Reading Genesis, page 5
Then a sadder concession is made. God requires a human life for a human life, lawful vengeance. Again, what is lawful is not therefore good. The Lord says, “Of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.” Hebrew has several words that are translated as “man.” In these three verses, the word translated as “man” is Adam, which also means “humankind.” Whoever sheds the blood of Adam, by Adam shall his blood be shed. Law notwithstanding, homicide is self-destruction. The application of this principle is potentially very broad. In any case, the fact of destroying an image of God, language of Creation reiterated by God, should be terrible enough to lift homicide out of the ordinary calculus of justice or desert. Yet in every situation in Genesis where revenge seems just and inevitable, no revenge is taken. The first instance of this restraint occurs very early, in the matter of Cain and Abel.
The idea that God would make concessions to these most regrettable human propensities might seem at odds with the righteousness and the compassion that are His preeminent attributes. It is consistent, however, with there being a series of covenants, and the promise of new covenants, to establish terms on which God and humankind can reach some kind of peace and mutual enjoyment. Many centuries later in biblical history, the prophet Jeremiah, speaking for the Lord, says Israel and Judah have broken the covenant He made with their ancestors when He brought them out of Egypt. With a new covenant, “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.” God’s great constancy lies not in any one covenant but in the unshakable will to be in covenant with willful, small-minded, homicidal humankind. Jeremiah’s vision of this state of things would not involve any ratcheting down of divine hopes, except in the important particular that it would diminish human choice, the loving acceptance that should be the response of human beings to their loving Creator. We must assume, on the basis of history, the present, and the foreseeable future, that God still honors our freedom to choose against Him, and for Him. As Psalm 103 has it:
He hath not dealt with us after our sins,
nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.
For as the heaven is high above the earth,
so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.
Revenge arises as an issue early in Genesis, when Cain, having killed his brother, is told by the Lord that “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” Cain fears that “every one that findeth me shall slay me.” Vengeance against fugitives and murderers was approved practice throughout the ancient world, and still a matter of honor in early modern Europe for the “avenger of blood”; Hamlet and Laertes, for example. Revenge is dealt with repeatedly in the law of Moses, to impose limits on it. In those laws a number of cities are designated as cities of refuge, to which anyone accused of a capital crime can flee and where he can live in safety until some resolution is found. A very humane response to the problem.
There is a passage from the New Testament, Romans 12:18–21, that is widely taken to characterize God as vengeful. Context does not support this reading. Paul says, “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’ Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him … Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” Clearly Paul is telling the Roman Christians not to avenge themselves, instead to deal kindly with enemies. He cites two Old Testament passages in making his case. In other words, this view of revenge takes its restraint from the older literature.
The problem with this potent phrase goes deeper than the absence of context. Vengeance is one of those fierce old words like abomination that is rare outside Scripture. It has a history in Europe that has shaped its meaning. It came into English through French from the Latin vindicare, a word that can mean to vindicate, to justify or find innocent, as well as to find at fault. It implies judgment in the scriptural sense, the establishing of justice. There are always those who thrill at the thought of divine vengeance, imagining themselves to be exempt, even to be its agents, and perhaps this is one reason vengeance in the ferocious European Middle Ages shed any suggestion of vindication. As for the Hebrew sense of the word translated as “vengeance,” Genesis deals again and again with the scant resemblance between divine purpose and human notions of justice. Wrath has a part in all this, being the anticipated impulse behind divine vengeance. It comes from Old English and seems to have meant anger and no more. But again, in the special environment of scriptural language, words take on exceptional qualities. Wrath is singularly terrifying. Extraneous to the text as these words are, they characterize God in the minds of serious, even reverent readers. It seems we may, so to speak, impute to the Lord words that are not in His lexicon. The thought should give us pause.
Revenge is the concern that is important enough to be allowed to disrupt the story of the first fratricide, the story of Cain and Abel. I was teaching a class on Genesis in my church. Two women recently arrived from a non-Western country to study at the university sat in on the class. They became indignant. One of them asked, “What kind of God would not kill a man who killed his brother?” An excellent question. This episode indeed characterizes God and is relevant to the whole of Scripture for this reason. The mark that God gives Cain to protect him from possible avengers is often read as something meant to stigmatize him as a killer, though the text very clearly says otherwise. When he says he fears he will be killed, the Lord says, “‘Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’ And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” For all we know, it could have made him disarmingly beautiful.
