To Love Cain

[This is an expanded version of a paper read to the Reading, Rhetoric, and Hebrew Bible and the Semiotics and Exegesis sections of the Society of Biblical Literature during the joined annual national convention of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature at Philadelphia, Nov. 19, 1995]

To love Cain more than God, in other words, Nod-y Gen 4:1-16

John Havea j.havea,

One's duty regarding the other who makes appeal to one's responsibility is an investing of one's own freedom. In responsibility, which is, as such, irrecusable and non-transferable, I am instituted as non-interchangeable: I am chosen as unique and incomparable. My freedom and my rights, before manifesting themselves in my opposition to the freedom and rights of the other person, will manifest themselves precisely in the form of responsibility, in human fraternity. An inexhaustible responsibility: for with the other our accounts are never settled. Emmanuel Levinas (1993:125)
[. . .] our reading of the Bible will be a militant reading. The great questions about the word of the Lord arise out of Christian practice. It is time to reclaim this militant reading of the word of God in faith. It is time to open the Bible and read it from the perspective of "those who are persecuted in the cause of right" (Matt. 5:10), from the perspective of the condemned human beings of this earth for, after all, theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Gustavo Gutiérrez (1983:4)
I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write. Michel Foucault (1972:17)
wh'dm yt` 't-chvh 'shtw "And/but/now/so/then/w the man knew Eve his wife . . ." So begins the Gen 4 story. Things have happened, are now happening, and/but/now/so/then/w the narrator begins telling his story from in between, inter-esse, its beginning and its end (cf. Levinas 1991:3, 1985:99f.). At w-point, the narrator seeks to tame, to place, a happening event with words. But by telling a story in which events unfold and overlap here and there, inter alia, he displaces his desires. Words cannot capture a happening event, the narrator tells his altering story "in other words,"1 in dis\placement.2 Inter alia, stuff happens, inter-esse (cf. Caputo, 30f.). As readers, we begin as the narrator begins. Whether we read from left to right, right to left, or otherwise, we are placed-readers who can only begin inter-esse: We read towards the margins, and always out of the margins, so inter-esse and inter alia signify placement not at a/the center. We may invest our freedom as obligation, or otherwise than obligation,3 still we begin reading from where Levinas's demand for responsibility (response-ability) disapproves the ignoring of other persons. We also begin from where the repressed of modern history demand to be heard, and we must respond by being/reading with them.4 The repressed of modern history still Say something with their silenced bodies, inter alia they are elusive absences. We therefore imitate the narrator, despite not being tamed by him,5 we begin reading at many places (cf. Phillips): "The place is everywhere, anywhere. The time is after the beginning, after creation, after Shabbat" (Wiesel, 38). We begin with presuppositions, elusive absences, on the nature of discourse and its implication for reading texts. We presume that words, the texture of voices and the fiber of texts, do awesome things including doing otherwise than Said. Irony. Words cannot capture happening events but they can heal, infect, alter, move, establish, oppress, encourage, even de-/re-press. We hear and are moved by words, more than words, but we cannot capture voices. Though we may reject an-other person's words we cannot deaden her voice because it still Says something in its silence, and silence cannot be silenced. We must therefore read elusive absences, and listen to silences also. We also presume that a text, like Gen 4:1-16, is a first moment of repression (cf. Levinas 1989:103-11).6 It is the stuff of language to repress, to subjectify and disAbel: Gen 4:1-16 names victims, seeking to fix their status as victims. In a second moment, readers re-press by announcing the story as Said:7 Cain is the jealous murderer, first victim of sin,8 and Abel is always innocent; Yhwh is just, absolutely;9 the narrator is always impartial and so trustworthy (see n.5). The Gen 4:1-16 story on the other hand is not as unambiguous. We are obliged to reread, with the freedom of obligation, because we are Sayers also, not just announcers. We may rewrite, inter-esse, even if otherwise than Said; we may re/de-nounce, inter alia, as responsibility.10

