Fr. Stephen De Young: We'll go ahead and get started. When we get started, we'll be starting at the beginning of Genesis 4, starting with verse one. One of the nice things so far in Genesis, and this'll go on for a little while at least, is I don't have to do a ton of recap, because people are at least vaguely familiar with the stories, and for details— I'm not going to repeat all the details, obviously, because we'd never get anywhere, so you can go to the previous episodes. Obviously, we just finished Genesis 3, and so that ended with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise. Man has been expelled out of paradise and into the present world. That is really right where we're picking up. There is in the text no time-lapse described; that doesn't mean there wasn't one, because as we're going to see, at least nine months are going to pass during the first verse. [Laughter] But otherwise that's really right where we left off was their expulsion from paradise and the stationing of the cherubim with the fiery sword which, as we said, was to— not to protect God and paradise from them, but to protect them from God and paradise in their now-fallen state.

Unless there are any comments or questions or dramatically read 1960s song lyrics that anyone has to offer, we'll go ahead and pick up in Genesis 4:1.

"Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain and said, 'I have acquired a man through God.' " Obviously, the word "knew" there is carrying a lot of weight. That's the Hebrew word yada. This is not only the origin of the English saying which may be antiquated now—I don't know if people still say it—but "knowing someone in the biblical sense" as a euphemism. That's what— This is where that comes from.

But the reverse of that is true. We need to remember this is— And we actually mentioned this last time in terms of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that this understanding of what it means to know something or someone is different than the way we talk about knowledge today. There is in Hebrew and in Greek a very rich vocabulary to talk about different ways of knowing and kinds of knowing. While we have words in English to describe some of that, we use the word "know" to cover pretty much all of it. "I know my wife. I know you sitting here. I know that two plus two equals four." [Laughter] And it's just covering all of these different senses.

For the most part, as modern contemporary Western people, when we talk about knowing something, it's very externalized. To say that I know this is— We sort of treat it as an assertion that whatever I then say is true. "I know that two plus two equals four" is basically asserting that it is true that two plus two equals four, so it's this objective statement or an attempt to present something as an objective statement, as opposed to "I think that two plus two equals four" or "To me two plus two equals four." These other ways— When we say "I know," we're claiming some kind of objective facticity to it.

As I've said before to try and disambiguate this, this misses a distinction, that you can make in English, between knowing something or someone and knowing about something or someone. Knowing about something or someone is some kind of conglomeration of facts. We were talking earlier: I know a lot about William Shatner. [Laughter] I have yet to— Well, I've been within ten feet of William Shatner, but I have yet to meet or interact with William Shatner, so I cannot claim I know him, but I know a lot of things about him. I've watched TV shows and movies with him in them. I can tell you factual things about them.

Another example I know I've used before is my wife's childhood friends and her doctor know a bunch of facts about her that I don't know, but they don't know my wife the way I know my wife. So we're really talking about two different things there, even though we're using the same verb. Biblically, in both the Old and New Testaments, to know, as here, almost always—and I only say "almost" because I'm sure someone somewhere can find an exception, but almost always implies a level of intimacy with the thing known. It implies a relationship between the knower and the thing known, not just an objective… So when, for example, in St. John's gospel, Christ says, "This is life: to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you've sent," that doesn't mean that life or eternal life is acknowledging that God exists—

Q1: Reciting the Nicene Creed.

Fr. Stephen: —or reciting the Nicene Creed and putting "T" on the true/false afterwards. That's not nothing, but it's much more than that. It's not less than that, but it's much more than that. Obviously, you can't know someone who you don't think exists. [Laughter] But there's a lot more to it than that. This knowledge implies this level of intimacy and this relationship between you as the knower and what you know. This word is not being used here— "Adam knew his wife" is not being used here as a euphemism the way we now use it today, "to know someone biblically" is a euphemism. It's not because they don't want to use the word for sex. There were no Victorians in the Ancient Near East, trust me! When you get to a certain chapter in Ezekiel, you'll all know that for sure. [Laughter] The Bible is not Victorian about this stuff; the Bible straight up… So this is the correct usage of the word.

It's related to what we saw in chapter two when Eve was created out of Adam, when woman was created out of man, when he was pulled apart and made into two people. The idea here is that they are coming back together and becoming one flesh. And so that means— This is the kind of Bible study that, back when my sister lived in town, she would avoid, because she didn't want to hear her brother talking about this stuff, but this is talking about a spiritual dimension to sexuality. This is going to be the basis, later on, for when we start talking about sexual immorality and sexual sin: why it's a sin, why it's a problem, because just as we've seen already— We're not that far in Genesis, but we've already seen that commandments are not just rules that God sets arbitrarily. And for the record, "arbitrarily" comes from the Latin abitrio which means according to his will. So it's not just something based on his will and nothing else; God forbids things because they're destructive: to us, to each other, to our relationships with each other and our relationships with him. That's why he forbids things.

