively discipline him. Cain's "curse" is "too much to bear" and he complains to God that someone will kill him, so God immediately ammends the punishment. I find myself losing respect for God's way of dealing with humans, in the same way I am disappointed in flimsy parenting.

Cultural Notes

A hugely significant event, the end of hunting and gathering, takes place in chapter four. People begin systematically growing crops and raising livestock. It is not a coincidence that this happened after God gave the earth to man to "rule." It is also not a coincidence that this is when the trouble starts. Humankind really did take a fall because of this. As is clear in chapter four, the human species began to multiply exponentially with the advent of these new food producing styles.
The story is also put into historical context by mention of the birth of Tubal-cain, the "father of bronze." So, we are at least in the bronze age at this point.
The mention of polygamy again highlights woman's position in the culture. Women are clearly property at the time of the writing.
Music and musical instruments are also mentioned as well as tents and nomadic living.

The Art

As wrote in the first paragraph, I found the writing to come a bit easier than I expected. As I found previously, writing in short bursts and taking breaks to read over the story works the best. I sat on the floor and wrote on a low table, so my feet fell asleep and I became really uncomfortable if I stayed down there for too long. However, the lettering did not suffer. I was really happy with the look of the columns and the spacing of the words. I also included an example of the art I have been trying with my new ultra fine tip pen.