Cain’s Exile
The marking of Cain, to prevent his
finders killing him, follows on from the sentence of exile that Yahweh
pronounced on Cain for the murder of his brother. And that, of course, raises
the question of who would wish to kill him, and why. Cain’s fear is the result of his being sent away—he shows
no fear of vengeance by Adam, or by future kin at home. Blood vengeance
scarcely seems a likely outcome within such a family household anyway, let
alone their pursuing a manhunt across a large and unoccupied land of exile.
No, Cain’s fear must be, and naturally
reads as, that of being a stranger encroaching on another group’s territory
without good reason. It is strangers who are likely to be killed if they stray
into foreign territory. That group, we suppose, consisted of whoever occupied
the land of Nod, though since “Nod” is translated as “wandering,” it probably
had another name amongst its own people (this is by no means unprecedented: the
name “Wales” derives from “foreign,” whereas the Welsh name for their land, “Cymru,”
means “fellow-countrymen”).
Cain’s Wife
The identity of Cain’s wife has been
debated for centuries, and of course the traditional interpretation, amongst
both Jews and Christians, was that he married his sister, or perhaps his niece,
Eve having been busily producing the population of the world without its being
mentioned in the text, which only tells us that “[Adam] had other sons and
daughters.”
One problem with this interpretation
is why God would have exiled Âwân (the name given to Eve’s daughter, Cain’s
wife, in the second temple Book of
Jubilees) for a murder her husband and brother, Cain, had committed. But
the bigger problem is that Cain is said, in a matter of fact manner, to have
built a city and named it after his son Enoch.
Now we know a lot about the building
of cities in the ANE, and archaeologists have excavated many examples. The
oldest true city, according to both archaeology and Mesopotamian tradition, was
Eridu, founded around 5,400 BCE. Like other Mesopotamian cities, it was the
product of population growth, the centralization of resources, the
stratification of society, and strong leadership. Cities were, from the first,
built to maintain large populations (and to manage regional economic
resources). A city for one family is called a “house.”
But even a so-called “proto-city” like
Çatalhöyük, established from around 7,500 BCE, had an average population of
5,000. It was never a family farmstead, and even if Cain and Âwân lived for
centuries, that kind of population growth is frankly incredible.
However, what would be realistic is for the immigrant Cain, bearing the
inheritance of Adam’s royal election and the ruthlessness of sin, to have
married a local woman, and gained power and influence in a local population, to
the extent of building a city—and probably not the first ever constructed, or
at least Scripture does not tell us it was.
Calling on the
Name of Yahweh
After naming Cain’s descendants, the
writer of Genesis returns to Adam’s third son Seth, and to his son Enosh. But then he adds the strange comment that “at that
time men began to call on the name of Yahweh.”
Which men would those be? In Genesis,
the phrase “calling on the name of the Lord” usually implies sacrificing to him
as Abraham did. But Adam had known Yahweh face to face, as had Eve, and we have
already been told that both Cain and Abel “brought an offering to Yahweh.” It
is hard to believe that Seth or his family didn’t also share in the family
worship. Even if they only began to do so late in life, they would not be the first to do so. The verse, then, appears
to suggest that some outsiders began
to worship Yahweh either under his covenant name, or at least in substance.
Now the introduction of outsiders to
Yahweh, like the growth of population recorded in these chapters, would
actually be a limited fulfilment of the commission that God had always intended
for Adam, and so it has a logical place in the unfolding story. This mission
was impaired, but not cancelled, by the fall, just as the parallel commission
of Israel, marred from the start by the rebellion at Mount Sinai, nevertheless
moved forward under the hand of God.
Greg Beale deals with this at length
in A New Testament Biblical Theology,
tracing the commission down through its various bearers from Noah onwards, and
writes:
After Adam’s sin, the commission would
be expanded to include renewed humanity’s reign over unregenerate human forces
arrayed against it. Hence, the language of “possessing the gate of their
enemies” is included, which elsewhere is stated as “subduing the land …”
Such an understanding takes what
otherwise is both a curious, and (in the absence of an outside population)
incomprehensible snippet of information, and ties it into the whole
missiological purpose of Genesis, the Torah,
and indeed the whole Bible. Adam’s people are damaged goods, but God’s word was
not spoken in vain. But in order for this to be the case, we need to see and
acknowledge the “invisible” population surrounding the new-creation population
which Yahweh has seeded into the world. Somehow people began to perceive the
Lord through this family—perhaps through intermarriage, even—and to call on the
name of the Lord.
Paul tells us that “Everyone who calls
on the name of the Lord will be saved.” Perhaps this verse includes some of the
very first followers of Christ in history. (Jon Garvey, The Generations of
Heaven and Earth: Adam, the Ancient World, and Biblical Theology [Eugene,
Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2020], 33-36)