Murder and Mercy

Court is back in session. In case you missed the last episode, it began – doesn't it always? – with a crime. Abel Adamsson falls, hitting the dusty earth. Some pattern of blood spatter is knocked beside it by each crack of the rock that bludgeons and batters his body. There he lay, his wounds open and flowing as his heart uses up its final beats. It's a gruesome scene, one that takes a strong stomach to bear beholding. This was no accident of grisly nature. A homicide has happened; crime is created (Genesis 4:8). The suspect pool is as shallow as it's ever been. The victim's brother, one Cain Adamsson, is brought in for questioning. The lights in the interview room – an interview room the size of the world – grow hot on his face. “Where is Abel your brother?” (Genesis 4:9).  So goes the sum of the interrogation.

Now, the beauty of this scene is that a plea deal is on the table, beyond all reason. It always is, isn't it? When it comes to God, that is. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). Not only that, but he'll unite us to his Supreme Goodness, let us abide in him. This plea deal is even better than outright acquittal. Only plead guilty before the trial, and the sentence will be life and sanctification by the love of the Lord. Cain, though, overlooks his chance for a plea bargain. So the case is brought to trial. How do you plead? It's important, Cain. St. Ambrose reminds you, “admission of guilt placates the judge.”¹ But Cain ignores him.  Cain admits no guilt: “I don't know; am I my brother's keeper?” (Genesis 4:9).  Cain pleads not guilty.

The prosecution's first witness is none other than Prosecution Exhibit 1: the splattered blood of the victim. But this blood speaks, it has a voice! It isn't just entered into evidence, it takes the stand in its own right. “The voice of your brother's bloods cries out!” (Genesis 4:10). In this, we know, “the murder victim himself has testified.”² All through this tale so far, we hadn't heard a voice cross Abel's lips. Not one of his flashbacks has an audio recording; not one thing Abel said in all his life on earth was written down for us. But now that Abel's soul has fled for happier shores, his blood left behind won't shut up, won't quit demanding justice, won't quiet its accusation. “There, at the defendant's table: that's the man that killed me – my own brother!” His spilled blood presses its charge relentlessly.³ It's the voice of Cain's bloodguilt, his responsibility.⁴

Next to take the stand is the prosecution's second witness, a surprise witness, an unindicted co-conspirator turned state's evidence. For “the earth which received the blood also stands as a witness of the deed.”⁵ The ground had for so long been Cain's closest partner and dearest friend: it's the soil he tills, the source of his livelihood, the strength of his days. So naturally, Cain had coaxed it into being, effectively, an accessory after the fact to his murderous crime, though not quite a full accomplice.⁶ “The ground... opened its mouth to take your brother's bloods,” God narrates (Genesis 4:11). Having tasted innocent blood, having consumed Cain's violence, the ground is poisoned against him. From complicity in crime and cover-up, it's chosen its Maker over its former friend, and has become a fearsome accuser of the killer.⁷ “Yes, Your Infinite Honor, it was that hand,” – let the record show that the witness is identifying Exhibit 2, the hands attached to Cain – “that hand there that fed me the blood of the victim as he died; I was there, I gobbled it all up, and I know what I saw. Cain did it!”

“Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses shall a charge be established” (Deuteronomy 19:15). So reads the Law. Two witnesses have given evidence to the court: they “cry out to me,” says the LORD (Genesis 4:10). God, the Righteous Judge of All, has now considered the evidence in the case of Kingdom of Heaven v. Cain Adamsson. Cain couldn't have imagined that there'd even be any evidence, any witnesses, any trial at all. And so often, when we sin, neither can we. We think ourselves so covert, so clever, so careful in craft. But all must stand before “the Judge of all their deeds, whom nothing deceives, to whom all deeds cry out.”⁸  There are always witnesses to all we do; our words and works shall testify.

