Know Your Bible: Cain and Abel - the Archetypal Fratricide

According to Genesis 4:1-2, the first two humans, Adam and Eve, had a son Cain, who was a tiller of the soil, and a son Abel, who was a keeper of flocks.

The trouble starts when Cain and Abel brought offerings from their efforts to the LORD (Gen 4:3-4). 

When the Lord looked with favor on Abel's offering--but not on Cain's--Cain was (somewhat understandably) discouraged. 

The LORD addresses Cain's resentfulness with an enigmatic statement (Gen 4:7):

If you do well, will not your head be lifted up? But if you don't, sin crouches at the door. It's desire is for you. You must master it.

הלוא אם־תיטיב שאת ואם לא תיטיב לפתח חטאת רבץ ואליך תשוקתו ואתה תמשל־בו׃

There is clearly background information original readers of this text knew that made this statement understandable. Without this knowledge, any interpretation of this verse is unconvincing speculation.

Peter Paul Rubens - Cain Kills Abel

But the rest of the story is pretty straightforward. Cain invites his brother out into the field (Gen 4:8). And he kills him.

The LORD immediately addresses Cain and asks him (Gen 4:9):

Where is your brother Abel?

Cain replies with the famous line:

Am I my brother's keeper?

The Hebrew original is a sing-songy rhyme:

השמר אחי אנכי

ha-shomer aHi anokhi?

Is Cain's response just an elusive dodge, or is it potentially a challenge to God himself? 

In Psalm 121:4, God is described as "Israel's Keeper" (shomer-Yisrael; שומר ישראל).

In other words, is Cain implying that God was Abel's keeper? And so, since Cain could kill Abel, why did God allow this?

As a result, the first sin described in the Bible already asks the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?"

Cultural and Historical Connections

The immediate point of comparison is with Romulus and Remus. According to the Roman historian Livy, Romulus killed his twin brother after Remus jumped mockingly over the nascent walls of the city Romulus was building (History of Rome 1.7.2). 

The half-sisters Elizabeth and Mary lived out their lives in mortal combat, the Catholic and Protestant religions serving almost as a pretense for a conflict actually based on their mothers' marriages to Henry VIII. By a delicious irony, the two are entombed side by side in Westminster Abbey.

To end on a positive note, Catullus' brother died while serving in Bithynia. This is not a fratricide. This is a touching tribute to a dead sibling. Catullus traveled to perform the rituals necessary to allow his brother passage to the afterlife. And he penned a poem on the matter, in which he bids his brother farewell.

He writes (Carmina 101.10):

And into eternity, brother, hail and farewell

atque in perpetuum frater ave atque vale

And the elisions themselves speak a voice broken in grief:

atque'n perpetuum frater ave'tque vale

Made in Wisconsin: the Gideon Bible

My own life trajectory was profoundly affected by the Gideon Bible twice, one academic, the other spiritual. And it turns out that the Gideon Bible actually comes from my home state of Wisconsin. Even so, my encounters with the Gideon Bible did not turn out as the Gideons themselves would have preferred.


History of the Gideon Bible

In 1898, traveling salesman John Nicholson, from Janesville, Wisconsin, checked into the Central House Hotel in Boscobel, Wisconsin. Because the hotel was full, he was only able to stay in a double room with another traveling salesman, Samuel Hill, from Beloit, Wisconsin.

As they made their common acquaintance, they discovered that each was a Protestant Christian and they conceived that night of the concept of businessmen such as themselves somehow promoting evangelization efforts. They met again the following year in Janesville, Wisconsin, joined by a third interested party, William Knights. They formalized their new organization and selected the name "Gideons." Early in their efforts, since most of the people they recruited for their new mission were traveling salesmen, someone suggested they arrange to place a Bible in every hotel room in America. Their mission was born.


1977 - A Gideon Bible on the way home from Florida

This is essentially the page I saw.

My family took a vacation to Florida in 1977. While on our back, we were snowed in somewhere and stayed in a hotel. Bored, I was looking through the Gideon Bible in the room and I stumbled upon Psalm 119. This psalm is an acrostic in the Hebrew and this particular edition printed the Hebrew letter corresponding to each stanza (which then all begin with that letter in the original Hebrew). To the left is an example of what I saw. 

When we got home, I was so enamored by this alphabet that I practiced writing the letters over and over until I had the entire thing memorized. I would eventually study Biblical Hebrew formally in college, as a way to follow through with my earlier exploration. And I would get my doctorate in Biblical Hebrew. And my doctorate minor in Arabic. And I would serve as an Arabic linguist for the NSA. And I don't think any of it would have happened, had I not opened that Gideon Bible.


1985 - A Gideon Bible on my way to University

The Bible he gave me. Of course I still have it!

In the Spring of 1985, during my second semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I stepped off the bus and a gentleman handed me a small green-covered Gideon Bible. Up to that point, I had been very uninvolved in the Lutheran Church of my nurture for several years. I would still be attending services with the family on major holidays, but that was it. Between classes I would typically have hours of time to kill. That day I read the Gospel of Matthew in its entirety from that little Bible. And I consider that day the beginning of a spiritual revival that never abated. Following years of biblical, historical, and theological research, I made the decision for myself to leave the Protestant tradition.  In 2003, I become a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It was after my entry into the Orthodox Church that I met my Romanian-American wife, I did not convert for her.


