Fr. Stephen De Young: Verse six:

So the Lord said to Cain, "Why are you extremely sorrowful, and why is your countenance fallen? Did you not sin, even though you brought it rightly but did not divide it rightly? Be still; his recourse shall be to you, and you shall rule over him."

Yes, so they were trying to translate the Greek here, and the Greek here kind of makes hash of the Hebrew, and that's because there are some really weird, obscure words in the Hebrew here. This is where the people start sending the angry emails once again to Fr. Andrew Damick at Ancient Faith because I imply that maybe there's some problem with a Greek version of the Old Testament. But, yeah. [Laughter]

What this says in the original Hebrew, which is clear but it uses a bunch of archaic words, is— The "why are you extremely sorrowful and why is your countenance fallen" thing is pretty straightforward, accurate: "Why are you downcast? Why are you sad? Why are you upset?" Verse seven is more like in the Hebrew: "If you do good, will you not also be accepted?" The Greek is— The way they translated it— I'll say this: the way the Orthodox Study Bible translators translated the Greek here is trying to get at what I was saying. The "even though you brought it rightly," the idea is "even though you did the right procedure, but you didn't—" and the "dividing" thing there is the same kind of thing as "rightly dividing the word of truth": "you didn't consider it correctly; you didn't reckon it correctly even though you brought it correctly" kind of thing. But the Hebrew's pretty straightforward: "If you do well, will you not also be accepted? If you do good, would you not also be accepted?"

So the same idea at least is there, but then that last: "Be still; his recourse shall be to you, and you shall rule over him." So there's a word that's used in there that not only— It's not even archaic Hebrew; it's Akkadian. [Laughter] So this is— Remember, I mentioned in the introduction that there are very old parts of the Torah that go back to at least the time of Moses as they are, meaning it hasn't been updated at all; there's been no sort of adjustment of the language. These are the parts—and I mentioned a couple of other ones: Exodus 15, Deuteronomy 32—that when you look at the Greek text that was translated in the third century BC, they were already having trouble. Rabbis were looking at it like: "Uhh…" because the Hebrew was so ancient it's not even really Hebrew.

This is translated in English from the Hebrew usually as: "Sin is crouching at your door. It wants to master you, but you must master it." You can see some of that in the English from the Greek. The word that's translated there as "crouching" like "crouching at your door" is the Akkadian word. And that Akkadian word we've found in a bunch of Babylonian texts being used to refer to this type of demon that would crawl up through cracks in the ground from the underworld and then sort of prowl around looking for people to eat. The idea here is sin is being sort of quasi-personified or monsterified I guess, demonified. So sin is this sort of thing. It's crouching; it's waiting for you. It's prowling around, looking for you. It wants to master you; it wants to conquer you: you must master it. That there's this struggle. This struggle is going on between you and sin. It's trying to take control of you; you need to counter it and defeat it.

We see similar kind of language used in a bunch of points in the New Testament. St. Peter is saying the devil is prowling about like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. St. Paul in Romans 5 comes back here. He says, "Sin entered the world"—not "sins" or "sinning" like the act of sinning, but sin as a noun: "sin entered the world through Adam." So now, because they've been cast out of paradise, now sin is out there in the world. And now it's after his son; it's after Cain. This is also why we talk about sin the way we do. St. Paul really does this all the way through his writings. We mentioned this when we were going through St. Paul's letters. He very rarely uses "sins" in the plural to talk about actions. Sometimes he does, and then he's talking about sinful actions. Most often he uses "sin" in the singular, and he talks about sin as this force or this power.

The Fathers have picked up on that, and that's why they talk about sin, and we talk about sin in the Orthodox Church, in terms of the passions. They're passions because they make us passive. When we get angry, anger takes us over. We do things we wouldn't otherwise do and say things we wouldn't otherwise say, because anger is controlling us. Or our pride, our ego sort of takes control of us, and we say things and do things that in a more considered, calm moment we know are wrong, we wouldn't do. Or lust, or envy—pick your—greed—pick your sin. These things take control over us, and it's this same image.

So when St. Paul talks about one of the fruits of the Spirit being self-control, this is ultimately— That one fruit is ultimately the whole struggle with sin. The whole struggle with sin in our life is pursuing self-mastery. It's being in control of our self all the time, rather than these other things coming and taking control and causing us to do these things that we wouldn't otherwise do. This is the struggle that now Cain faces, being very dramatized. He's facing it internally. What is he going to do? Is he going to let anger take control of him, or is he going to take control of it and do something else?