The testimonies of the blood and the ground are sufficient witnesses to establish Cain's actus reus, the legal principle of a guilty act. Cain did just what he's accused of. He killed another human being, his own brother, in a legally indefensible homicide, an especially heinous crime. Moreover, Cain's smarmy question (“What, like I'm my brother's keeper?”), combined with his premeditation by isolating Abel before killing him, go to establish Cain's mens rea, his guilty mind. By law, actus reus plus mens rea point to legal culpability. Not only did Cain kill his own brother; in the process, he murdered his own soul. The verdict is obvious. In fact, we blinked and missed the trial; we've just been hearing the transcript read back.⁹ For God first said, “What have you done?!” (Genesis 4:10). Roughly translated, we hear what the Judge is saying: “On the charge of aggravated murder in the first degree, I find the defendant, Cain Adamsson, guilty.”

The gavel slams down in judgment, and God “does not... postpone punishment indefinitely.”¹⁰ The very next verse opens the sentencing hearing, where “God declares Cain's fate.”¹¹ Now, if we're good Israelite boys and girls watching this episode the first time, we're pretty confident what's coming next. After all, we've heard the Law of the LORD, haven't we? “If anyone kills a person, on the testimony of witnesses shall the murderer surely die” (Numbers 35:30). “If he struck him down with a stone tool..., and he died, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely die” (Numbers 35:17). “Your eye shall not pity! It shall be life for life...” (Deuteronomy 19:21).

So we expect that God the Judge, the Lord of Law and Order, is going to send Cain the Convict to the gallows, the firing squad, to the flaming fire that smites from heaven. Isn't this the God who, as Isaiah preaches, will “punish the inhabitants of the land for their iniquity, and the land will disclose the blood shed on it” (Isaiah 26:21)? Isn't this the God who, Moses sings, “avenges the blood of his servants” (Deuteronomy 32:43)? Isn't this the God who, Ezekiel reminds us, “poured out his wrath upon them for the blood they had shed in the land” (Ezekiel 36:18)? What could that ever mean, if not that he will do as his Law says, and lawfully take the life of Cain who unlawfully took a life?

On the other hand... maybe our good Israelite boys and girls know another story. It's a parable told to a grief-mad king by a woman sent to see him. For David had watched a tragedy when David's son Absalom slew David's son Amnon – with better reason than Cain killed Abel, mind you – and then Absalom fled to the shelter of his grandfather Talmai (2 Samuel 13:28-38). David was both furious and brokenhearted, his soul tormented three years with a deep conflict between justice and mercy. Can he love his red-handed son without failing in justice to his buried son? How can there be harmony between the Father's Law and this father's heart? Torn betwixt the two, David was a perfect model of inaction. His conniving nephew Joab fetched a clever woman, sending her to the king disguised as a widow in mourning; and she told him that, having lost her husband, her family had been ripped apart at the seams when, while quarreling in the field, one of her two sons fatally struck the other a lethal blow (2 Samuel 14:5-6). Now, she knows the Law sounds unambiguous: her surviving son is a murderer. The entire clan to which her husband belonged is the voice of vengeance: Stop sheltering your son, turn him in, let him get what justice has for him: death unsparing. But what they ask is not only one young man's life, but also his late father's legacy and his grieving mother's heart (2 Samuel 14:7).

So the woman presses King David again and again: he agrees first to think it over, second to protect her in sheltering him, and only at her third petition does he royally decree an exemption for her son from the vengeance of his brother's blood (2 Samuel 14:8-11). David's come around to her point, that in the story she's telling, “the original aim of blood vengeance – protecting life – becomes meaningless.”¹² Now she springs her trap: “In giving this decision, the king convicts himself, inasmuch as the king does not bring his banished one home again” (2 Samuel 14:13). She argues that death and estrangement are inevitable, “but God will not take away life, and he devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast” (2 Samuel 14:14).  Whether David or we are right to be persuaded is a question for another day.