Jean Calloud offers an interesting and interested reading of Gen 4:1-16.11 Calloud identifies traces of the figures of Gen 4:1-16 (e.g., brother, blood) in the rest of Scripture,12 which he reads as a unity with the Jesus-event at its center. The movement is from figure to fulfillment (traces; 62).13 Calloud’s study is interesting in the way he maps the textual effects of Gen 4:1-16 in the biblical chains of signification, and interested in how he anticipates and discerns the Gen 4:1-16 figures in Scripture, with its center as the final-signified. An interested question arises: Of what figures is Gen 4:1-16 a trace? Since we do not read from the beginning of the story we propose to read in the other direction.14 Inter-esse we read other (alter), we alter-read. To make this alter turn involves risks inter alia, and we are obliged to indicate what alter-read signifies and represses. First, we do not propose to read about alter, qua being. The other of alter-read is not an object to observe, territory to capture, gap to fill, or boundary to level, but, inter-esse, the event which allows us to observe, capture, fill, level. Alter is otherwise than being, alter is w-point, the rupture, be it a lack or an excess, necessary before a daughter can say to her mother, “I would like both of us to be present. So that the one doesn’t disappear in the other, or the other in the one. So that we can taste each other, feel each other, listen to each other, see each other together” (Irigaray 1981: 61). Alter is opening, where “in” and “out” meet. In other words, only “in other words,” alter is fluid while “irrecusable and non-transferable” (Levinas). To alter-read obliges us to reread textual (in)consistencies as openings, we are always hetero-interested and always militant (Gutiérrez). Concerned with opening, alter-read traffics in dis\closure. We resist rigid closure. But we need some closure in order to make sense, so in alter-read closure “leans against” dis, exposing inter alia readerly vulnerabilities:15 We are, for instance, vulnerable to the illusion of The universal Wo\man who defines the human subject, or human Other. Such a dis\figure exists in the fantasy, not inter-esse (cf. Lacan). We are also vulnerable to the fantasized “we” that “I” have thus far been writing. My “we” is possible because there is a “you” and a “me” who exist separately (Irigaray 1980:72), “in other words,” it exists because of our disunity and because of “others” at a third positionality so it can never be a universal we.16 To alter-read then is to dis\close the paradoxes of subjectivity. Third, our desire to alter-read indicates discomfort with the illusion of sameness and two blind spots in systems of signification: the tendency to map linear chains, and the unwillingness to let-go of semiotic figures/traces.17 To alter-read is not to be overly committed to figures and traces but to the happening events (Il y a), to alter-read is to embrace alterity and dis\placement. Différance. As we alter-read in the other direction from Calloud’s fulfillments we ask, What is disfigured in Gen 4:1-16, or in its readings?18 who is disfigured by this story?19 what figures lurk behind this text? what are the text’s silences and absences? So we begin again,20 inter esse, to alter-read.


The narrator makes a distinction that emphasizes the gender barrier: the man is the “knower,” his wife is the object that is known, the “knowee."21 The (female?) narrator begins from the unnamed knower’s point of view, but the named knowee is the one who is productive: “Eve conceived and bore Cain.” If name indicates placement, this knower is a nobody. He is subject-ed, simply “X-ed,” and his point of view is thereby blurred. So is our alter-reading, blurred and blurring. At w-point the narrator shows no interest in God, the creative character in the garden episode. Inter-esse, a silence: God is not involved in the mode of production (so Wiesel, 41). He reenters the story late. Inter alia, ruptures: The serene narration of the conception and birth of Cain suggests that the process was not most severe with pangs and pain as God prescribed in 3:16. And whereas 3:22-24 denies access to the tree of life, the next story event is the production and deliverance of a new life. Inter-esse and inter alia silences and ruptures resist sameness. What’s happening? God returns upon the voice of the productive knowee/bearer/mother: “I have gained a man ’t-Yhwh.” We imagine a father figure lurking behind Eve’s words because of their 4:1a frame, conception. And at the place where we expect to read the father’s name appears God’s name. The narrator’s “knower” is displaced by the “knowee’s” yhwh, who appears to be the same character who functioned earlier as Eve’s father (Fewell & Gunn, 23). Father of Eve, and of Eve’s ‘ysh. The same literary character with a different face, testifying to the many “faces” of alter. One voice rewrites another (Eve over narrator), one character displaces another (Yhwh over “the man”), one acquired character has two literary fathers, and readers are teased inter alia: Which literary father is obliged, in freedom, to ‘ysh-Cain? Who does not disfigure this “the man” of 4:1? Whose birth is announced in 4:1? Is it not curious that, east of the garden, the words of a woman, the speech of a bearer of life and the “mother of all the living” (3:20), “conceived and bore” yhwh?


