On Seth and Cain

Dearest Rachel –

These characters aren’t the ones I saw as I was climbing from the depths of sleep in the chair in the family room the other night. Their living conditions were most likely as primitive as those you might picture from the stone age, whereas I envisioned scenes from a mansion with a waterfront view, marred only by the sight of a pillar marking a recently-dug mound, and a confrontation that might have been a college campus or a very well-tended park.

No, the scenes I saw were set in the modern day, give or take a few decades. They could have easily been settings for a television drama, and indeed, they concluded with a ‘twist’ worthy of a fairly standard one as well. It seemed to be a case of one brother confronting another about something deadly serious – literally. The accuser (which tended to jump between myself and someone I didn’t recognize, as the perspective would occasionally shift between the first and third person perspective) was yelling at the accused, and while I couldn’t make out the words that were being said (despite the fact that, due to the shift in perspective, ‘I’ was occasionally the one yelling), it was obvious that this was about his having killed a third brother (which might very well explain the pillar and mound in the other scene). The accusing brother went so far as to brandish a weapon – if memory serves me, it was a large pair of scissors or shears, which he was holding as if to bash his brother’s head in (which is strange, given that you might expect him to use such an implement to stab him, but it’s dream logic, after all. It’s not necessarily meant to make sense).

It’s at this point that an older man stepped into the fray; presumably, the father of the two younger men. Again, the words weren’t clear, or even intelligible, but the point was obvious; any injury (or worse) inflicted on the son accused of murder would render the accuser to be no better (and, should the accusation be misplaced, quite possibly worse, for having assaulted an innocent man with the intent to kill him) than his brother. Leave judgement up to God, the older man seemed to be saying, I’ve lost one of you boys already. Let’s not make things that much worse by taking matters into our own hands.

He made a point of escorting the hotheaded accuser from the scene, but with a backward glance that suggested that he, too, was fully convinced that the accused brother was ever bit as guilty as his other son was suggesting so vehemently. As they walked away, but before they disappeared from sight, the accused man fell to his knees on the grass, with a hand bracing himself on the ground and the other clutching at his chest, grimacing with pain as he was stricken with… something. Perhaps a heart attack, or some reaction to the stress of the encounter, but it was somehow clear that divine (or karmic) vengeance was being visited upon him at that moment…

…because the last scene that crossed my mind, before surfacing amid the waking world for the few minutes necessary to get myself prepared and into bed, was the sight of the accusing brother, now calm and contemplative, staring out of the picture window of the family manse, at the two mounds and pillars overlooking the waterfront.

***

I didn’t write you about this at the time, because, well… I needed to go and sleep in my own bed, rather than spending the night (or rather, any more of the night) in the recliner, no matter how comfortable it might be. But even as I was making my way across the house, I was trying to process what I had seen, and a few issues I had with the prototypical characters within the drama.

I honestly don’t know if Adam and Eve’s third child, Seth, knew anything about what had happened with his older brothers; the way Genesis is written, it would seem as if the whole situation between Cain and Abel took place before he was born. Indeed, his very name (meaning ‘given’ or ‘appointed’) suggests that Eve saw him as one given to her to replace Abel. I wonder how much he was told about the older brother whose place he was meant to take over, and whether he saw himself as being in Abel’s shadow throughout his life.

In any event, he probably never confronted his eldest brother regarding what he had done, since Cain had long since been banished to somewhere east of Eden (wherever that was – one can assume that the subsequent effects of the flood would have altered the geography of the earth, or at least that portion of it, so as to be unrecognizable – neither Nod nor Eden would ever be able to be discovered). Most likely, Cain was every bit as much a legend to him as Abel was, little more than a ghostly figure in his parents’ past. And that’s assuming that Seth ever gave the matter any thought, as he and his father simply struggled to put food on the table as they labored under the curse God had wrought upon the earth and its produce. There’s no time to bother philosophizing about lost relatives when you’re always on the verge of starvation; one season’s bounty could easily turn into the next one’s famine in those days, and you have to pay attention to those sorts of things more than what a relative might have done to another back before you were born.

And besides, he’d already been supposedly punished by God for what he’d done, although that brings up its own set of questions…

But that’s a topic for another letter, wouldn’t you agree? I’ll talk with you later about it.