But the truly great mystery is that, while being the Consuming Fire of Justice, God takes “no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” no matter how guilty (Ezekiel 33:11). Therefore, now “God sovereignly set aside the requirement for [Cain's] death.”¹³ That divine decision, though, might rub us the wrong way.  To many readers old and new, “the resulting punishment seems less than just,” not if it doesn't do unto Cain as he did unto Abel.¹⁴ But, however light it is compared to the capital punishment he justly merited, Cain is nevertheless sentenced to be “altogether subject to a curse,” to “undergo the punishment for his profane actions.”¹⁵ As one scholar put it, “His sentence involves his sustenance and settlement.”¹⁶ What Cain gets is like Adam's penalty in the garden, but on steroids.  But is it enough to do justice where it counts?

In chapter 3, only two things were directly cursed: the serpent and the ground. Now, the same phrase spoken by God to the Serpent is said to the confirmed seed of the Serpent: “Cursed are you” (Genesis 4:11). What a sad and sorry precedent Cain sets, that God's image should hear God's curse! And where the serpent was “cursed... from [or above]... all beasts of the field” (Genesis 3:14), Cain is cursed 'from' or 'above' the already-cursed ground (Genesis 4:11).¹⁷ He's separated by divine force from communion with the ground.¹⁸ As a proud farmer, Cain had “sought security in settlement and possession of a portion of the earth.”¹⁹ So this curse hits where he's pinned his sense of identity.

“When you work the ground,” God explains, “it shall no longer yield to you its strength” (Genesis 4:12). And so if he persists in trying to be a farmer, “he would sweat in vain tilling the earth, since no abundance of fruits would answer his labors.”²⁰ Once Cain de-fertilized the soil with innocent blood, how could he ever expect it to be the womb of life for him? To Cain, farming will be failing and famine, for the ground refuses to cooperate with his hopes and dreams.²¹ Cain will have to pay the bills and stuff his face some other way.²² He'll likely be a hunter-gatherer, a forager, a scavenger of scraps. And so “Cain's way of life is irreversibly changed.”²³

God concludes the curse by declaring, “You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:12). Both words are from Hebrew verbs which can mean to shake around, to stagger, to move, to run. Old translations assume they're small-scale movements, like a shiver or a seizure (cf. Exodus 20:18). But these are also used for nomads and others who have to move from place to place a lot (Amos 4:8).²⁴ Unable to live off the meager resources of one spot for long before depleting it, Cain will be tossed to and fro by compulsion and confusion. One commentator glosses this phrase as “a vagrant and a vagabond,”²⁵ while another dubs Cain a “homeless hobo.”²⁶

Taken all together, the terms of Cain's sentence are designed “to deny him the benefits of his act,” to make sure that he draws no profit from Abel's absence in any way.²⁷ In more ways than one, Cain is rendered rootless: his veggies can't put down roots (says the ground), neither can Cain (says the land).²⁸ God's punishment isn't final, but it is fitting: the ground Cain polluted becomes unresponsive, the family roots he betrayed welcome him no more, the open wilds where he lured his brother to death are now the limits of his life.²⁹

As if making up for lost time, Cain answers God, and what he says could grammatically go two opposite ways. See, the Hebrew word for 'iniquity' or guilt can also mean its punishment, and the Hebrew verb for 'lifting up' could mean carrying or lifting off. If you lift up your punishment, you're bearing it on your shoulders, carrying it, laboring under it. But if your guilt is lifted off of you, it's removed, forgiven. So some have read Cain here as saying, “My punishment is heavier than I can carry!” – a gripe about the severity of the sentence. Others read Cain as saying, “My iniquity is too great to be forgiven!” – a belated word of hopeless admission of guilt (Genesis 4:13).³⁰ These chapters of Genesis are deeply indulgent in double meanings. See, Cain should admit his sin – confess it, not to the point of despairing, but to the point of repenting. As guilty as Cain is, this burden could be lifted from him, his load could be lightened, if he'd only run toward the Coming Savior who promises his burden is light, light, light (Matthew 11:30). But what Cain does do is the other meaning: object. “He felt that God was overreacting.”³¹ He's filled, not with repentance, but with petulant self-pity.³²  Everything about his reaction privileges self over order, person over principle.