Verse eight: "Now Cain talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him." I know everybody's heard these. [Laughter] Everyone saw this coming, I know. But notice— Notice that this is premeditated. This isn't Cain snaps, flies into a rage; he goes out in the field with him, away from everybody else, talks with him, and then kills him. This isn't even just anger; this is all kinds of things overwhelming him and taking control of him.

Verse nine: "Then God said to Cain, 'Where is Abel your brother?' " This is not, again, as we said in the last chapter— God is not requesting information he doesn't have. [Laughter] God knows exactly what happened. He knows what Cain did.

Cain replies: "I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?" which is, of course, where that phrase comes from. The irony here is, of course, not only does God know, he knows Cain knows. And "my brother's keeper" is referring to animal husbandry, like: "Am I in charge of taking care of him?" The irony, of course, being yes being implied.

Q1: It just struck me that as soon as there's a family of three men on earth, the first murder happens.

Fr. Stephen: Yep. [Laughter]

Q1: Seems like a fourth can… [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: But notice what's the key here? As we said when God came looking for Adam and talking to him, what did we say last time that was an opportunity for? That was an opportunity for Adam to repent, to go back to God and say, "We were wrong. We did this thing. We regret it. Is there a way to fix it?" There's nothing. But again, he goes to Cain. And Cain has to know that God knows, right?

Q2: It's a very unrepentant...

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yes, that is a complete lack of repentance. This is what the book of Numbers later in the Torah is going to call the high-handed sinner, the person who sins with their hand held high like they're swearing an oath to it, zero repentance. Quite the opposite. And so it's after that lack of repentance that God says:

"What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground." So it's not just that God knows, but we have this image that we saw, once again, remember, in Revelation: the martyrs, the souls of the martyrs, crying out to God for justice. The life of the innocent blood that's been spilled. God is just; things are out of whack. God is saying to Cain— This is another opportunity for Cain, potentially, to repent. He says, "Look, your brother's blood: this has to be answered; this has to be fixed."

Verse eleven: "So now you are cursed from the earth, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand." Notice that connection of the earth and this mouth language. Remember we talked about the serpent, the devil and the power of death, and it's going to eat the dust of the earth, and that's the same dust that humans become. So this is the same idea. The earth opened its mouth to receive his blood from you, so now you're cursed from it. Again, this is an escalation, because Adam in the last chapter remember, it was "Cursed is the ground because of you. So now it's going to be hard for you. It's going to be hard for you now to bring forth food from the earth." But now he's cursed from—cursed away from, like cut off from—the ground.

Adam went from the creation offering itself to him for sustenance to having to work the ground to feed himself. And now Cain is going to be cut off from the ground; his sin has cut him off from the rest of creation. There's now this split. So it's not just a split between him and God; it's a split between him and God and a split between him and the rest of the creation, because those things go together. Those things go together. And what does that concretely mean?

Verse twelve: "When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You will be groaning and trembling on the earth." So it's not going to be difficult for him to farm; he can't farm. "The ground will not cooperate with you at all. The rest of the creation will not cooperate with you at all."

This breaking of the relationship between humanity and creation includes animals, by the way. This is why there is enmity between humans and animals, and that's why we see certain saints, like St. Seraphim of Sarov with his bear. I don't recommend going up and hugging Siberian bears unless you're as holy as St. Seraphim, which none of us in this room are, sorry. And if you argue with me, you'll just be proving my point, so you're kind of stuck on that one. [Laughter] But we see these saints who can approach wild animals. There's even the story of St. Paul and the lion, which is pretty clearly a riff on Androcles and the lion or Daniel in the lion's den, all of these, where people who are holy and are correctly related to God are also correctly related to the rest of creation. So animals in their presence don't feel threatened by them; they don't feel afraid of them. I'm not— I am also not, by the way, recommending snake-handling. I know I was in West Virginia for eight years, but that's not what I'm getting at. [Laughter] "Do not put the Lord your God to the test." But that's part of that idea.

So Cain here is becoming quite literally the archetypal sinner. As we mentioned last time, the first time the word "sin" appears in the Bible is when God came and talked to Cain. The word "sin" did not appear in the Bible before that. So I'm not saying Adam didn't sin when he ate from the tree; I'm just saying the word "sin" was not attached to it. The word "sin" is attached in the text to Cain. Cain's sort of the archetype of what it means to be a sinner. We're going to see he's completely unrepentant. When you read later Jewish texts, including some of the latter parts of the Old Testament that we'll get to in a few years, Cain is held up as the first heretic, teacher of wickedness. He is the archetype of the unclean person. He is it.

