ORAL/AURAL PARALLELISM IN GENESIS 4: 10-11:
A CASE OF SCRIBAL DELIMITATION WITH IMPLICATIONS FOR THE NARRATIVE OF CURSE
Douglas B. Olds (2009)
Abstract
A marked parallelism is found in God’s declaration to Cain in Gen 4:
10-11. This declaration displays chiastic parallelism that was broken up when
written down, suggesting developments in scribal context and meaning. If the
text is read as of one oral discourse, the ablative, etiological, and thus
miasmic and spreading nature of the primeval history’s curse becomes a key for
translation and interpretation.
Keywords
--parallelism --verse
division --Cain and Abel --curse narrative
I.
Introduction
To judge by the variety of interpretative traditions and English
translations, the Cain and Abel episode in Genesis 4 is complicated by
ambiguities. If this episode encompassed
an oral stage of performance and transmission, we might expect to find
“grammatical parallelism at every level,” and we do.[i] When Masoretic versification of Gen 4:10-11
is ignored and God’s speech is read aloud[ii]
as one scene involving dramatic repetition, parallelism, rhythm and wordplay
become forefront: [iii]
מה עשית קול דמי אחיך צעקים אלי מן-האדמה ועתה ארור אתה מן-האדמה אשר
פצתה את-פיה לקחה את-דמי אחיך
What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from
the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth
to receive your brother's blood
[RSV].
A concentric inverted parallelism, or chiasm, stands out with the pattern
A-B-X-b-A featuring repetition of the A members and recurrent vocal patterns amidst
the B and b members:[iv]
מן-האדמה
ועתה
ארור
אתה
מן-האדמה
There are three main categories in translation of
relating primeval curse to Cain via the ground, each involving a different
sense (locative, ablative, or comparative) for the Hebrew preposition מן. When understood as oral wordplay of the pattern
A-B-X-b-A, ארור serves as the keyword that
unifies parallel members.[v] This provides a structural clue for resolving
the ambiguities, at the hypothetical oral level, of the meaning of the A
members of the parallelism.
II.
Tradition History in Genesis 4
Because the אלי of Gen 4:10 suggests a locative meaning for מן-האדמה that
follows it, [vi] מן-האדמה
in Gen 4:11 by reasons of oral parallelism most likely has the recurrent sense.
This conclusion supports the KJV, NRSV, RSV, and
A break in the expression’s anapestic rhythm—where iamb follows
iamb--occurs with the word אתה.
This rhythmic “catch” adds to the interrupted breathing from a compact
sequence of guttural consonants, further stressing the word אתה. After
the medium of transmission changed from oral to written,[vii] however, a stop (and then verse division)
came to be inserted between the A and the B members of the parallelism. The
“delimitation” by the written text appears to increase ambiguity by
re-segmenting the parallelism, rebalancing its literary elements. [viii] As a result, the relationship between
“curse” (ארור) and “the ground” (האדמה) takes on changed significance in the written text
of Gen 4: 11.
Moreover, the hiatus between verses 10
and 11 in the Masoretic interpretation of the written text appears to emphasize
the b member’s (ועתה )
beginning a normative clause. The oral inclusio becomes unbalanced when
committed to text, newly fronting the b member which promotes a rhetorical
aspect. The hiatus between clauses
emphasizes ethical progress rather than grammatical recurrence of oral
elements. By changing the structure of the expression,
the written medium “delimits”[ix]
or recontextualizes the source, mechanism, and implications of the curse at
this important waypoint in the Genesis 1-11 narrative.
This hiatus could have resulted from the technical limitations of the
written medium, or from the requirements of a new rite of performance, or from
a pre-meditated exegetical decision by unidentified sopherim.[x] The performance, grammatical, and literary
division markings implied by changes in the medium of transmission of this
parallelism may have implications for tradition-historical studies of the primeval
curse’s ontology and etiology, and for interpreting Cain’s status before God.
III.
