Those First Offerings (Gen 4:3–4)
You Can’t Go Home Again
Up through the end of v. 4 in our story, we’ve seen Cain, an earth-worker = farmer, and his brother Abel, a flock-grazer = shepherd, bring offerings to YHWH. Cain brought “some of the fruit of the earth” and Abel brought “some of the firstborn of his flock and some of their suets.” Now we’ll pause to think about some topics we’ve already touched on briefly:
Why did they think they should make offerings?
Where did they “bring” them?
How did they “offer” them?
The superficial answer for why Cain brought an offering is that he had a year of agricultural success. The simple answer for why Abel too brought an offering is that this is how the author of the story intended to set up the murder. Since the story does not explain the where or the how of these offerings, they are obviously not important for the story.
But that implies that we are to take for granted that offerings to YHWH are a normal and expected thing in the society where Cain and Abel are living. It is yet one more point showing that the story of Cain was integrated into the Primordial History of Genesis (chs. 1–11) rather than being originally written as the next episode in the creation story.
If that’s correct, we can guess that the story in its original setting also did not bother to explain the circumstances, assuming they would be obvious to all. Later readers of the Bible, to whom such things were not obvious in the story’s new context, were happy to explain them. The Jewish word for such explanations is midrash; I learned from my friend Andrew Greene — though he is not the only one to come up with this idea — that the best way to explain midrash is as a kind of rabbinic fan fic.
The more scholarly term for this, specially applicable in the pre-rabbinic, late-Second-Temple era of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, is “rewritten Bible.” We’ve talked on this Substack about the “creation word cloud” of ancient Israel, the various stories about creation that ancient Israelites knew and that may have contributed to their ideas on the subject. At some stage, I imagine, as this “cloud” condensed into writing, more stories were created to react to the written versions.
All of which leads me to the book of Jubilees, a “rewritten” Genesis (and part of Exodus) which assures us that offerings to God date back to our earliest existence:
Jub 3:27And on that day when Adam went out from the Garden of Eden, he offered a sweet-smelling sacrifice*—frankincense, galbanum, stacte, and spices*—in the morning with the rising of the sun from the day he covered his shame.
James Kugel (see those asterisks?) explains:
*3:27. he offered a sweet-smelling sacrifice A crucial theme for the author of Jubilees is that there had been a functioning priesthood from earliest times; this was very important because it supported his overall claim that God’s indissoluble connection to Israel went back to Israel’s earliest ancestors (and not simply to the Sinai covenant); our ancestors had always had priests serving God. The author is therefore at pains to show that Noah, Abraham, Levi, and others were in fact part of a great chain of pre-Sinai priests (kohanim). Genesis actually inspired this claim, since at several points it presents Noah (8:20), Abraham (12:8 etc.), and others as building altars and offering sacrifices on them. How far back did this chain go? It would be nice to have it start from the very beginning, that is, from Adam …
*frankincense, galbanum, stacte, and spices Of course, God had condemned Adam to vegetarianism (Gen. 3:18), so the sacrifice he offered could not be an animal but only incense. Here, Jubilees’ author clearly evokes later priestly law, whereby it is commanded to “take the herbs stacte, onycha, and galbanum, these herbs together with pure frankincense” (Exod. 30:34).
There is plenty more where that came from — Kugel’s translation and notes are in the important JPS publication Outside the Bible — but the point for right now is that the boys knew about God (whom their parents had chatted with) and understood that it was quite appropriate to “bring” offerings to him. Notice that according to Jubilees Adam lights incense every morning “with the rising of the sun.”
We can imagine that he did this …
in the same location every morning
on an altar of some kind at that location
with prayers or other ritual words to accompany the act.
As you see, even the Jubilees description leaves plenty of room for our own midrash. And this is just one of many later reactions to the text. When sacrifices began to be offered is a major point of disagreement even within Genesis itself, though the disagreement is not made explicit, as we’ll see when we discuss how many of each kind of animal boarded Noah’s ark. Genesis Rabbah, a rabbinic midrash much later than Jubilees, discusses a similar question.
I’ve said that this story seems to be here to introduce violence into the world as a pretext for the Flood. Cain has a well-earned reputation as “the first murderer,” but he is not the first killer. That would be his brother, who (if “offering” them to YHWH means anything) kills sheep and burns their body parts on an altar. That’s clearly not in line with the “really good” Version 1 story of creation, where not merely human beings but all the animals are intended to be vegetarian.
That’s a much more important aspect of the story than your Sunday School classes made it seem (if they mentioned it at all). One of the rules of the new creation after the Flood is this:
Gen 9:2 The fear and the dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the earth and upon all the birds of the sky—everything with which the earth is astir—and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand. 3 Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat; as with the green grasses, I give you all these.
The fact that no one was yet allowed to eat meat makes it doubly surprising that Abel’s bloody sacrifice is the one that YHWH accepts. We’ll start with that next time.