And when we go through his genealogy, which we may or may not get to tonight, but when we go through his genealogy—I may save that for next time—we'll see that it's not just him, that this is compounded down the generations. So it's not that he was just a particularly bad guy, but then some of his kids and grandkids were okay; it gets worse and worse. It's compounded from generation to generation. The early— The Second Temple Jewish writings about Cain all emphasize that, like Josephus when he talks about Cain emphasizes that Cain was active in that, that he actively taught his kids and grandkids a wicked way of life, a sinful way of life.

Verse 13, Cain now is going to respond to this thing, this super heavy thing that's just been laid on him:

Then Cain said to the Lord, "My guilt is too great to be forgiven. Surely you have driven me out this day from the face of the ground. I shall be hidden from your face. I shall be groaning and trembling on the earth. Then it will happen if anyone finds me, he will kill me."

Anybody see any repentance in there?

Q2: Well, he says his guilt is too great to be forgiven.

Fr. Stephen: By whom?

Q2: By God, I suppose.

Fr. Stephen: No. That's why they're going to kill him.

Q2: Ah, okay.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] "My dad's going to kill me."

Q2: So it's just the "sorry I got caught, not sorry I did it"?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. This is the idea here. "My life is going to be horrible. You're doing this horrible thing to me. And anybody who finds me is going to kill me," not: "Well, I guess I messed up," not: "This is what I deserve for what I did." [Laughter] None of that! Just: "Aw, man. They're going to find me and kill me. What am I going to do?"

Verse 15: "So the Lord God said to him, 'Not so. Whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.' Thus the Lord set a sign on Cain, lest anyone finding him should kill him." So God says no. Note, God didn't kill Cain. God didn't say, "Your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground… gotta make this right: dead Cain. Life for a life, eye for an eye." So even though Cain is still not repentant, and God knows he's not going to be later, God still gives him the rest of his life, to potentially repent. As harsh as that is— And again, God doesn't say, "Here's what I'm going to do you: I'm cursing you from the ground; I'm going to make it so…" He says, "This is the consequence. This is the consequence of who you are and what you've become."

And God still, in addition to talking to him, in addition to coming to him first and saying, "Where's Abel?" to give him this first opportunity, second opportunity, rest of his life opportunity to repent—God is showing this mercy—and then he does this to ensure: "No, no one else is going to kill you." God is the one— And this is going to be used to refer to God several times later in the Old Testament, God is the one who silences the avenger. What does that mean? Well, in the ancient world, you had a lot of cycles of revenge. There was a right of revenge. You kill someone in my family, I get to go kill someone in your family. But, see, it rarely stopped there. [Laughter] After you kill someone in my family and I kill someone in your family, it was rarely like: "Well, fair enough. Okay, we both lost somebody." No, now it was: "Oh, they're going to kill someone else in my family, and I'm going to…" This cycle of violence, and this turns into wars, quite literally, and this turns into bloodshed. So God is saying, "No, no, no, no." God is the one who puts a stop to that cycle. God is sparing Cain's life to give him an opportunity to repent, and so that means everyone is going to spare Cain's life.

Now, this whole— It's called a "sign" here, or in King James Version, the mark, the mark of Cain. Yeah. So that has been read in some really gross and offensive ways. Let me just say it. Anyone who comes to you—and people used to say this; I'm sure there are people out there saying it—anyone who says to you this has anything to do with Cain's skin color is an idiot.

Q2: Duh.

Fr. Stephen: Why are they an idiot? Well, because two chapters from now there's going to be this thing, this flood, and it's going to kill all of Cain's descendants. So there is no one alive in the world today who is descended from Cain. I'm going to take the bold stand: racists or idiots. [Laughter] That's a particularly dumb one. We're going to have a much more awkward conversation when we get to Ham—not ham like the food, Ham like Noah's son Ham—who has been used for similar stupid racists purposes, but part of the reason for that misunderstanding is that there's some really dark stuff in that text that is completely hidden in the English translation that we're going to have to talk about, so there will be kind of a parental advisory on that episode. I don't think I said this yet in my introduction as we started Genesis, so I'll say it now for the record. I will try to let people know and try to say it on the recording when we're getting to passages in the Old Testament with stuff that people might not want kids to hear. So adults can listen to it first and decide if their kid is ready to talk about some of these things, because there's some bleak stuff we'll get to.