Lamentabile dictu, the Gideons do not allow non-Protestants to be members or serve in their organization. As such, they apparently do not consider non-Protestants such as Catholics and Orthodox to be, in fact, Christians at all.

Which is ironic, since I consider the man who handed me that Bible that day to have had a key role in me being a practicing Christian today...

Keith Massey was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. He has his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Biblical Hebrew, with a minor in Arabic. After 9/11, he served as an Arabic linguist at the NSA. He is currently a Latin teacher at a public high school in New Jersey.

Keith is the author of Intermediate Arabic for Dummies. His fiction novels follow the adventures of Andrew Valquist, roughly patterned after himself--a man born and raised in Wisconsin who gets pulled into the world of international intrigue. 



Keith's novels are A Place of Brightness, Amor Vincit Omnia: An Andrew Valquist Adventure, Next Stop: Spanish, and In Saecula Saeculorum.

The Paleo Diet: Take Magnesium for Better Sleep

I've experienced much better sleep since beginning magnesium supplements. In this video, I explore the reasons why, based on Paleo Diet principles, humans may require more magnesium than our foods generally contain. (To the right is the product I personally take daily.)
 

It all goes back to the fact that our ancestors cooked meat directly on fire for millions of years.

Photographer Nick Riley graciously gave me permission to use one of his photos which illustrates the cooking methods of modern hunter gatherers. Please visit his beautiful website and explore the world through his talent.

Getting Back to Proto-Human

It's been an exciting last couple years for people, like myself, who are deeply interested in paleolinguistics. I've already blogged about research that demonstrates that all languages are or once were of the basic structure Subject-Object-Verb, suggesting a common ancestor to all.

There is also now the assertion that the reduction in phonology as you move farther away from Africa points to a common ancestor.

I've coupled this observation, which I feel actually demonstrates that the ancient peoples who left Africa didn't have the phonological diversity that later developed in Africa, with the findings that Aborigines in Australia represent possibly the oldest people and culture outside of Africa itself.

I put it all together and argue in this video that traces of the original human language can be recovered.

What words from the original Proto-Human language might have survived in three major language families for 70,000 years?

Fire, eagle, and dead.

A Land Flowing with Milk and ... Wine?

That's the title of a chapter in my book, Original Thin: the Paleo Diet in the Bible and Ancient Literature.

I argue that Paleo purists are wrong in asserting that we should avoid dairy products and alcohol simply because ancient humans didn't enjoy them or couldn't digest them.

I've made a video in which I argue my case:


I do hope that other Paleo enthusiasts can either agree to disagree with me or agree with me on these points. I really don't want to be branded as "that Paleo guy who supports dairy and drinking." But I have to be true to my principles. So, people, be fair to me and at least hear me out.

A Paleo Cartoon!

Two ladies in a Sauna. But the hottest thing going is the information that the Paleo Diet can help you lose weight!

Lost in Translation...

New version of the New International Version is causing controversy by adding some modest inclusive language:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42138347/ns/us_news/

The changes described are reasonable. The NIV, however, has been the standard translation for many conservative Protestants for a long time. This will become a firestorm.

People grounded in the historical Tradition, however, know that this is ultimately meaningless.

Squabbles about translations of books, translations intended for the use of people who want to not learn the book itself yet still screech angered claims about what the book says, is sad at best.

For the record, the original RSV is the best English translation of the Bible on the market. The NRSV is second best, but managed to suck all the poetry out of the thing.

IN THE BEGINNING: Correcting an Ancient Typo in the Second Verse of the Bible

One of my Latin students recently asked my advice on how to charge up her Biblical Hebrew abilities. She's preparing for her Jewish Confirmation and hadn't been reading regularly since her Bat Mitzvah. I told her to take just a few verses and practice them very solidly and then build from there. We looked together at just the first three verses of Genesis. She reports that she's been reading them out loud every day and already feels her abilities are coming back nicely.

But something about Genesis 1:2 bothered me. If you've ever studied Biblical Hebrew, you are acquainted with the famous word pair tohu wa-bohu ( תהו ובהו ), traditionally translated as "without form and void." What struck me in this fresh reading was how the sing-songy quality of this pair just seems flippant within the grandeur of the overall Creation Narrative. I mean, tohu wa-bohu sounds like the ancient Hebrew equivalent of "splish-splash" or "teenie-weenie."

Linguists call these paranomastic and pleonastic doublets (meaning words that occur together, mean pretty much the same thing, and are playing off each other). And they're pretty common in languages.

But the appearance of one in a text of such gravity seemed out of place. I'm not required to like those words there, and just because they seem out of place to me doesn't at all mean that a native speaker of Hebrew in ancient times would have had the same reaction.

Even so, the experience made me look a little more deeply into the words in question. And this led me to the theory I'll explain here, namely, that the second verse of the Bible contains a textual error in the Hebrew. And the actual original Hebrew changes how the Bible describes Creation itself.