Predictably, the notion has sometimes flourished that this supposedly stigmatizing mark is hereditary. But Cain goes on to have a wife and son and found a city. He seems to have had the full satisfactions of the patriarchal life. His descendants are credited with “fathering” many of the arts and skills of civilization. It might suggest another instance of fatherly devotion that he names the city for his son Enoch. In stories so economically told as these are, no detail should be dismissed, and this detail is unique in Scripture. If there is any thought that the arts of civilization are corrupt in their origins, having arisen in Cain’s city and among his descendants, his son Enoch has an exceptional place in the tradition, having “walked with God” through a long life, until “he was not; for God took him.” The tradition that he did not die is cited in the New Testament book of Hebrews, which says, “By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death.” This is true of one other figure only, the great prophet Elijah. God gave Cain particularly estimable descendants, which would seem to discourage the notion of a hereditary curse. But this famous tale is a study in the fact that people see what they want to see, even in Holy Scripture, whose presumed authority should encourage careful reading. And these interpretations escape the study or the pulpit and merge with wild strains of feeling on the subject, giving the appearance of biblical authority to the primitive urge to avenge, in the course of imputing primitivity to “the God of the Old Testament.”
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In fact, God’s great leniency toward Cain does seem to ask for some kind of explanation, or sense of circumstance. The story raises the question of revenge, first in God’s awareness of the crime, which He might be expected to give an equivalent punishment, and then in His defense of Cain against vengeance from any source. It surprises, perhaps disappoints, expectations. The Hebrew word for punishment here also means “sin” or “crime”—my crime is heavier than I can bear. So perhaps Cain’s crying out is weightier and more moving to God than English can render.
And context is always relevant. This crucial passage, His treatment of Cain, is a characterization of God in His righteousness and compassion, two attributes that are not always easily reconciled. Scripture will return to them again and again. In the Bible, great men, for example Eli and David, are very indulgent fathers. Their sons are no better for the fact. God, in His dealings with Cain, is as indulgent as any of them. He comforts Cain in his grief at not having made an acceptable sacrifice. Interestingly, He is not reported to have said anything to Abel, toward whom, with his sacrifice, He is said to have “had respect.” The name Abel means “emptiness” or “vanity” or “something transitory.” The story was always about Cain. The sacrifices were of no real importance.
Like a good father who notices his son’s disappointment at failing to please him, a loving disappointment, God tells him that he can still “doest well,” at the same time being aware that he might go wrong because of his resentment of his brother. Sin, like the serpent in Eden, takes on some part of the blame for the potential transgression. It is represented as a crouching beast with designs on Cain. This could be a naïve lapse into pagan thinking, or it could be a gentle way of speaking of potential wrongdoing without ascribing it directly to this man who is so desperately sensitive to His disapproval. It would be hard to argue that Cain’s worship was not offered in good faith, given the potency of his reaction to its inadequacy. Of course this does nothing to mitigate the crime of premeditated murder, of spilling his brother’s blood. But it gives Cain complexity. It might also suggest a condition, Cain’s piousness, for God’s extraordinary faithfulness to him. Or the long genealogical view of the family of Cain reflects God’s knowledge of the lives that would be spared with his life. Murderous Lamech is one, and Noah, son of Lamech, is another. And, after Noah, the whole fruitful and multiplying world. But rationalizing what God does involves the risk of losing its difficulty and otherness to human expectations. His great forgiveness of the first criminal offends people’s sense of justice, unless they can find a way to read vengefulness into the tale. We are instead to learn that mercy is nearer than justice to Godliness, and that mercy can release an abundance far exceeding whatever might come of attempting to impose justice as we mortals understand that word.
The narrative includes an instance of the perversion of divine will by a man who knows something about it— a familiar type. Clearly Lamech, Cain’s descendant a few generations on, has heard about the assurance God has given his ancestor. Rather than finding in it the protection of a murderer from revenge, he takes it as permission or incitement to be unrestrainedly vengeful. “Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, ‘Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold,’” overlooking the fact that divine protection on one hand and brutal self-aggrandizement on the other are very different things. The vengeance permitted in the law given after the Flood, since it allows the taking of one life for one life, would be a deterrent to violence or a containment of it. Lamech boasts of lethal violence in reaction to relatively minor injury. He vastly multiplies the pretexts for homicide and exults in this before his wives, poor things. We have here the turn of mind that would change vindicatio to vengeance.
Lamech is not among the prophets. About his son, Noah, he says, “This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed.” This does not happen. But in his own person Lamech does allow us to see some part of the future that God sees.
The boast of Lamech, together with the Noachide Law permitting the taking of a life for a life, frames the Hebrew version of the Flood narrative, which is much longer and more fully imagined and elaborated than the Babylonian versions. This suggests an enjoyment in the telling. Remembering always that God did not really send an all-destroying Flood, the story could be enjoyed without discomfort. Whatever drastic experiences the Mesopotamians may have had with their great rivers, they no more than the Hebrews were ever brought near extermination, let alone the extinction of all life. This story in both its versions, Hebrew and Babylonian, is not about an actual disaster but about the fact of disaster and how to understand gods or God in the face of this fact.