Before, God told Cain that if he just did what was good and right, there'd be a 'lifting up' – of his face, of his identity – and that would include the 'lifting up off' of his sins (Genesis 4:7). But now Cain's done a great evil, and he whines he can't lift the heavy weight of all his well-earned consequences. He insists his punishment is excessive, is unreasonable, is unbearable, impossible for him to accept it as just or to humble himself under it.³³ And so he submits an appeal. He demonstrates. He protests. He complains. But the prophet would ask him and us: “Why should a living man complain – a man! – about the punishment of his sins?” (Lamentations 3:39).

Cain believes that, even though he's been spared the death penalty despite his crime and his impenitence, even though his whole life has been filled with gifts he could never have earned, he nonetheless is in a position to complain, despite all this mercy he refuses to see. And in drafting his appeal, he outlines his grounds for despair. “You have driven me out today from the face of the ground..., and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:14). His fate comes with “exclusion from the tribal and family unit,”³⁴ with Cain “removed from belonging and community.”³⁵ Cain will be “the perpetual outsider,”³⁶ like a leper who has to keep his distance, unsafe to come near.³⁷ It's a cutting irony: this whole thing spiraled out from Cain being upset he once wasn't accepted, and now he'll never be accepted anywhere.³⁸

The verb Cain uses – not one God used – is the same one used last chapter for Adam and Eve being evicted from the garden (Genesis 3:24). Just so, Cain is evicted, expelled, exorcised from the face of the ground. It's also the Hebrew word for a divorce, which gives a sense of the deep pain Cain is venting here: as a farmer, he'd treated the soil as like his bride, giving the earth his heart; but now she's divorced him, kicking him out in the cold, refusing to take his calls, and the sight of her face is nothing but a taunt.³⁹

“And from your face I shall be hidden,” Cain adds (Genesis 4:14). Again, that's Cain's inference, but it's got merit: Isaiah challenged Judah by telling them, “Your sins have hidden his face from you” (Isaiah 59:4). Here it isn't God's face that's hidden to Cain, but Cain that's hidden from God's face, the radiant spring of grace. And so at both ends, earth and heaven, Cain is cut off from a 'face.'⁴⁰ He's excluded, cast away, rejected, unwatchable – that's what Cain says is happening. St. Ambrose sums up what's so distressing in this picture: “There is nothing more grievous than to be a wanderer and to be irrevocably bereft of God.”⁴¹

But Cain thinks there is something still more grievous: “It will come to pass that anyone who meets me will slay me!” (Genesis 4:14). Between claiming he's removed from God's face and this threat he sees from... who, exactly?... we begin to wonder if maybe “Cain's fears lead him to exaggerate the punishment.”⁴² Cain is utterly “shaken by the fear of death, lest anyone should do to him what he had done to his brother.”⁴³ Oh Cain, thou hypocrite!  Cain is chained captive to the dreadful thought of being treated as he'd treated others, of being trapped in a replay of his crime but in the wrong shoes. Cain recognizes that the point of God's judgment is for Cain to walk in Abel's shoes – to have to live like a vapor passing through the world, to face disdain and vulnerability, to “see life through that brother's eyes” – and “as Cain begins to consider his life as Abel, the worthlessness of his own existence is terrifying.”⁴⁴

Mere moments earlier, Cain espoused a worldview which denied man's responsibility to man. Why should Cain be his brother's keeper, he wanted to know? Why should Cain care about Abel? Why not prey on his brother; what else are brothers for? Now, Cain is panicking at the prospect of living under his own philosophy. Cain quakes at the idea he might meet himself out on the lonely road – someone who asks, “What, as if I'm supposed to be Cain's keeper?”, before bashing and slashing Cain to the dust, his guilty blood staining the face of a ground that simply doesn't requite his love anymore.