So the reason why there is a thing called sexual immorality is because of this spiritual dimension to sexuality, meaning sexuality between husband and wife is not primarily about pleasure for either party; it's not primarily about gratifying a desire that needs to be gratified. It's also not primarily about procreation, even though that's what's about to happen here.

Q2: Yeah, are we going to get past sentence number one tonight?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Am I making you uncomfortable like my sister? [Laughter] No? Ha! So that is a— That it is about this being one flesh and this spiritual connection and knowledge of each other, the intimacy aspect of it is. What we're going to see when we get to— When we get to Leviticus 18, it's going to be a harrowing night, because the whole chapter is just going to be one gross thing you can do after another, frankly, with relatives and with everything else! But the reason for that— What we're going to see when it talks about sexual immorality, is going to be places where the gratification is there or something else is there, but that intimacy and that connection, that knowledge, isn't there. It's about someone getting something else that they want using sexuality.

And the reason I spent time going into this is not because I love talking about sex, because as you've seen I don't that much—it's obvious—but because this here—the creation of Eve and then this—when a question comes up about divorce, this is where Christ goes. Something about marriage comes up, this is where… So this is the foundational understanding of relationships between men and women and marriage that the rest of the stuff we're going to read—like when we start getting to commandments about marriage and about divorce and about sexuality and all those things—that's going to have reference to, back to here. So we have to kind of lay that groundwork now.

Q2: And would you say that when Adam says she conceived and she said he said, "I have gotten a man from the Lord," that has a power within itself in relation to what you just said.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So this is the first baby who's born, but what does it mean that this comes from— And in the Hebrew it's from Yahweh. This I am not going to go into, but— No, you don't want me to, trust me. Cock-eyed weird scholarly theories about that, meaning something weird about God or the devil or whatever—are weird and ridiculous and not what the text says. [Laughter] The idea here is that— Remember how Adam was created: his body was formed from the earth, and then God breathed life into it and he became a living soul. So the idea here is that sort of she and Adam biologically made the body, and it's God who has given this life, so that now there's a new person. So this isn't just God set it rolling—sorry, Thomas Jefferson; sorry, Deists—God sort of starts everything rolling, and then just the natural processes take over. The idea is that each life that comes into the world, every person, is created by God and comes from God. Even Cain, who's not going to do so well.

Q1: It's significant that the first baby didn't turn out well.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, it is going to— As we go on, we will see there's going to be a… It's going to set a pattern that's going to play out in Genesis, of older brothers and younger brothers, and who's born first and who ends up being reckoned as the firstborn. So, yeah, she says that to indicate that he's from God.

Verse two: "Then she bore again, this time his brother, Abel. Now Abel was a shepherd of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground." Younger son is Abel. Abel's name is interesting. I should probably have this conversation now.

When we say, or we're calling Adam "Adam," which just sort of means Man, or Human, technically speaking, and Eve means mother; as we said, her name went from Woman to Mother. And now Abel is actually Havel, which actually means vanity or wind or emptiness. [Laughter] So we're not asserting that these are these people's given names. We're not asserting they spoke Hebrew, for example, and would have had Hebrew names. What they would have actually called each other is not the focus here. And this is— Again, people get a little too weighed down with literalism of exactly… But the names there are referring to changes that happen, like when somebody's name changes, like Eve's, and their role in the story and that kind of thing. We're not making this propositional assertion, like: "No! This was this person's given name by happenstance, and it just happens to be this in Hebrew, however long later."

Q1: What does "Cain" mean?

Fr. Stephen: Well, "Cain," they kind of argue about, because there are some Cainites later whom they argue about. It can refer to reeds; it can refer to— There's a couple different theories of what Cain is referring to, but, yeah, the reason I went into Abel or Havel is: This is not somebody's given name. Cushan-rishathaim from [Aram]-Naharaim, we brought up on Lord of Spirits the other day, is a king who gets mentioned later. Cushan-rishathaim literally means, like "double-dark evil one," so I doubt his mom named him that. [Laughter] So this is not— The Bible's not asserting that these are people's given names. It's like Skeletor.

