The Book of Genesis, chapter four, tells us about the firstborn child on the Earth who was named Cain after Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden. At sometime after Cain was born, Adam and Eve had another son who was named Abel. Cain became a farmer and Abel was a shepherd.
After a period of time had elapsed it became time for the family to offer an offering to Jehovah their God. Cain’s offering consisted of the fruit of the ground that he harvested and Abel’s offering was one of the first of his flock of sheep that he had killed and prepared for Jehovah. Now Jehovah had respect for and accepted Abel’s offering, but rejected the offering that Cain brought.
Because of the rejection of his offering, Cain was very sorrowful and sad that Jehovah had not accepted what he had offered. In response to Cain’s offering Jehovah told Cain that unless he changed and started doing well, that he would enter into sin.
After a time had passed while Cain and his brother Abel were in the field talking, Cain killed his brother Abel. Now why did Cain kill his brother? It may have been out of jealousy since Abel had found favor with Jehovah and Cain did not.
Because of what Cain did to his brother, Jehovah chastised Cain, put a curse on him and sent him out to be a wanderer, never to be in Jehovah’s presence from that time on. Cain was feared that because he had become a fugitive because of his crime, someone would find him and kill him in revenge for taking his brother’s life. The Bible tells us that Jehovah somehow marked Cain so that everyone would leave him alone and not take his life.
Not what was the mark that Jehovah put on Cain? Before we get to that, let’s look at the whole situation from the beginning and attempt to analyze what has taken place.
What could have caused Jehovah to accept Abel’s offering and reject the one from Cain? Why was the offerings presented to Jehovah in the first place? What did Abel know that Cain did not about the kind of offering that Jehovah has wanted?
Up until this time, according to what we see in the scriptures, Jehovah had not given any laws for Adam’s family to adhere to that could have been considered a sin, in order to make these offerings sin offerings. But if they were not sin offerings, what else could they have been for. The scriptures don’t give us any clue to why the offerings were given.
One thing that we could consider is about what happened in the Garden to Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve had sinned against Jehovah by disobeying and not believing His word about what would happen if they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Because God had realized about what they did and considered that to be a sin, He gave them coats of skins to cover them. For Jehovah to have provided them with skins, it meant that one or two animals had to have died for the skins to be available. So, one could surmise that it required the shedding of an innocent animal’s blood to provide for the covering of Adam and Eve’s sin.
Could this have been what Cain missed out on? Was he have supposed to know that this kind of offering was the only acceptable one with Jehovah? It seems like Adam would have taught his son’s about this by then. Certainly these two boys would have witnessed or had been involved with offerings to Jehovah before this happened.
If the killing of, which was murder of his brother that Cain was guilty of, then why wasn’t his life taken in payment for Abel’s life? Why did Jehovah not allow his life to be taken by protecting him with some kind of a mark? Wouldn’t this lack of equal justice, a life for a life, be a signal to others at that time to do the same thing knowing that no punishment existed for murder? It turned out that Cain’s descendent; his great-great-great-grandson also killed a man and thought that he should escape punishment for it too.
In the book of Hebrews, the writer speaks of the faith of Abel as follows:
Heb 11:4 by faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet spoke.
So according to this Abel had faith and Cain didn’t. I wonder why that was? Abel and Cain were brought up side by side under their parents who supposedly taught them both about their experience with Jehovah in the Garden, including why they were expelled from it and about Jehovah providing them with the covering of skins. Did Cain not believe? If he didn’t believe their story then why did he provide an offering to Jehovah. I think they both believed, so there must be another aspect to one having faith and the other didn’t.
John wrote in First John the following:
1 John 3:10 In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever does not righteous things is not of God, neither he that loves not his brother. (11) For this is the message that you heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. (12) Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And why did he kill him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother's righteous.
So John says that Abel’s works were righteous and Cain’s were evil because Cain was of the devil. If Cain was a child of God then he would have loved his brother and would not have killed him. The Bible does not go into any detail about the righteous and unrighteous acts of these two brothers, but that does not mean that there were none.
The way John explains this is though he had reason to believe that Cain was of that wicked one, the devil. Now whether he meant physically or just spiritually one can only surmise. That is unless you believe what some do about Cain being conceived by a union between Eve and the serpent in the Garden. One must have a suspicion about that possibility with a statement that Eve made when Cain was born. Eve made the comment saying: “I have gotten a man from the LORD.” Why would Eve make a statement about Cain in that manner? It would cause one to think that Cain did not resemble Adam enough for Eve to believe that he was Cain’s father. Then again, when Seth was born Eve said: “God has appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.” From this statement it could be that she recognized the resemblance between Adam, Abel and Seth.
If this is true, that Cain was born as a result of a union between Eve and the serpent, who was the devil incarnate, it would explain the difference between his works and his brother’s. Abel being a descendent of Adam, a son of God and Cain being descendent from the evil one, satan in the serpent. If this is true, then one must surmise that the ancestors of Cain, who became known as the Kenites, were also of that evil one and would explain why Lamech, a descendent of Cain also committed murder.
But still a mystery as to why Jehovah put a mark on Cain to prevent anyone from avenging the death of Abel by killing him and what this “mark” could really mean or what it was. Without any additional evidence it is of my opinion that the mark was nothing more than Jehovah in some was making it known to those living at that time to not avenge Abel by laying hands on Cain, rather than physically putting some kind of identifying mark on his body.
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