What Cain is appealing against is the sentence that will make him an outlaw.⁴⁵ In the original sense of the word, an 'outlaw' was a person the law refused to recognize, a person outside of legal society and its protections and promises. Nothing done to an outlaw could be considered a crime, because he was no longer a legal person; he was a beast who could be put down on sight for the public good or pure sport. In those old societies that used it, outlawry was a serious penalty, capital punishment's next-door neighbor. Cain fears to be an outlaw, at the mercy of a merciless world of potential Cains who fear not God nor man.

But here God steps in with a promise: “Therefore, whoever slays Cain, sevenfold vengeance will be taken on him” (Genesis 4:15). By this solemn oath, this royal proclamation, this definite decree of the highest order, Cain hears something that contradicts his fears.⁴⁶ “Mercy triumphs over judgment,” the Bible whispers (James 2:13). In a way, “God in grace lessens the sentence.”⁴⁷ Now, God “adds no promise of a protector,” gives Cain no absolute assurance against death.⁴⁸ After all, Abel the Righteous had no such guarantee, either. If someone should choose to attack Cain, God says nothing about stepping in to stop it, any more than he stopped Cain's crime.⁴⁹ But by this legal ruling vowing drastic vengeance for Cain's killing after the fact, God brings Cain back within the world of law and of order.

In ancient Israel, the way the justice system worked was, someone guilty of homicide would be chased down by an 'avenger of blood,' a kinsman-redeemer for the victim's blood, someone who – as the family's representative – was charged with exacting a life for a life. Cain, cast out of his family circle, has no one in the Adam family to consider him kin; instead, they'd all bray for his blood, aiming to avenge Abel. Lacking a kinsman-redeemer for his blood is why Cain would be rendered an outlaw: there's no threat of deterrence, no one to step in and punish whatever will be done to him. Or, at least, so he thinks.

But God chooses something radical. All Cain's “sniveling complaints cannot deter God from his pursuit of his fallen human creatures.”⁵⁰ The LORD says, in effect: “Cain, you will have an avenger of blood to stick up for you. You aren't out of family yet. I will be your family. I will take you for my own. I will be your avenger of blood, I will be the kinsman-redeemer of your life.” When Cain is at his most fearful and despairing, the LORD overlooks his impenitence and adopts Cain as his blood-brother, to show him mercy and rebuild his hope.⁵¹ He could not have asked for a more awesome gesture of loving entry into his plight, this peril of his own choosing.  James warns us that “judgment will be without mercy to one who has shown no mercy” (James 2:13).  But Moses chants back, astonished by the fact, that, though Cain had shown his own brother not an ounce of mercy, the LORD God judged Cain with astounding mercy still.  Oh, the mysterious and matchless love of God, the Judge of All!

And so “the LORD laid a sign on Cain” (Genesis 4:15). Cain had heard the word, but would Cain otherwise believe? Cain was an earthy man, a worldly man; he craved “an omen, something he could fix his gaze on, something he could sense.”⁵² Here was something he could see. What kind of sign it was, Genesis doesn't tell us, which led to lots of guesses among the ancients, some saner and some stranger. It was imagined to be a sunshine spotlight that wouldn't leave him alone, or a horn growing out of his head, or the first ever outbreak of leprosy, or a pet dog to follow and protect him, or a disability or tremor, or some kind of mark on his forehead, maybe some or all of God's name written there to declare him a true homo sacer, 'sacred man,' devoted to God by God's will over against his own.⁵³

The sign was there to warn others not to mess with a man under God's personal protection, no matter what he'd done. It was put there as a deterrent, informing any who saw Cain that killing him had overkill consequences. But it also was a sign to Cain. It reminded him he was under God's merciful eye wherever he went – that he wasn't rejected or devoid of care, that he'd received both “a word of divine promise and an act of divine protection.”⁵⁴ On the other hand, it reminded Cain of what he'd done, that he was in the shadow of a crime which stained him heart-deep, that he'd be working out the consequences all his days. It was, as one reader put it, “the original 'mark of the beast.'”⁵⁵ So early Christians anointed people with a cross on their foreheads, they said, “to rid you of the shame which the first human transgressor bore about with him everywhere.”⁵⁶

