Fair and Balanced
You Can’t Go Home Again
Today we’re going to step back a bit for a look at the bigger picture before continuing with the details of Gen 4:2b. (The b, as you remember, indicates the second half of a biblical verse, the part that comes after the etnaḥta, the major pause in the middle of almost every verse in the Bible.) There’s plenty to discuss even in this half-verse, but right now we’re going to zoom out to look for a moment at vv. 2b–5a, which I’ll give here in the NJPS translation:
2 … Abel became a keeper of sheep, and Cain became a tiller of the soil.
3 In the course of time, Cain brought an offering to the LORD from the fruit of the soil; 4 and Abel, for his part, brought the choicest of the firstlings of his flock.
The LORD paid heed to Abel and his offering, 5 but to Cain and his offering He paid no heed.
We saw last time that what we’re reading is not (as we’re used to calling it) the story of “Cain and Abel.” It is the story of Cain, who has a brother named Abel. Cain is the one character in the story with a “real” name — one that doesn’t relate to his role in the story and therefore was presumably known already (somehow) to Israelite readers.
Nonetheless, the next three verses’ worth of the story — the second half of v. 2, vv. 3–4, and the first half of v. 5 — move back and forth in a rigorously balanced way between the two young men (as they have somehow become once we step across that etnaḥta). In fact, we can begin this analysis right at the beginning of the chapter, when “Ḥavvah … got pregnant and gave birth to Cain … She went on to give birth to his brother Abel.” Distilling everything but the names, here’s what we see, staring with v. 1b:
Cain • Abel
Abel • Cain
Cain • Abel
Abel • Cain
It reminds me of the quintessential Mississippi riverboat pilot described by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi who, rather than running to the side of the boat as the passengers did when there was something to see, “would stick to the center of the boat and part his hair in the middle with a spirit level.” (See p. 198 here.) There is an absolutely perfect literary balance between the two brothers — until suddenly there isn’t.
There is at least one other place in the Bible where I’ve noticed this technique. It’s in the story of the birth of Samuel/Saul. (To read more about that, see here, here, and here.) This is the same story I mentioned when I suggested that Cain might somehow have been originally considered ⅔ human and ⅓ divine. I’m not saying there is any link between the two stories; still, Elkanah’s two wives in that story are introduced this way, again in the NJPS translation:
1 Sam 1:2 He had two wives, one named Hannah and the other Peninnah;
Peninnah had children, but Hannah was childless.
It’s admittedly a shorter example; to my mind, however, it demonstrates a recognizable literary technique. It introduces two characters who are in some sense at the same level or somehow each might be the one chosen to play a certain role as the story goes on, first showing them side-by-side and then letting the story take its course.
You might retort that this is an obvious esthetic choice made by writers, composers of music, and painters throughout history. Yes, that is part of the point I’m trying to make. Whether you think the Bible or any particular text in it had an Author or just an author, that creator was composing the text for an audience of people like us in a human language like our own.
Once more we see that the Bible is not just a recitation of facts. Some parts of it, at least, are shaped to focus our attention on some of those facts in a certain way. And one aspect of that shaping is not the effect the words will have on the reader, but the pleasure the writer gets from his or her choice of words.
I’ve written about this before on The Bible Guy. Part of what’s making me think about it now is an article by David Carr that I read recently summarizing his analysis of ancient scrolls. (You can find a reader-friendly discussion by him here.) It’s part of what I learned from colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania to call a “material texts” approach.
Scholars of ancient books — and my 17 years of work on the Commentators’ Bible showed me that this is even truer of Jewish scholars through the ages — focus on the words of the ancient texts. But material texts, the objects that transmit the written words from writers to readers, have an enormous amount to teach us about the age in which the texts were written and the subsequent times in which they were read.
What I’m going to do next is just to offer some questions that deserve thought. I am not the kind of scholar who can solve them; that will require an interesting combination of archaeological research and discovery, historical study, and imagination. The obvious questions, all of which apply to more than just our story, are these:
How did the writers support their families? What were their economic circumstances?
What materials did they use to write? Parchment and ink? How did they get them?
Where did they work and how were their working spaces arranged?
Why were the biblical texts written? Who were the intended audiences? How did the writers expect others to read their work or hear it read?
Where were the finished copies kept? How were they organized? How were they used?
Did the writers have texts by others at their disposal, “libraries” of their own?
All of these are questions we may have an opportunity to return to in the future. Thinking about them helps me realize how very little we know about the Bible.
We’ll continue our close reading of the Cain story with v. 2b, next time.