According to Eve’s words, Yhwh is in-deed involved in the event of 4:1. But his involvement is deceptive because of the dis\closing nature of the ’t-particle: object marker, and as preposition. A monosyllabic word indicates a double voice, the kind of situation in which readers prefer to limit their choices by ignoring some of their options. That alternative, though, is difficult to execute here because both of our options are theologically problematic. We are vulnerable to such double voices because the possible and legitimate are not always comfortable. The LXX translates ’t as a preposition, ’t-yhwh becomes dia tou Theo: Yhwh is the agent “by means of” whom Cain is acquired. Westermann finds this linguistically legitimate option problematic because ’t “in the sense of `with the help of’ is never applied to God” (291). His judgment is interested, he denies Yhwh the chance to be helper of a woman, “helper of a helper,” and of later becoming a helper of Abel in the field. Westermann’s God cannot be a helper to this story’s repressed. Was he fantasizing that Yhwh is male and that the divine-class does not interact with the human-class directly, so God cannot be doubly subjugated by helping a woman? Why not let Yhwh help in the acquiring of a man-child, a process he earlier promised to “make most severe” (3:16)? Elusive absences, gender and class biases lurk behind Westermann’s judgment. To translate ’t on the other hand as object marker is also discomforting: Here, Eve acquires a man-who-is-Yhwh. Yhwh is therefore a man, an ‘ysh. Behind this alternative lurks the events of Gen 3, in which Eve’s deeds caught Yhwh’s attention: She saw that the fruit of the tree was “good for eating,” and a “source of wisdom,” before she even touch it (3:6). She ate from the fruit of the tree, gave some to the man who was with her, he ate, “then the eyes of both of them were opened” (3:7) as Yhwh came calling. We may imagine that in 3:9 Yhwh gazed upon Eve but called out to the man, like a lover who embraces one but utters the name of another. Prior to 4:1, Eve caught Yhwh’s attention. Did she also acquire-’t-Yhwh? How does one not acquire-’t-Yhwh-qua-otherwise-than-being? Who falls in Gen 3? Eve bears life in 4:1 so she is, at least, yhwh-like. Prior to 4:1, Yhwh is portrayed with ‘ysh-qualities: Yhwh discloses ‘ysh-like emotions when he curses his creation in 3:14f. Yhwh is quick to condemn and eager to reject what is different;22 the creator who creates by differentiation (Fewell & Gunn, 23f.) cannot now deal with differences; this literary character is not always consistent, he is threatened by ambiguities (so Gunn & Fewell, 28-9). Thus far, we assume that ‘ysh signifies “man.” What if ‘ysh signifies “husband?” Did Eve name her son “Cain” because she has acquired Yhwh as her husband? Did Yhwh displace Adam as the husband of a mother?23 If so then we have provided a father for Abel, who is born next. But to entertain this alter-reading is to transgress constraints that define Yhwh as immutable: Yhwh cannot be acquired, Yhwh is no ‘ysh (whether man, son, father, husband, or otherwise). Both translations of ’t are legitimate, and both are troublesome. Lurking behind the text are ruptures that push away our readerly “grab” (cf. Penchansky). But also, we resist the grab of the text. Nonetheless we expect Yhwh to be responsible for Cain, and the ’t-ambiguity accentuates his response-ability.