As the episode closes and the credits will soon roll, Cain has exhausted his appeals and prepares to go and serve his sentence. God has married justice and mercy, accomplishing both in a way we couldn't've guessed, a way calculated to Cain's good if only he'll see it that way. But “Cain went out from the face of the LORD, and he dwelt in the Land of Wandering east of Eden” (Genesis 4:16). He takes a further step away from paradise, walking off as surely as the prodigal son left his father's lands. Even in the Land of Wandering, “in the midst of fears... and in fruitless labors,”⁵⁷ it'll be up to Cain now what to make of his life, what to do with the mercy he's been shown. Can he even recognize it for what it is? 

That he “went out from the face of the LORD” might imply he's turning his back on God, refusing to look to God any longer. Yet even as he wanders restless in the world, he's branded as God's, he's under God's watch, and he's got the prospect, however distant, of repentance. If so, might he turn back around someday? Could it perhaps even be, as the woman of Tekoa hoped, that God “devises means so that the banished one will not remain an outcast” (2 Samuel 14:14)?  Has Cain still hope?  Can he now do good?  Might Cain yet make the most of mercy?

So long as yet he lives in the body, Cain may have faced a judgment, but he has not yet faced the judgment, the final judgment. And so, out east of Eden, it will still be up to Cain whether, as one old bishop minced no words about it, “the hell of fire and all the other undying torments will receive him as a victim for endless ages.”⁵⁸ We, too, know “the righteous judgment of God,” when – the Apostle Paul says it – “the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus: they will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the face of the Lord” (2 Thessalonians 1:5-9).

For those who will not obey the gospel, Cain's road lies open wide and easy (Matthew 7:13). But we do not need to despair! For if the Lord of Law and Order so loves Cain that he heard his appeal, will the same Father of Love not hear ours? Before all fiery vengeance, this Love came first as our kinsman-redeemer, in our flesh and in our blood, to show us mercy unearned and overflowing. “God shows his love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” – for Abel and Cain alike, and for me and for you (Romans 5:8). So “keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life; and have mercy..., snatching others out of the fire” (Jude 21-23). Amen.

1  Ambrose of Milan, Cain and Abel 2.9 §27, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 42:428.

2  Donald E. Gowan, From Eden to Babel: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 1-11 (Eerdmans, 1988), 70.

3  Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 34.

4  Pamela Barmash, Homicide in the Biblical World (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18.

5  Ambrose of Milan, Cain and Abel 2.9 §29, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 42:430.

6  Mari Jørstad, “The Ground That Opened Its Mouth: The Ground's Response to Human Violence in Genesis 4,” Journal of Biblical Literature 135/4 (2016): 708.

7  Mari Jørstad, “The Ground That Opened Its Mouth: The Ground's Response to Human Violence in Genesis 4,” Journal of Biblical Literature 135/4 (2016): 712.

8  Ambrose of Milan, Letter 15, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 26:80.

9  Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1990), 231.

10  Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 4:10, in Luther's Works 1:289.

11  John Byron, Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition: Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the First Sibling Rivalry (Brill, 2011), 93; cf. Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 160.

12  Ed Noort, “Genesis 4:1-16: From Paradise to Reality: The Myth of Brotherhood,” in Gerard P. Luttikhuizen, ed., Eve's Children: The Biblical Stories Retold and Interpreted in Jewish and Christian Traditions (Brill, 2003), 99.

13  Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 61.

14  John Byron, Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition: Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the First Sibling Rivalry (Brill, 2011), 93.

15  Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra on the Pentateuch 1.3.2, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 137:69.

16  Johnson T.K. Lim, Grace in the Midst of Judgment: Grappling with Genesis 1-11 (De Gruyter, 2002), 156.

17  Iain W. Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), 100.

18  Anne Marie Kitz, Cursed Are You! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts (Eisenbrauns, 2014), 138.

19  Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 143.