Q1: So what are we supposed to—? Are we supposed to attribute these qualities to Abel?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the idea— He ends up, as we're going to see— that when he dies— I mean, spoilers, when she has the third son, Seth, "Seth" means replacement. [Laughter] So, I mean, like, that would be kind of rough, being named Replacement after… But you see the idea, this is talking about their role in the story; this is something symbolic. His name is symbolic in speaking about them.

Q2: So he's going to be here and then—

Fr. Stephen: Right, he's going to be here and then gone, and what did it mean.

Q2: Vanity, not in the sense of pride and vanity, but in the sense of—

Fr. Stephen: Vanity like emptiness.

Q3: So it would be like us in modern day writing and naming somebody Can't Vote.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. It's a little more subtle than John Bunyan, but in the same vein. [Laughter] Sorry to mention a Puritan in your presence, but—

Q1: That's the heir and a spare.

Fr. Stephen: Yes. And they have these two jobs. So Cain takes after Dad, remember, because that's what Adam was— break the ground, bring forth food. Abel's a shepherd of sheep. They're not eating sheep, remember, but you can shear sheep, make everything out of wool like shelter and clothing. So between the two of them, doing these two different things, both of which are respectable and which are contributing to their own way of life as a family.

Verse three:

Now in the process of time, Cain brought a sacrifice to the Lord from the fruits of the ground. Abel also brought a sacrifice from the firstborn of his flock and of their fat. The Lord respected Abel and his offering, but he did not respect Cain and his sacrifices, so Cain was extremely sorrowful and his countenance fell.

There are a couple of things here that are sort of implied in the text that are never explained. Number one, sacrifice? [Laughter] There's never sort of a "Then God said, 'Here's how you worship me: you offer a sacrifice and here's how you do it and here's what to do.' " And that's pointed out even more by this second thing, which is this "now in the process of time." So some time comes when they're going to do this. What time was that? There are times? When were these established? None of that is told to us. It's just sort of assumed. So this again is part of the idea that if you read Genesis closely, Genesis, contra some of the very literalistic modern readers, is not pretending to be giving us the full story of everything that's happening. So there's other stuff going on in the background, including potentially other people, other children of Adam and Eve, other things happening that we're not being told about. Clearly they've established some kind of time when they offer sacrifices on a regular basis, and they have a process by which they do this, but we're not told when and how that started or any further details. It's just assumed.

And sacrifice as such is just ubiquitous in the ancient world. Everybody does it. Plants, animals, sometimes humans. Just everybody's doing it. So the fact that everyone is doing it is actually helpful in terms of understanding what's going on, because one of the dangers with sacrifice— And I'm going to make this really pertinent on this verse by the time I get to the end, so this is not just me rambling about sacrifice for a while, though it may seem like that for a minute; it's going to come back to this verse.

One of the tendencies among modern scholars and theologians is to take, especially since most of those modern scholars come from a Christian background even if they're not Christians themselves, is to take a lot of the theology and thinking about Christ and the crucifixion and his sacrifice and read it back into ancient sacrifices, and not just in the Old Testament, but even pagan sacrifices. Despite whom I may offend, René Girard does this, Walter Burkert does this. [Laughter] It's just ubiquitous. And Walter Burkert, even though he was a Lutheran, was mainly a scholar of ancient Greek sacrifices, but he's got all this guilt and forgiveness stuff working in, like, Homer. [Laughter] I don't think the Greeks thought that way!

And if you want some— If you have some really advanced, complex idea of what's going on about sin and guilt and the gods and all this, that's very difficult— a very difficult argument to make if everyone, in all of these vastly different cultures—so we're talking about the Indus River Valley, the Nile River Valley, Mesopotamia—they're all offering sacrifices that they all came to the same advanced, complicated notion of substitutionary atonement or whatever other things you're going to want to shove in there: that's not really likely.

But what we do find is that all of those sacrifices in all of these different diverse cultures involve food. When you've got human sacrifices, it's pretty much always connected to cannibalism. I won't go too far down that road, but just to say that it is. But you get grain offerings, you get drink offerings, you get animal offerings, but they all involve food. This is because the framework for understanding sacrifice is hospitality, because the idea of hospitality is a basic human reality. You don't need any advanced theology or complicated sociology. "I have stuff. I offer you some of my stuff. I share some of what is mine with you." You don't need any of that; this is basic to all of humanity. So when this comes into the spiritual and religious context, this just includes God, gods, spirits, whomever within this community that's sharing this hospitality of offerings.