Application to Translation
ועתה ארור אתה מן-האדמה אשר פצתה את-פיה לקחה את-דמי אחיך
Gen 4:11 (
Gen 4:11 (NIV) Now you are under a curse and driven
from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from
your hand.
Gen 4:11 (NJPS) Therefore, you shall be more cursed
than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from
your hand.
Each translation
has arguments in its favor. To wit, the
NJPS takes the initial ועתה of verse 11a as that which “generally
introduces an ethical consequence.”[xi] Taking the Masoretes’ verse division as a
given, NJPS reflects the consequential, ethical sense in English. In addition, NJPS differs from the others in
the use of comparative מן, suggesting a second point of departure from the other two
translations. Comparative min is also consistent with an ethical
judgment.[xii]
The lexical and syntactic warrant for NJPS’ consequential meaning, though, begs
contextual questions--for example, is murder recognized as an ethical
transgression against human integrity at this time and place, or as a sin
against God?
The NIV translation may be justified by
appeal to lexical studies. In contrast
with NJPS’s translation, it does not read into the initial vav of the B member any logical, sequential, or ethical sense that
is not confirmed elsewhere in the literary unit. HALOT states that min with warning verbs (in this case, verbal nouns) like “curse”
suggest a removal before a threatening presence.[xiii]
“Removal/driven from” a cursing agent is thus a valid sense when a threat
becomes explicit. However, the
passive form of the translation “driven from the ground” may suggest that the
agent is not the ground but rather is God.
If so, this would conflict with the sense of agency delineated in this
usage and weakens NIV’s value for translation.
At the same time, NIV’s translation does not reflect that it is the
blood(s) “crying from the ground for redress” that is the cursing agent.
Accordingly, from the reasons discussed above--of parallelism and the
context of its historical transmission--this paper suggests that the RSV and
IV.
Interpretation: Toward an
Etiology of the Curse
Genesis 4 does not explicitly indicate God’s reason
for looking upon Abel’s offering with favor while not favoring Cain’s. This silence of the text regarding the nature
of Cain and his sacrifice became an on-going source of interpretive fascination
within [Second Temple Judaism]. By the Roman period, at least three solutions
circulated:[xiv]
- Cain was a son of the devil and not of Adam (see also 1 Jn 3:10-12).
- Cain’s agrarian vocation was less favored than that of a shepherd’s
(Philo’s, Josephus’s, and Ambrose’s solution).[xv]
- The problem was with the sacrificer’s faith and spirit (see
Heb 11:4).
The third solution is congruent with what is
proposed in this paper. Cain’s fault was
his predisposition to envy in which the devil found a place for entry. [xvi]
“A greedy sin lurks at the entry, ready to pounce” (my paraphrase of לפתח
חטאת רבץ ואליך Gen 4: 7b).
By this, we
see a parallel between what Jewish and early Christian commentators saw as the
characteristic and death-dealing etiology
of disorder from envy—as opposed to the essence of
the disposition that Cain displays in Gen 4: 5.
Later Targumic and anti-Marcionite Christian accounts of Cain took a
more forensic than etiological frame.[xvii]
The former were concerned with judgment that removed the accursed from the land
of the living, less so with the propagation and transmission of the universal
curse.[xviii]
While 1 Jn 3:10-12 and Heb 11:.4 are
thematically related, there is a distinction. In the former interpretation,
Cain is distinguished from Abel by reason of essence prior to act, while in the
interpretation of Hebrews 11, the distinction between Adam and Eve’s two
children is based on their faith: one is more righteous because of his
faith. Abel has received the wages of a
watchful shepherd and is tendering back to God a portion of his successful flock.
As a manifestation of the
human-divine relationship, this distinction between birth and faith—between etiology
and dualism of essence--in characterizing piety and sin becomes crucial in the
early church as it struggled to determine whether it is action or essence that
justifies a human before God: his or her birth versus one’s faith and the
practices of the reliant spirit. It
follows that this distinction is important to debates regarding membership in
the new church community at the time of the New Testament writings and sermons
(in 1 John and Hebrews). It became a
question for the early church whether any condition of birth or “essence”
conflicts with a profession or act of faith that would otherwise qualify a
person for membership in the ecclesia.
