Genesis 4 is dense and deep and yet it is sparse with its language. It’s like a riddle. The narrator gives us very few words, but those few words suggest and evoke interpretation. Novelist Ernest Hemingway famously made a wager that he could write a short story using less than ten words. He only needed six: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.” That is brief but suggestive. It sets your imagination firing in all kinds of directions. We have something like this in Genesis 4. Very few words, but those words are evocative. They invite you into the story in order to fill in the gaps intentionally left.

Or think of Picasso. It wasn’t that he couldn’t paint realistic paintings, but that he intentionally painted in a suggestive manner.

Here’s an example of an early, realistic painting from Picasso:

Picasso said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

Here’s an example of one of his later paintings:

The brush strokes are not realistic. The lines don’t fill in all the details for you. There are less strokes here, but they are suggestive. They are supposed to evoke something in you: you fill in the rest.

Genesis 4 is a story told by a master storyteller. The story contains very few words, but suggests so much. We have a lot to fill in! But it’s every bit as intentional as Hemingway or Picasso.

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This is the diagram of Cain and Abel referenced in the teaching:

And here are the quotes referenced:

Miraslov Volf, Exclusion and Embrace:

“Why this…vagrancy, we may ask? Why banishment into the land of unpredictability and fear…? Because belonging is home, and home is brother, who is no more…To have a brother one must be a brother and ‘keep’ a brother.” 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall:

“The end of Cain's history, and so the end of all history, is Christ on the cross, the murdered Son of God. That is the last desperate assault on the gate of paradise.”

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