Why is all of that pertinent to this verse? Because the question that arises out of these verses we've just read, most often, is: Why did God accept Abel's offering and not Cain's? One way that people have done this that is very common amongst our Protestant friends is to say, "Well, Abel offered an animal, and Cain offered his grain, the fruits of the ground." So he offers grain; Abel offers an animal. And then: "Well, animal, see: the animal, sin-offering, da-de-dah, dee-da-dee," start running all the way, right. But if you read further forward in the Torah—and remember, Genesis is part of the Torah—not only are there also grain-offerings commanded by God from the harvest, but there are sin-offerings that consist of wheat-cakes. Technically, I guess you're killing wheat when you pound it up, but it doesn't bleed.

Q4: Maybe that's what Cain had.

Fr. Stephen: Right! That's what he had, so he took from his; Abel took from his. But so people in this context, to explain it, do that "reading back into it" thing. They have this whole developed theology of how Christ's crucifixion worked, and they've read that kind of substitutionary atonement idea back into the sacrifices of the Old Testament, and then they take it all the way back here. Not only does that have this problem of reading backward, but there's a basic problem here where the way they're interpreting this is essentially that it was magic. Here's what I mean. They're saying the reason God accepted one sacrifice and not the other was one was performed correctly and the other one was performed incorrectly.

So within ancient religious ritual, there's a distinction that's made between your regular rituals—your sacrifices, your festivals—on the one hand, and then ritual magic on the other hand, which magic, sorcery, exists in these societies. And the difference between the two is ritual magic, if you perform the process correctly, guaranteed the result. That's how magic was seen to work was that it did what it did by the process; by following the recipe, it did it. Whereas regular religious ritual did not guarantee the result: the god or gods or God with a capital-G or the spirits retained free agency to accept or reject your offering.

Attempting to interpret this as God rejected it because the correct procedure wasn't followed is not even to look at it from an enlightened pagan perspective, but to look at it from a magical perspective. You don't have to read very far in the rest of the Old Testament to hear God say— He eventually gets to the point where he says, "Stop offering me sacrifices. I don't want them from you. Yes, you're following all the procedures, but your heart is far from me. You're wicked. You're doing all these things. You're unrepentant. Stop offering the sacrifices." So God, as he's presented in the Torah, in the Old Testament, doesn't work that way, so he doesn't work that way here either.

We have to go a little further, but the text is actually going to tell us why. We already saw some spoilers in 1 John. Remember when he brought up Cain? He said it was because Cain's deeds were evil. Because sacrifices don't work on automatic. They're not magic. That includes the sacrifice we offer in church, the Eucharist. It's not magic. None of these things… And so this is, like I said, all through the Old Testament, but for this sacrifice to be effective, it has to be joined with repentance, in the case of a sin-offering. It has to be joined with actual thanksgiving if you're offering a thank-offering. If it's a peace-offering where you're reconciling with another human being and you haven't actually reconciled with that other human being, it doesn't mean anything. And Christ reiterates this. He says, "If you're going to the altar with your gift, and you realize"—his wording here is important—"that someone has something against you"—not "you realize you have something against someone," but you realize someone else has something against you—"you should leave your offering and go be reconciled to them, and then you come and give the offering."

It's true of all offerings. It's true of the Eucharist. It's true of Christ's sacrifice. St. Paul had to explain this, remember, in Romans. The fact that Christ has brought the forgiveness of sins does not mean: "Whee! Let's hit the streets! We're forgiven!" [Laughter] It has to be met with repentance, with faithfulness. So the reason we're going to see— I'll just go ahead and spoil it now. The reason we're going to see that Cain's offering is not accepted is that his offering is not met with those things on his part. If he's unrepentant, if he's resentful, if he's— Then going through the motions of offering the sacrifice, God's not going to accept it. It would be like using our hospitality thing: You and I have had a big blow-out fight. I invite you over to my house for dinner. You know that even though I gave you that invitation I've been going online and saying all kinds of horrible things about you. Are you going to accept my dinner invitation? [Laughter] No! So it's the same kind of thing. Just going through the motions of hospitality doesn't actually fix things. It's not— The hospitality comes afterwards: you celebrate the reconciliation with the meal. You celebration the reconciliation, the restored relationship, the forgiveness that's come to you; you celebrate that with the meal. It doesn't work the other way around.

And so we're also going to see this is not— There's another way of reading it which is just that: "Oh, Cain didn't do his sacrifice right; he messed up. So God didn't accept it." We're not even told for sure how they know, but "God didn't accept it and so he just snaps!"

Q1: That's how I've usually looked at it.

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that's— The idea is the reason it wasn't accepted is there's already been an issue, and this becomes the last straw. You don't go from deeply loving your brother to murdering him over, like— That literally doesn't happen, barring sudden-onset psychosis or something, but that's not a normal [thing].