Although God in Genesis 4 does not
explicitly evaluate Cain’s faith by the character of his sacrifice, the reader
regards Cain the sacrificer in consequence of his apparent disregard by God when Cain reacts to God favoring of
the fruit and sacrifice of Abel’s vocation: Cain displays an angry and
downfallen countenance. Such a countenance is consistent with envy. The “mark” that God fashions for Cain may
have been an apotropaic emblem or tattoo to distract from the “evil eye” of
envy.[xix]
The central theme of this episode, as this paper has
proposed by delineating the ablative parallelism of Gen 4: 10-11, is ארור, “curse.”[xx] Curse is doubly central to the episode in
question. It forms a chiastic climax to the episode itself, and this particular
episode contains a central waypoint of the spread of the aboriginal curse of Gen
3:14 and 17 and which recurs in Gen 5:29 and in Noah’s curse of his son in Gen
9:25. [xxi]
Following this theme of ארור
through the larger primeval history locates the curse of the earth with Adam’s
transgression, as the curse estranges Adam from his task as tiller of the
ground and from his mate Eve. From this reading, the curse then migrates from the ground where Abel’s
potential offspring (blood) lie unrequited.
Cain, as a tiller of the earth from which Adam was estranged, sows the
lifeblood of his brother into the earth.
The continuing alienation of the spirit from matter then is tragically
recapitulated in history’s reconstituted “post-flood family” through Noah’s
alienation from the son, Canaan. Thus,
the curse flows to Earth, and then Earth to Cain, and from Noah to Canaan. It
inheres in all flesh derived from the dust, so that Noah goes so far as to
express curse upon his own son at the Genesis 9 conclusion of the curse narrative.
The Cain and Abel episode brings into focus themes of
curse from earlier episodes as they carry through into later episodes in the
Genesis 2-9 story. According to the literary and historical context, ארור
suggests a “spreading, miasmic” quality that contaminates what it contacts so
that the relationship between “curse”
(ארור) and “the ground” (האדמה) takes on additional significance in the written
text. [xxii]
In Genesis 6, 8,
and 9, God unconditionally blesses humankind.
Yet in Genesis 9, the Yahwist (J compiler) has Noah’s son shaming his
father while his father is nakedly drunk.
By putting into Noah’s mouth the curse explicit by the word ארור, the J
compiler marks the reorientation and intensification of curse--not that it were possible to double the curse on
Canaan’s flesh, but rather to demonstrate that Noah himself has added a new and
lopsided vector to the curse’s psychic spread.
By usurping God’s initiative to dispense the report of ארור, Noah has
become the agent of the “mimetic” spread of curse. All
humankind seems implicated by the text in this mimetic intensification of curse. [xxiii] The pater familias Noah has set
his children’s teeth on edge, endowing them not with blessing but rather with
the inheritance of a lopsided curse that reflects and orients a culture of
retaliatory violence. From an unalloyed
blessing contingent only upon obedience in the J account of Genesis 2, J
suspends at Gen 11:7 with curse’s disorder unmitigated and unmediated by
blessing, repentance, or forgiveness. Genesis 4 is a dynamic moment in the
spread of disorder, and its central parallelism provides an exegetical key to
tracing the vectors and intensity of that spread.
