Cain and Abel: 'Brotherly Love' is an achievement, not the default
Genesis 4 tells the story of the first sibling rivalry, and the first murder. It's a reminder that darkness is the default, and light is an achievement.
Don’t call it a genocide.
No matter how great the atrocities in Russia’s war with Ukraine, French President Emmanuel Macron is uncomfortable using that word, genocide, to describe it.
“I would be careful with such terms today because these two peoples (Russians and Ukrainians) are brothers,” Macron said.
Macron was rejecting a term U.S. President Joe Biden has embraced.
If you call it a genocide, you have to treat it as a genocide. Less than 80 years ago, after the Holocaust, the Western World swore “Never Again.” This was Macron saying, it’s not happening again. That this isn’t that, and couldn’t be.
Macron’s falling back on the notion of brotherly squabbles led many on Twitter to recall the first brothers, Cain and Abel.
Genesis 4 presents Cain and Abel as a brief study in contrasts. Cain, the older brother, gives God “some of the fruits of the soil” as an offering.
“But Abel,” Genesis 4:4 says, “brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock,” the best.
God “looked with favor” on Abel, who gave from his first and best, “but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor.”
This is meant to be an object lesson on the difference between giving God “some” of what you have, and the best you have.
Cain “looked downcast” at the rebuke, and God felt the need to explain the lesson. Rarely do we get this privilege.
“If you do what is right, will you not be rewarded?” God asks Cain in Genesis 4:7. “But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.”
Some people rise to challenges. Cain fell to his feelings. In the very next verse, Genesis 4:8, Cain invites Abel into the field, attacks him, and kills him. He did not master sin. And so the first child born, the first big brother in history, becomes the first killer.
When it’s two guys, single combat, the Cain murder is fratricide. Brother killing brother. Genocide is fratricide at scale. It’s a murder charge applied to a nation-state. Whether it applies in Ukraine is not my concern. That the peoples are “brothers” does not preclude a genocide.
We laugh when we hear Philadelphia described as the City of Brotherly Love. For one, nobody thinks of it that way. These are the people who booed Santa Claus, who threw snowballs at Old Saint Nick. They’d boo world peace.
But also because we think of love between brothers as the default. We think of “brothers” as rosy-cheeked tykes wrestling on the rug as Dad reads Saturday Evening Post, something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
Early man was more like the baby birds in a nest on a nature show. They will gorge themselves as a sibling starves. Brotherly Love is a human achievement, not the norm.
In Genesis, the closest thing to a heart-warming sibling moment comes after Joseph reveals himself to his brothers in Genesis 45.
These are the 11 men who sold him into slavery. And that was the humanitarian bloc! The others wanted to kill him, and leave him in a ditch.
Joseph sends the brothers home to retrieve their father, Jacob, for the unlikeliest of reunions. Jacob has thought Joseph dead, killed by wild animals, for years now.
What his brothers meant for evil, God meant for good.
Joseph is not only alive, his position as Pharaoh’s No. 2 means the family will thrive in a time of famine. While the rest of Egypt struggles to survive. Indeed, Israel did so well under Joseph that the next Pharaoh felt the need to rein Egypt’s visitors in.
“Then he (Joseph) sent his brothers away,” Genesis 45:24 reads, “and as they were leaving he said to them ‘Don’t quarrel on the way.’”