Understanding Sin and Evil #2 - Cain and Abel: An Oracle of Sin

Thank you to the wonderful Mariana Gil Hammer for the transcript of this episode. 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Understanding Sin and Evil, Episode 2: Cain and Abel, an Oracle of Sin. Now, if you haven’t listened to the first episode, which was a story of Adam and Eve called The Origin of Sin That Wasn’t, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that episode before listening to this one. You can understand this episode on its own, but you’re going to miss a lot if you don’t listen to the first one beforehand. 

So let me talk a little bit about how this podcast series will continue. In the last episode, you heard an explanation of the Adam and Eve story in the Bible before the layers of interpretation that we get to later, and what the plain text meaning of that story is in its biblical context.

This episode, we’re going to be talking about the story of Cain and Abel again, in its biblical context, even though I will sometimes bring in some later interpretation when it is relevant or when it’s just too interesting to ignore. Then in the next episode, we will be talking about later interpretations of both these stories. 

The Cain and Abel story includes the first explicit mention of sin that we get in the Hebrew Bible. 

But for some reason, and we’re going to talk about that later as well, this story did not resonate particularly in the Second Temple Period. It resonated later, but not in the Second Temple Period, not much. After the next episode — when we talk about how the Adam and Eve story was interpreted in the Second Temple Period and immediately after the Destruction — after that episode we’re going to be going back to the biblical text and we’re going to be talking about Genesis 6 (Bereshit vav), verses one to four, what becomes the Watchers myth in the Second Temple Period. And then we’re going to be spending quite some time talking about how the Watchers myth plays out in different Second Temple interpretations. 

But now let’s turn to our text. I will mainly be using the NJPS translation, but I’m going to be changing it liberally when it’s not that close to the plain meaning of the text. And I will also be talking about certain cases where you might see a very different translation in your Bible. So, let’s turn to our texts. And luckily enough, this picks up right where we left off last time: right after the expulsion from Eden, we have the conception of Cain and Abel, or as I will call them Kayin and Hevel. So I’m starting with chapter four. 

Now Adam knew his wife Eve and she conceived and bore Cain saying, I have acquired a man with the Lord. (Gen 4:1)

So, the word that she’s using for acquired is kaniti, hence Kayin. I have acquired a man with the Lord. Now this wording sounds peculiar to us, but it expresses two different things. First of all, we have to have the name Kayin in there somehow. So we need the word kaniti, acquired. But besides that, what is this expressing?

This is expressing the first human birth. How does a woman feel? She’s given birth. There has been no birth before, she has made a man with God, right? She’s made a person. Wow. At the same time, it’s kind of hubristic, it’s kind of prideful for her to say that. And that’s a little bit of a foreshadowing of what’s going to happen to Kayin later, it is a kind of pride. And then she has another child and she continued to give birth. She bore his brother Hevel and here we have no explanation of the name Hevel. Frankly, we, who know the end of the story, don’t need an explanation of the name Hevel because Hevel means a breath or vanity — something that is gone in an instant. So if you are familiar with Koheleth (Ecclesiastes) that “vanity of vanities all is vanity.” The phrase there is hevel havalim, vanity of vanities.