“Just So” Stories
You Can’t Go Home Again
I don’t remember Kipling’s “Just So Stories” from when I was a kid, but some of the titles are quite familiar: “How the Camel Got His Hump,” for example, or “How the Leopard Got His Spots.” The “just so” in Kipling’s title doesn’t mean “that’s just how things are,” but that when he told these bedtime stories to his daughter she insisted that they always be told “just so.”
Some people apparently call these “pourquoi” stories, stories that explain why things are as they are. It’s easy to view Genesis as a collection of “pourquoi” stories, like “Why Snakes Have No Legs.” Vv. 20–21 in our chapter, where two of Lamech and Adah’s children are described as “the ancestor of” this or that, certainly seem to fall into that category — but without the stories that presumably accompanied them. V. 22 sounds similar, though it doesn’t use the “ancestor of” phrase, and Lamech and Zillah’s son in that verse is named Tubal-cain, so it’s reasonable to think of this chapter as including some “just so” stories.
It takes a lot of time and effort to earn a PhD, so lots of PhDs like to write in fancier English crammed with footnotes to demonstrate that it was all worthwhile. The buck-and-a-half word for a “pourquoi” story in biblical scholarship is etiology. In fact, one of the quotations in the Oxford English Dictionary showing the usage of the word comes from a commentary on the book of Judges by Susan Niditch:
The tale of the women of Shiloh may well be an etiology for customs involving marriage.
That’s just one of no doubt hundreds they might have chosen from biblical scholarship. John Scullion, in the Anchor Bible Dictionary — really more of a biblical encyclopedia, first published in 1992 and overdue for an updated 2nd edition — writes as follows:
An etiology is a narrative whose purpose is to explain the origin of a custom, an event, a name, a geographical formation, an object, a shrine. There are no etiologies of any length in Genesis, but there are many (popular) name etiologies: 2:23 (woman); 3:20 (Eve); 4:25 (Seth); 16:13–14 (God who sees); 19:22 (Zoar); 19:37, 38 (Moab, Ammon); 21:31 (Beer-sheba); 26:20b (Esek), 21b (Sitnah), 22 (Rehoboth), 33 (Shibnah); 28:16–17 (Bethel); 31:47–49 (Jegar-sahadutha, Galeed, Mizpah); 32:3b [—Eng 2b]; Mahanaim, a word play]; 50:11 (Abel-Mizraim).
Eric A. Eliason, in a 2008 review of James Kugel’s book How to Read the Bible, writes this about etiology as folklorists understand it:
By looking closely at the various cultures that tell them, folklorists have discovered that the etiological nature of the story is usually secondary to its main purpose—not only secondary but actually in service to the main purpose of the story, which is moral teaching after all.
All right, that review was from a Brigham Young University journal aimed at “Involving Readers in the Latter-day Saint Academic Experience.” It’s relevant to us nonetheless because before continuing with our story we should talk, once again, about what these stories are doing. The very fact that Cain and Abel have these quite complicated professions half a verse after they are born tells us that we are reading this story against the background of the presumed rivalry between farmers and sheepmen.
Do you get me? It is clearly not a story about that rivalry. Here’s what John Walton has to say about v. 2b in the Zondervan Illustrated Genesis:
This portrays the earliest human vocations. Abel is a pastoralist and Cain a farmer. Both provide food necessary for survival, yet the inherent nature of each creates the potential for conflict with the other. This conflict is likewise reflected in some of the earliest literature from Mesopotamia, namely, the Sumerian tale of Dumuzi [who gave his name to the month Tammuz] and Enkidu. Here their occupations do not cause their conflict. Instead, both deities (representing shepherds and farmers) are interested in gaining the favor of the same deity (the goddess Inanna).
It may well be (as we’ve mentioned, and as we’ll discuss further when we get to v. 17), that the original version of the Cain and Abel story — or an original version — was a Hebrew version of this ancient Mesopotamian story. There certainly was a rabbinic myth that said this dispute was about a woman, though Michael Fishbane’s 2003 book Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking has nothing to say about Genesis 4. (To be fair, his topic could have filled multiple volumes, not just one.)
Walton continues:
Likewise in Genesis 4 the conflict is not inherent in the occupations. The occupations explain the offerings, and the divine response to the offerings is the source of the conflict.
Our suggestion in multiple previous posts that this story was grafted into Genesis from an original source somewhere else makes the question even more urgent.
If this story were about rivalry for a woman, some woman other than Ḥavvah would obviously have been introduced into the story.
If this story had to do with nomads vs. settled people (or however else you’d like to characterize the farmer/cowman distinction), we’d surely have been told how the boys found their occupations.
Since our story doesn’t have either of those things, we’ve got to figure out what it’s doing here. My sense of it — which I’m sticking to for now, but will gladly revise when I understand more — is epitomized in the name I didn’t give this episode on the blog: “Life and Death in the Aftermath.” It seems to me that what our story is aimed at is the introduction of violence into the world to prepare us for the Flood story, which everyone in ancient Mesopotamia knew was coming.
I don’t want to say the farmers/herders distinction isn’t important, but most of the discussions of it I remember reading in my student days now strike me as anthropology of a very old-fashioned kind. Instead, let me point those of you who are interested to “The Debate between Grain and Sheep” (h/t Jack Sasson for the reference), where you will find a Sumerian discussion of the topic, not between farmers and shepherds but between the “commodities” themselves. We’ll have more than enough to talk about next time when we discuss what Cain is bringing, where he is bringing it, and why he is bringing it.