But anyway, back to this, to the mark. The idea of the mark in the original, in the Hebrew, is more like "mark" in its Elizabethan English usage, like "mark well." So what they were getting at in the King James Version, when God says, "I will set my mark on you" is "I will be watching you; I will be paying attention to you, to make sure that no one comes and murders you in vengeance." That's what it's aimed at, not trying to say he had a bar code on his forehead or was blue or something so that people would know: "Oh, that's Cain! Stay away from him!" [Laughter]

Q2: A yellow caution sign...

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! He looked like Skeletor… yeah, no. That's the idea, is that God is going to be watching him and what he's doing.

Verse 16: "Then Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, opposite Eden." This is interesting language. We're going to talk about the presence of the Lord a lot in the Old Testament; that gets talked about a lot in the Old Testament. In the Hebrew it's literally the face of the Lord; it's literally the face of Yahweh in the Old Testament. And it gets translated as "presence." Sometimes the King James did it fairly literally, like: "before my face." They would leave it in the Hebrew sort of idiom. I think it's important that we realize that Hebrew idiom behind the text, because the idea of the face of God in the Old Testament becomes something in the New Testament with the incarnation of Christ. When St. Paul talks about the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, he's talking about Christ as this sort of fulfillment of the people who want to see the face of God but no one can see his face and live. There's this whole idea that where his face is, that's where he is; that's where you can interact with him.

So even though humanity has been cast out of paradise—they're not living in the place where God is—there is still this place where God is present with Cain and his family, because Cain— He kept talking to Cain. So it's not that God's back there in Eden, and they can't get to him any more, and they've been thrown out and they're on their own now. God is still interacting with them; God is still with them. But Cain now deliberately leaves the place where God is. Again, that's not saying God isn't everywhere.

This is part of the concept of the presence of God in the Old Testament, that the idea is, yes, God's everywhere—you can read the psalms: "Where can I go where you're not? I go down to the underworld, to the grave; I go to the depths of the sea; I go to the heights of the heavens. God's still there"—but there are also places where God especially is, like the Temple or the tabernacle. There's a place, when you want to go and meet with God—remember this hospitality idea—there's a place where you go to do that, or places. There are places where you go to do that. And that's, again, more of this idea of the face. If you and I are looking at each other face to face, that allows us to communicate in a way that we can't by text message or something, let alone with my big sausage fingers where I can't type and everything's misspelled and autocorrect words into some weird gibberish. But we can communicate; we can interact. We can understand each other when we're looking at each other's faces.

So that's the idea: there's a place where God's face is. There's a place where you go to meet with him, a place where you go to sacrifice, a place where you go to do these things—and Cain goes away from that. So Cain: "I'm done." Again, not repentance; the opposite: "I'm out of here. Fine, then." And he wanders off.

Q2: What about the "opposite of Eden"? What seems to be in back of that?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, it's...

Q1: There's "east" in my bible.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, the Hebrew has "east," and the idea is the "opposite" is in the opposite direction.

Q2: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: So remember, they were east of Eden when they were cast out. They were cast out of Eden into the east. And he's going even further east, so he's not only going away from his family, he's going away from paradise.

Q2: So there's something to do with the sunrise and the sunset, so he's going off to something like…?

Fr. Stephen: No, it would be the opposite, because the sun rises in the east, and he's going further east.

Q2: Oh, he's going further east.

Fr. Stephen: But the idea is he's going even further from paradise than his parents. He's not going back towards paradise, he's not even going in a neutral direction: he's going farther from.

Q2: Yeah, "opposite" can be meant like "across the street from."

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! Catty-wompus to.

Q2: Near, where you could see it.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, so the idea is further away from Eden. We'll probably go, because we can probably do Cain's genealogy, but we're going to get into a bunch of stuff in there, and then chapter five is going to be more genealogy. So rather than—

Q1: Reading about all that sex, right?

Fr. Stephen: Rather than having two nights of genealogy… What I'm saying is, maybe we'll just have genealogy-fest next time. And then, after we've all been patient— Because there are interesting tidbits along the way in the genealogy. A lot of it are names of people we don't know anything else about, so we'll move through that quickly, and we'll just hit the highlights. So there's some highlights—or lowlights, in the case of Cain's genealogy. But then, the big payoff—this will be my promise for next time—the big payoff after we make it through all those genealogies, is we will do Genesis 6:1-4. [Laughter]

Q1: Ooh, there will be giants!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. So he who endures to the end will find giants. [Laughter] And people get excited when I talk about giants. But that'll be next time. Thank you, everybody.

Q2: Thank you.