Utnapishtim is told by the god Ea to dismantle his house to build a boat. Utnapishtim asks the god what he should tell the townspeople about what he is doing. Ea says Utnapishtim should tell his doomed neighbors that he is out of favor with a god and must leave that place, and when he is gone they will be showered with great abundance. The omitting of this detail in the Hebrew version is consistent with Noah’s righteousness. Utnapishtim’s neighbors are understandably eager to help with his leave-taking. Both he and Noah are given fairly elaborate instructions for the construction of these boats, different because Mesopotamians used reeds for building and Noah used something called gopher wood, different also because Utnapishtim has the help of the neighbors, whom he has deceived, in carrying out a hard task—the carpenter, the reed-worker, children to carry bitumen. With difficulty, launching rollers set it afloat.
“Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.” Then the ark was ready to receive that procession of animals, including “every creeping thing of the earth,” the humblest category of creature, which almost always has a place in these catalogues. The loving recitation of the varieties of animals here recalls the Hebrew account of Creation and the spirit in which they were made. Utnapishtim is told to “put aboard the seed of all living things,” including cattle and wild beasts. He is told to close up his boat, while Noah is shut in by the Lord. The rains come.
The Babylonian Flood begins to recede after seven days. The biblical ark is afloat for ten months. The Hebrew version follows the older story, departing in fairly minor ways until the great Babylonian tempest arises and the narrative of Utnapishtim becomes a pagan theophany, the works of the gods and their presence revealed in a terrifying storm. Profound darkness descends, in a black cloud the storm god Adad rages. The “flood-weapon” passes over “like a battle force.” The gods themselves are afraid of the flood they have unleashed:
The gods cowered, like dogs crouched by an outside wall.
Ishtar screamed like a woman giving birth.
They repent of what they have done.
The gods, humbled, sat there weeping.
This is very remote from the biblical conception of God, of course. There is a crucial detail on which all the difference rests. God tells Noah that “every thing that is in the earth shall die. But with thee will I establish my covenant.” Noah is for these purposes the human race. Again, that everything will die is a given in the debate between Hebrew and Babylonian. The Babylonians may have been unaware of such a debate or indifferent to it. But the Hebrews were dealing with the influence of Babylonia, a great, brilliant civilization that may well have invented the literary epic. Polytheism is always a temptation for the ancient world’s only monotheists. And stories are highly communicable, carrying with them assumed beliefs in memorable, even spectacular passages. The images of raging and cowering gods are the most vivid part of Utnapishtim’s tale. The Bible gives the Hebrews their own story, a truer tale, which serves important theological purposes as it raises Hebrew questions and incorporates Hebrew beliefs into this Babylonian querying of the nature of things.
God will establish a covenant with Noah, and He tells him this. He has an intention for him. This assurance, in advance of the Flood, means that events are under God’s control. He is not in the tempest. He will not frighten Himself with His own excesses. In fact, there is no tempest. The flood waters come from rain and from “all the fountains of the great deep,” natural, God-made sources that are not divinized, as the sun and moon, the whole of nature, are not divinized in the Creation. While the Babylonian flood is a great storm that lasts a matter of days, the biblical flood is an amassing of water on a scale that could cover the mountains and truly destroy all life. It imagines the world taken back to its beginnings, Noah and his wife, their sons and their wives like the family of Adam. From them all human life will proceed. Utnapishtim and his wife, though they are made immortal, are also isolated and alone.
The intention of the biblical God is fulfilled. The world is prepared for something like a new beginning. The Babylonian gods are shocked and threatened by the consequences of their own decisions and actions, and they regret them and at least scale back their homicidal intentions for the future. As freely as God wills the world and all it contains into being in the first Creation, and as freely as He could presumably create it all again, He preserves a human family, and He preserves the long list of animals, a synecdoche for the whole world of them. The creeping things crept into the ark, and they creep out again. Utnapishtim is told to take the seed of living things on board his boat. This is a story element the biblical version adapts to important purposes. Nothing is made of this saving remnant of life in the Babylonian tale. In the Bible the care to record its presence after the Deluge reveals a loyalty to Creation as it first emerged. There is a great constancy embracing all change. Humankind may have become or showed themselves to be violent, corrupt in their imaginations, but they are as they were created, images of God. This is asserted in the context where it seems most open to doubt, in the law that permits homicide in response to homicide, and does so because “God created man in His own image.” This law anticipates a humankind not different from or other than those swept away in this hypothetical Flood. The arc of narrative from Cain’s crime to this acknowledgment of the human necessity of limited revenge, a violation of the sacred in answer to a violation of the sacred, is important because it acknowledges that the very high sacredness that is the distinguishing human trait is unchanged despite anything. We are disastrously erring and rebellious, and irreducibly sacred. And God is mindful of us.