Elijah approached all the people and said, “How long will you keep hopping between two boughs? If Yhwh is God, go after him, w-if Baal, go after him.” The people did not answer him a word. 1 Kings 18:21

What did Eve desire? Westermann contends that Eve boasts of being a co-creator, “she has brought forth a man in a way that corresponds to the creation of the man by the creator” (290). Westermann thereby avoids the ’t-like God figure, replacing it with a God-like ‘ysh: An ‘ysh gives life to an ’t, drawing attention to the “coherence between the creation of God and the procreation of woman” (van Wolde, 28). This alter-reading opens up the gender and class barriers. Dis\closure. Van Wolde nonetheless eclipses this disclosure by insisting that the relationship between Yhwh and Eve is a promise-fulfillment situation: “What has been indicated in Genesis 2-3 as an ability' or capacity’ is realized in Gen. 4.1. The ability to bring forth children is transformed into actually bringing forth children. [. . .] In the construction [’t-yhwh, ’t] indicates the sociative, to be translated as together with'" (27). Van Wolde's Yhwh shares the credit for Cain with the knowee, in an equal-but-different relationship that reflects the story-world's gender and class distinctions: the woman is not a <U>parallel</U> creator, in which case she may displace the first creator, but a <U>sociative</U> creator alongside the creator-standard who is the divine Yhwh. We expect different characters to hear Eve's words differently. What Eve desired cannot be fixed. She disappears with Adam until 4:25.<SUP>24</SUP> Yhwh on the other hand has yet to appear "east of the garden." Elusive absence. Prior to 4:4b, Yhwh lurks behind the story but traces of his shadow are visible in the text (cf. Levinas 1989:130-43), one of which is Abel's name. By association with <U>hbl</U> ("breath"), "Abel" echoes Yhwh's act of blowing into the nostrils of the earthling in 2:7. Named <U>hbl</U>, something essential to life, Abel is doubly stabilized: He is named, and his name signifies life. The similar situations of "coming into life," of Adam in 2:7 and Abel in 4:2, binds Yhwh to Abel. More obligations for Yhwh.<SUP>25</SUP> The association of Adam with Abel begs the issue of placement: Was Abel born to displace Adam as figure of human-life? Who does not disfigure the first "the man?" The narrator did not name him in 4:1, Eve did not mention him, and now Abel signifies breath/life. So far "the man" has only been useful as knower. <I>Inter alia,</I> silences. Abel's name may be read otherwise: Westermann suggests that "Gen 3 describes one's state as a creature or a human being as dust’; Gen 4 adds another aspect by using the name hbl. It looks to a person’s contingency and nothingness [. . .]” (292). Adam is dust, Abel is nothing; the breath of 2:7 is condemned in 3:19, so do we expect for the breath of 4:2. Missing from the narrator’s account is a father for Abel. Without father, Abel is disfigured. His mother is now a single mother, known once but labors twice. As Yhwh earlier made two humans (1:27), drawing the second from the first (2:7-23), so does Eve produce two humans from one procreation, drawing the second after the first. The narrator tells two creative acts of one creation (1:1-2:24), now two back-to-back birth moments. The narrator identifies Abel not as the son of Adam/Eve/Yhwh, but links him to his brother Cain (4:2). Cain thereby becomes the “keeper” of Abel’s identity; Abel is Cain’s figurative trace, he lurks behind the birth door after Cain. Différance. Another trace of Yhwh’s absence can be seen in the tasks performed by the brothers. The narrator reverses the order of presentation, introducing the task performed by the second son first. Abel was “shepherding sheep,” a task not cursed in 3:14-19 and an animal not named prior to 4:2. He introduces something new to the story, he acts differently. Creation-by-differentiation? Class differentiation? Was Abel safe since his task steers clear of Yhwh’s curses? By “keeping an eye on sheep” Abel brings to mind the animals that were named but not accepted as helper in 2:19-20.26 The narrator again sets Abel against his father, the one who failed to “keep an eye” on his helpers. Abel’s task dis\closes Adam’s failure, and consequently “leans against” Abel the burdens for that failure. The narrator teases our imagination because he who “keeps an eye” will later become the one on whom Yhwh gazes (4:4). Abel’s task discloses the events lurking behind it, and anticipates the introduction of Cain’s task. By acting differently, Abel acts against sameness. Cain is “tiller of the soil,” recalling not only what was lacking from the creation in 2:5, but also, the curse of that very task in 3:17 (cf. Jobling 1986:17f.). Cain is caught between fulfilling God’s creation, which is an unavoidable obligation (cf. the condition of the expulsion in 3:23), and doing the same task as a curse. Like Moses who was called to a journey that he will not finish, Cain is caught between “thorns and thistles.” When Cain produces “fruit of the soil” (4:3b), he undermines Yhwh’s curse (3:18). Cain is already a transgressor, before the offering of gifts. We anticipate that he will be ejected as were the Gen 3 transgressors, raising troubling questions about God’s creation: If creation is the act of bringing order to chaos, doesn’t God show that the world he created is a chaos by continuing to control it? Are we dealing with a creation gone awry, or a messy creation (pace Hauser)?27 Elusive absences. Silences. Dis/closure. Yhwh’s elusive absence discloses another silence in the story, a silence that the narrator can no longer silence: The parents who are absent, inter-esse, until 4:25. “There are gaps in the text. From the