By the
time of the late Second Temple period in Palestine, the monotheistic oath
takers were interested in the relationship of a standing curse with the onset
of death. Interpreters of the Hebrew
scriptures noted both the source and the progression of the passive participle
“curse,” ארור , in the J-narrative of Genesis
3 through 9. Because death was patently
inevitable, adhering to created nature, an ancient propensity to link death
with technologies of curse began to conflict with monotheistic promises and
practices. Not only did the technologies
of curse become a subject for exploration, but also the circumstance that
surrounded and provoked a curse utterance was thought to determine the efficacy
of the curse. A curse uttered at the
time of death against the murderer was seen as especially effective in bringing
about retaliatory retribution from elements of nature.[xxiv]
The Cain and Abel episode documents primeval curse’s
progress from a fated outcome to the creeping miasma of anxiety and
paranoia. Curse begins its migration
from the flesh into the psyche of humanity. The J account represents the shared
ANE understanding of “miasma” resulting from the metaphysical by-products of
inequitable treatment of kin in a henotheistic narrative of curse. Gen 4:13 and its LXX gloss aitia suggest that psychic state of
anxiety derives from the awareness of being scrutinized for cause, either by a
judging spirit or by the disenfranchised victim of the inequity herself.[xxv] It is this psychic sense of being watched by
agents planning violence that characterizes (polytheistic) anxiety.
Whatever Abel’s sacrificial motivation in
the J account, the clearly marked blood-cry from the earth initiates in Cain a
fear of retribution. The curse has now
taken on the character of supporting lex talionis that supersede kin
relations. Cain fears retaliation by any
and every party so that God marks Cain with a protected status. Cain departs the scene, bearing his anxiety
regarding retaliation and, most likely, the festering, de-spiritualizing disease
that sees enemies all around. As an
agent of fratricide prior to the giving of the Torah, Cain was a
transgressor of the moral norm of equity.
He is stabilized against a creeping anxiety regarding conspiracy so long
as he trusts God to fulfill the promise of protection. When the promise begins
to be distrusted, as when a polytheistic or atavistically hierarchical view of
the cosmos begins to take the human mind captive, trust as faith ebbs, and the
miasma of anxiety takes hold.
[i] F. M. Cross, “Toward a History of
Hebrew Prosody,” in Fortunate the Eyes that See: Essays in Honor of David
Noel Freeman in Celebration of His Seventieth Birthday (ed. A. B. Beck,
A. H. Bartlett, P. R. Raabe, and C. A. Franke; Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995) 298-309, here 300.
[ii] More manifold patterns of meaning
overlap in a written text. Parunak
states that the “first axiom” of Biblical literature is its essential
aurality. “Understanding came through
the ear, not through the eye.” H. v. D. Parunak, “Some Axioms for Literary
Architecture,” Semitics 8 (1982) 1-16,
here 3.
[iii] R. Alter, The Art of Biblical
Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1980) 51: “The biblical type-scene
occurs not in the rituals of daily existence but at the critical junctures in
the lives of the heroes.”
The slightest strategic variations in the
pattern of repetitions could serve the purposes of commentary, analysis,
foreshadowing, thematic assertion, with a wonderful combination of subtle
understatement and dramatic force (Alter, The
Art of Biblical Narrative 91; cf. 96-7).
[iv] “Anadiplosis” of semantic units.
Parallel sonants are not uncommon in Semitic verse or in Genesis. A. R. Ceresko, “The Chiastic Word Pattern in
Hebrew,” CBQ 38 (1976) 303-11.
J. S. Kselman, “Semantic-Sonant Chiasmus in Biblical Poetry,” Biblica
58 (1977) 219-223. J. M. Sasson,
“Word-Play in Gen 6: 8-9,” CBQ 37 (1975) 165-6.
[v]Reverse symmetries—“chiastic
structures”—establish internal unity of segments. An internal inclusio is threaded through a central X member. J. T. Walsh, Style and Structure in
Biblical Hebrew Narrative (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001)
177-8. H. v. D. Parunak, “Oral
Typesetting: Some Uses of Biblical Structures,” Biblica 62 (1981) 153-168
[vi] “This is one of the most monumental
sentences in the Bible…The most important word in the sentence is אלי , ‘to me.’” C. Westermann, Genesis
1-11: A Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1994) 305. F. A. Spina, “The ‘Ground’ for Cain’s
Rejection (Gen 4): adamah in the Context of Gen 1-11,” ZAW
104 (1992) 319-332.
