Self Inflicted

There must have been a whole village of the Sons of God when you count the Awdawm who left the garden with the first couple. And just as God said, Adam worked the earth and paid for his crop with sweat and struggle.

Adam and Eve, and the other Sons of God had many children of pure Awdawm stock, and every mother had a first child.

Eve’s was a boy:

“I have gotten a boy from God! I will call him Spear.”

That’s a pun in the Hebrew language.

Got = QANAH (kaw-naw’)

Cain = QAYIN (kah’-yin)

Spear = QAYIN (kah’-yin)

Just like his father, Cain was a farmer. Unlike his father, he would go on to build a city. Cain's younger brother was a shepherd whose life would be a Breath that passes as soon as it’s present. "Breath," we call him Abel, would be taken by the “Spear.”

As the account goes, Cain and Abel brought their sacrifices to God, and God rejected Cain’s…What...?

…perfectly acceptable sacrifice…?

…paltry gift from a lean harvest…?

…stingy token…?

…haughty display…?

It's interesting to speculate, and there's no shortage of object lessons to be drawn from any attitude we can ascribe to Cain, but in the end, God chose Abel period

God has his own reasons. Maybe He didn't need a spear just yet. Maybe He needed a specific strand of RNA that Cain didn't have. He might have chosen Abel because Cain's heart wasn't strong enough to bear the rejection, making it fertile ground for the worst sin against love.

Hate (Jesus equates it to murder), was the sin that crouched at the threshold between the desires of Cain’s heart and what he would do next. God told Cain that he would have to do well before he could master his anger. If Cain didn't do that, his sins were waiting to devour him.

But why would God declare war on the serpent but not choose the elder brother, the stronger brother? Because, Cain could have reasoned, it was a test…it was a test to see who was indeed the stronger brother, the better soldier, and therefore more fit to protect the Sons of God.

Yes, it was a test, and Cain had to prove to God that he deserved what Abel had stolen. Cain would do well, and God would change His mind.

By way of making peace, Cain told Abel what God said to him, and they must have come to some sort of understanding because they were in the field together after that.

Cain may have believed he had mastered his anger by hiding it behind a mask of resignation, but at some point he had to realize that the family priesthood would never be his as long as Abel was alive.

His earlier thought spoke up: Abel, the Breath, had stolen his high position among the Sons of God. Cain, the Spear, would take it back.

The spear is an angry weapon, best wielded in eye to eye combat. Like the bayonet of modern warfare, the spirit of the spear is to kill without mercy. A two handed weapon, and driven by the whole body; what it cuts on the thrust, it rips out on the return.

The spear has no room for empathy much less compassion. People fall into three categories, friend, foe, and prey. 

Abel was not a friend.

There was no battle when Cain, the first casualty of God’s war with the serpent, murdered his brother. He rose up and killed his foe as if he were prey then put his mask back on and tried to go about his business.

God, being who He is and knowing what He knows, called bullshit on Cain's front. He asked Cain where his brother was, and Cain might as well have said, "Was it my turn to watch him?" that's pretty much what he meant by "Am I my brother's keeper?"

But Cain knew he was busted. He could hear Abel's blood cry out from the ground because God was all-up-inside his head. The mask didn't fit as well as it did the moment before he talked back to the Father. The face beneath the mask was different, distorted by the fear that accompanies guilt when it's found out, and frustration blossoms into hate.

Cain could have been (should have been?) tried by the the first man, or the tribal council, but it seems God gave Cain a head start before the rest of the village found out, because He punished Cain then and there.

His punishment was not death. Why didn't fratricide merit the death penalty? Because God was being the Father, not the Judge, but the heinous nature of Cain's sin gave the Supreme God little choice:

Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth.” (NASB)

Unlike his father, Cain was cursed by God. Any skill he had as a farmer was for nothing. Cain would never harvest another crop, so it was just as well that God drove him away, cast him into the land of Nod (wandering).

Not a place in the usual sense of the word, Nod is the fugitive's lot in life.

Keep moving or die. Prowl the eastern edge of Eden where the Fertile Crescent gives way to sand and rock. Haunt the fringes of civilized society and exploit its weaknesses, . Take what you need, and kill for what is yours.

Cain made one more plea before God drove him out of His grace for good. "Please don't abandon me to die at the hands of strangers."

God granted the final request and appointed a sign for Cain so everyone would know that killing Cain would bring vengeance times seven (there's that number again).

Sign? What sign? (as if I'm the first to try to answer that question)

NEPHILIM?

Next time: Signs Times and Progress (part one)

Peace Out Y'all