purely human point of view, we cannot but be disturbed about . . . the parents” (Wiesel, 43). What’s happening? Whether ignored by the narrator, displaced by Yhwh, or by their sons, the parents’ absence is still very disturbing.28 The story is gloomier when they reappear in 4:25 as if 4:3-16 is not a problem. Inter-esse, stuff happens, and to the parents we pose Wiesel’s judgment of Abel’s aloofness toward Cain’s sorrow when God did not gaze at him and at his offering: “In the face of suffering one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way” (57). Like the people’s answer to Elijah, Adam and Eve answer us not a word. They have responded, otherwise than they are obliged, so in the case of their repressed children their accounts are not settled. Inter-esse, Yhwh is inter alia. Cain and Abel came to him as if he was a parent (cf. Rosenblatt & Horwitz, 55-6). The brothers create a dilemma: if Yhwh accepts Cain’s offering he concedes thereupon that his curse failed (unless Cain’s “fruits of the soil” were only “thorns and thistles”), but for Yhwh to uphold his curse is to reverse his mandate in 2:5.29 To save-face (cf. Williams for “scapegoat”) Yhwh needs to reject Cain and so affirm divine immutability and free will (von Rad, 104f.). The text resists such a constraining reading. This story remains an opening. Dis\closure. The one in whose birth was Yhwh named is in a no-win situation, the one named “futility” is placed, and Yhwh curiously lurks behind the story-event. Elusive absence. When Yhwh finally appears we assume that something may be wrong because, thus far, he has only appeared to bring order, to create or to judge. Why doesn’t Yhwh just stay away, imagine that things east of the garden are in good hands (cf. 1:29-31), and observe his creatures do good-w-bad (2:15f.)? Why not give freedom, for obligation? Why not see how the divine nature of these humans (cf. 3:22) help them survive? Did Yhwh appear because the existence of a man who “has become like one of us” (3:22) irritated him? because sameness tormented him? Did he show up to show who the real god is? to show who is in charge? to show off? Différance. Vulnerability. The prelude to Yhwh’s entry is the presentation of offerings (see Kugel, Waltke, for traditional readings). There is no demand, and no justification (cf. Hendel).30 Stuff happens. Events slowly evolve, as if things are normal. With Yhwh’s entry, things rush to a close as if something needs to be covered up.31 Another reversal takes place, the firstborn who was mentioned second in the previous story-moment is now mentioned first. The narrator is not consistent as the order of one moment is reversed in the next. Cain appears as initiator and director of the moment’s business, an event that takes place “from end of days” (or “days from the end”). Does this mean that days have passed since the last offering? that it has been days since Yhwh cursed the land, so we may expect the curse to have worn off? that after days of tilling Cain produced fruits from the soil, indicating that he controls the land? Who is in control? We marvel at the courage of Cain in presenting “fruits from the soil” to Yhwh, the one who cursed the soil and told it to yield “thorns and thistles.” Was Cain aware of Yhwh’s curse? Dis\closure. To read Cain’s “fruits of the soil” with an eye for 3:17-19 identifies absences lurking behind the text. Though 3:17 allows that man may “eat from the soil” if he works (so 3:19), Yhwh prescribes in 3:18 that the fruit of man’s labor will only be “thorns and thistles” and his food be the “grasses of the field” (undermining 1:29). What’s happening? Why labor if he will only labor in vain? Why journey if he won’t arrive? The soil nonetheless yields to Cain’s toil, not to Yhwh’s words.32 Yhwh seems ticked at Cain, dis\closed in his later curse of Cain, “If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you” (4:12). It is not good that the soil yields to a man, even though (especially if?) he is God’s image and heir to the God-like knowledge of good-w-bad.33 The event is complicated when Abel for his part offers a gift that does not meet nor transgress any constraints: he “brought the choicest of the firstlings of his flock” (4:4). It may seem that Abel satisfies God’s direction for humans to “rule [. . .] all the living things that creep on earth” (1:28). But the narrator does not indicate a capacity-realization relation here, nor does he consider the point of view of Abel’s victim. Thanks to Abel, the ground tastes blood. Irony. If the offerings were simultaneous, Abel again shadows Cain. At birth and now as offerers, Abel lurks behind Cain. Cain’s action was desirable so Abel captures a firstling thereby reminding us of Cain, a first-born. When the story turns eastward we assume that Yhwh remains in the garden, where the tree that defines the difference between gods and humans was guarded. When he leaves the garden, maybe because he saw that it is not good for gods to be alone, Yhwh enters Cain’s space. The guards of the garden cannot confine Yhwh because they guard against humans, not gods who wish to exit. Assume that Cain expected Yhwh to remain in the garden. He must have been very surprised when Yhwh appears.34 Time stops while Yhwh’s (in)action is described: “Yhwh gazed on Abel and on his offering. But on Cain and on his offering he did not gaze.” The text syntactically distinguishes between each offerer and his offering, so a person is gazed upon not because of what he offered (Waltke, 365). In 1:31 God saw that the creation was “very good;” in 3:7 the eyes of the man and the woman were opened and they perceived their nakedness; in 4:4-5 Yhwh simply gazed (sh`h) on Abel, but not on Cain. No word is spoken, nor a judgment, only a gaze, an (in)action.