I'm not going to go into exhaustive detail about all the places in the Bible the words tohu wa-bohu ( תהו ובהו ) appear. If you want to explore all the uses of tohu, bohu, or the two together, click on the links I provide.

The main points are that the word tohu occurs a lot more than bohu, with the meanings "wasteland" (Job 12:24) or "vanity" (Isaiah 59:4). bohu, by contrast, occurs only three times and only with tohu (Gen 1:2, Jer 4:23, Isaiah 34:11). And there have been many explorations into possible etymologies of these words by comparison to Arabic, Akkadian, and other related languages.

At first glance, since tohu is a full fledged word that can stand alone and mean something to someone, we would conclude that bohu is the rhyming tag-along that fills out the doublet for effect. Kind of like how "super" is a real word that describes something good. The addition of the "duper" somehow makes the two together even stronger. But you couldn't really tell someone out of the blue, "Hey, you did a duper job on that project!"

Isaiah does make a word play in which he uses both. In 34:11 he describes the destruction of the land and writes "he stretched over it the line of vanity (qaw-tohu; קו־תהו ) and the stones of nothingness (abney-bohu; ואבני־בהו ). This would seem to be like saying "he did super in the morning and duper in the afternoon." It only makes sense because the two are being employed together.

And that's what we know about tohu wa-bohu.

So I'm looking at the phrase in context and something hits me. We have two small words, each ending in the letter waw and they're connected by the particle waw (which means 'and'). Almost half of the phrase is that single letter! Then I spot that immediately after the phrase tohu wa-bohu we have "and darkness" (wa-khoshek; וחשך ).

Now, we need to remember that the texts we have that were eventually turned into the Hebrew Bible were copied by hand for centuries. If you've ever tried to hand copy something a page or so long, you're amazed at how easy it is to make a mistake.

One common mistake that bleary eyed copyists would make is either omitting letters or words or copying them twice (called dittography). I catch myself making these kind of mistakes even while typing a simple email. I've gone back and, to my bewilderment, I typed the word "the" twice in a row.

Hebrew copyists did a remarkable job. But they made understandable human errors. One error was accidentally double copying the letter waw (the letter "w").

This is what happened in Hosea 11:3, where the Hebrew text says: "I taught Ephraim to walk. I took them up in his arms (zero'otayw; זרועתיו )." The problem is that that makes no sense whatsoever.

Translations into Greek and Latin made in ancient times were clearly looking at a different Hebrew text than the one we currently have. The ancient translations are reading this as "my arms" (zero'otay; זרועתי). And when we realize that the very next word starts with the waw (wa-lo'; ולא "and not"), we can see what happened here. Some scribe accidentally copied the waw twice and then the extra waw was tagged onto the preceding word (which turns "my arms" into "his arms").

Back to tohu wa-bohu wa-khoshek. Let's imagine that the final waw of bohu ( בהו ) was a copyist duplicate from the following waw of wa-khoshek ( וחשך ) "and darkness." This made me suspect that this sing-songy little phrase wasn't originally two words at all. After someone accidentally added a waw, more could have been added later to try and make some sense of the resulting problematic word.

 So I looked at the possible original word, removing the vowels and all waw's: *t-h-b-h. A Semitic word should have three consonants that make up its root. This word looks to be a noun from the root h-b-w (since a final waw turns into h). And words prefixing a t- are common in Semitic languages. In Hebrew, for instance, we have tip'arah ( תפארה ), "beauty"; torah ( תורה ), "teaching"; tiqwah ( תקוה ), "hope."

Now, there are no other words in Hebrew with the root h-b-w. But the closely cognate Arabic language has preserved considerably more of the original Semitic base. So many times rare words in Hebrew are explained by comparison to Arabic.

It turns out that the Arabic root h-b-w means "dust." As a verb it means "[dust] rising in the air." As a noun, the root produces words like habwa (هبوة) "swirl of dust" and habaa' (هباء) "fine dust/dust particles." In the phrase habaa' manshuur ( هباء منثور), it means "atoms scattered in all directions."

And so, we can surmise that there existed a Hebrew word on this root, *tihbah (*תהבה ), meaning "[scattered swirl of] dust." And this makes a whole lot more sense suddenly than "without form and void."

After all, in Genesis 1:1 God created the Earth. And in the traditional understanding of tohu wa-bohu, that Earth God created is then called a "void."

What does it mean for anything to be a void? I mean, a hole is, by definition, a void. A hole describes the absence of the surrounding earth such that you can fall into it. But to call the entirety of the newly created Earth a "void" is ultimately senseless.

But for the original Hebrew author to describe the newly created Earth as a scattered swirl of dust is perfectly understandable. The rest of Genesis 1 will describe how God sorts out and divides the creation toward ever greater complexity and solidity. It makes more sense for him to be doing that from a starting point of a swirl of dust scattered in all directions than with a void.

Science tells us that after the Big Bang, energy becomes matter and slowly coalesces into the structures such as galaxies we observe today. Genesis 1:2 may now reflect a vision of Creation startlingly similar to what modern science has posited.