20  Bede, On Genesis 4:11-12, in Translated Texts for Historians 48:146.

21  Mari Jørstad, “The Ground That Opened Its Mouth: The Ground's Response to Human Violence in Genesis 4,” Journal of Biblical Literature 135/4 (2016): 711.

22  James McKeown, Genesis, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Eerdmans, 2008), 42; Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 86.

23  Matthew R. Schlimm, From Fratricide to Forgiveness: The Language and Ethics of Anger in Genesis (Eisenbrauns, 2011), 141.

24  Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1990), 232.

25  Donald E. Gowan, From Eden to Babel: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 1-11 (Eerdmans, 1988), 71.

26  John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 101.

27  Martin Sicker, Reading Genesis Politically: An Introduction to Mosaic Political Philosophy (Praeger, 2002), 58.

28  David Fohrman, The Beast That Crouches at the Door: Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, and Beyond (Maggid Books, 2021), 102-103.

29  James B. Prothro, “Patterns of Penance and the Sin of Cain: Approaching a Sacramental Biblical Theology,” Nova et Vetera 21/4 (Fall 2023): 1386.

30  Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 34; James McKeown, Genesis, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Eerdmans, 2008), 42.

31  Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1990), 233.

32  Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan Academic, 2001), 98.

33  David W. Cotter, Genesis, Berit Olam (Liturgical Press, 2003), 43; John Day, From Creation to Abraham: Further Studies in Genesis 1-11 (T&T Clark, 2021), 89-90.

34  John Byron, Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition: Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the First Sibling Rivalry (Brill, 2011), 98.

35  Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 86.

36  Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 165.

37  Anne Marie Kitz, Cursed Are You! The Phenomenology of Cursing in Cuneiform and Hebrew Texts (Eisenbrauns, 2014), 237.

38  Paul Borgman, Genesis: The Story We Haven't Heard (IVP Academic, 2001), 33.

39  David Fohrman, The Beast That Crouches at the Door: Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, and Beyond (Maggid Books, 2021), 103.

40  John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 101.

41  Ambrose of Milan, Cain and Abel 2.9 §32, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 42:432.

42  Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 143.

43  Augustine of Hippo, Unfinished Work in Answer to Julian 6.23.A2, in Works of Saint Augustine I/25:662.

44  Zvi Grumet, Genesis: From Creation to Covenant (Maggid Books, 2017), 64-65.

45  Martin Sicker, Reading Genesis Politically: An Introduction to Mosaic Political Philosophy (Praeger, 2002), 58.

46  Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 35.

47  Johnson T.K. Lim, Grace in the Midst of Judgment: Grappling with Genesis 1-11 (De Gruyter, 2002), 137.

48  Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis 4:14, in Luther's Works 1:300.

49  Martin Sicker, Reading Genesis Politically: An Introduction to Mosaic Political Philosophy (Praeger, 2002), 59.

50  C. John Collins, Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary (P&R Publishing, 2005), 213.

51  Iain W. Provan, Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters (Baylor University Press, 2014), 201.

52  Martin Sicker, Reading Genesis Politically: An Introduction to Mosaic Political Philosophy (Praeger, 2002), 59.

53  John Byron, Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition: Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the First Sibling Rivalry (Brill, 2011), 119-121; John Day, From Creation to Abraham: Further Studies in Genesis 1-11 (T&T Clark, 2021), 91; Natan Levy, The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1-11 (Routledge, 2023), 97.

54  Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-17, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1990), 233.

55  James B. Jordan, Primeval Saints: Studies in the Patriarchs of Genesis (Canon Press, 2001), 31.

56  Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogical Lecture 3.4, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 64:171-172; cf. R. R. Reno, Genesis, Brazos Theological Commentary (Brazos Press, 2010), 109.

57  Ambrose of Milan, Cain and Abel 2.9 §37, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 42:436.

58  John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 19.21, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:34.