[vii] F.M. Cross notes that oral
symmetries and parallelisms “broke down” in texts between the archaic period
and the Persian and Greek periods.
Cross, “Toward a History of Hebrew Prosody,” 301.
[viii] M. Sternberg, The Poetics of
Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature;
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) 186ff.
[ix] Systematic analysis of text
divisions at the level of verse and paragraph is the approach of M.C.A. Korpel and J.M Oesch eds., Delimitation Criticism: A New Tool in
Biblical Scholarship (Pericope I; Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000). For a
discussion of method, see M. C. A Korpel, “Introduction” in Delimitation Criticism, 1-51,
esp. 37-40.
[x] Tov notes evidence from Qumran that
segmentation and divisions in texts accord with the logic of scribal exegetical
“impressions.” E. Tov, “The Background
of the Sense Divisions in Biblical Texts,” in Delimitation Criticism 312-50, here 339.
Parunak, “Oral Typesetting,” 166-7 gives
examples of what he terms the broken “panels” of parallel segments by scribal
acts. The scribe has “broken in” to the traditional symmetry of parallel
members with an exegetical judgment.
[xi]
G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word
Biblical Commentary; Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1987) 107 emph.
added.
[xii] L. Koehler
and W. Baumgartner, The Hebrew and
Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament: (vol. I; Study Edition, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2001) 598 meaning 5.
[xiii] Koehler and Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old
Testament, I. 598 meaning 7.
[xiv]
J. L Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A
Guide to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998) 146-69.
[xv] Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, 149.
[xvi] Envy personified in the Wisdom of Solomon 2:23-4 with the
devil who leads to death.
[xvii] Cain and Abel were part of a dualist
frontier for the anti-Marcionite church. Satan acts by imprinting his
essence. See E. Levine, “The Syriac
Version of Genesis IV 1-16,” VT 26 (1976) 70-78. Levine’s (p. 78) “general principle that the
simpler and less developed a targumic tradition, the older it is;” that later
interpretations were increasingly forensic.
[xviii]In the ancient Mediterranean context, a curse uttered at
the time of death against the murderer was seen as especially effective in
bringing about retaliatory retribution from elements of nature. L. Watson, Arae: The Curse Poetry of Antiquity
(Leeds, Great Britain: Francis Cairns, Ltd, 1991).
[xix] J. H. Elliot, “The Evil Eye in the
First Testament: The Ecology and Culture
of a Pervasive Belief,” in The Bible and the Politics of Exegesis: Essays
in Honor of Norman K. Gottwald on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (ed. D. H.
Jobling, P. L. Day, and G. T. Sheppard; Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1991)
147-60.
[xx] Fulfilling the conditions of what M.
Buber (quoted by Alter in The Art of Biblical Narrative [p. 93])
terms a leitwort,
a word…that recurs significantly in
a…continuum of texts…[B]y following [its] repetitions, one is able to decipher
or grasp a meaning…; in fact, the very difference…between combination of sounds
related to one another in this manner a kind of movement takes place: if one
imagines the entire text deployed before him, one can sense waves moving back
and forth between the words…the inner rhythm of the text…is one of the most
powerful means for conveying meaning without expressing it.
[xxi] The reverse symmetrical parallelism
of Gen 4.10-11 appears to reflect in microcosm the concentric macrostructure of
Genesis 1-11 discerned by J. A. Loader, “Rhythm in Primeval Narrative,” Old
Testament Essays 13 (2000) 204-17.
[xxii]
A.M. Kitz, “An Oath, its Curse and Anointing Ritual,” Journal of the
American Oriental Society 124 (2004) 315-21. By these reckonings, a
dead body hung over the ground would not make contact with the ground. It
concentrates pollution because there is no apotropaic movement of the miasma.
[xxiii] On mimesis, see Rene Girard, I
See Satan Fall like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001).
[xxiv] Watson, Arae.
[xxv] Williams, Bernard. Shame and Necessity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 219-33.