And Yhwh said to Ha-Satan, “Have you put your heart against/to my servant Job, because there is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, he fears God and shuns evil?” Job 1:8

A silent gaze does not indicate valuation; but choosing to gaze on one and not on the other indicates desire, if only as a “delight to the eyes.” Thus far, Yhwh has been awfully silent. Elusive silence. He has done no wrong, so he needs no justification. Or otherwise? His gaze is so penetrating, and readers are again poked with divine comedy: Cain felt not being gazed upon, his face fell. Recall that this was not the first time that a gift was not accepted. Earlier, the man looked at the animals, God’s gift, but did not find a fitting helper (2:20) and instead of declaring them “good” he called them names (!). Only to Yhwh’s second gift did he say, “At last . . . .” As this other father accepted the second but rejected the first gift, so Yhwh gazed at the second but not at the first. No reason is given for Adam’s preference, nor for Yhwh’s gaze (cf. Hendel, Wiesel). We imagine that Yhwh’s refusal to gaze upon Cain’s offering is his counter-constraining move, a do-unto-others lesson from an offerer not accepted earlier. If Yhwh was intimidated by Cain’s offering, we cannot agree that his “flawed character led to his feigned worship” (Waltke, 371; so Josephus). We also refuse the claim that Abel was righteous but Cain was wicked from the very beginning (cf. Krasovec, 12f.). Such claims presume that the difference between good and not good is clear. This story on the other hand does not surrender to simple resolutions. Van Wolde for her part surrenders to the narrator’s desires: she explains that it is “more likely that Cain is envious not because Abel is more successful, but because YHWH looks at a blunderer like Abel while ignoring Cain” (29). We on the other hand cannot determine Cain’s opinion toward Abel before and after Yhwh’s gaze. We expect sibling rivalries (Williams, 25-30, 33-8; Rosenblatt & Horwitz, 53-4), and envy may be a big factor (so Wiesel, Williams), but there is no reason to assume that Cain and Abel were not also each other’s good companion. This story has room for inconsistencies! The narrator suggests in 4:5 that Cain was distressed not because of who and what Yhwh did not gaze upon, but because of what Yhwh did not do. The problem lies not with Cain, or Abel, but with Yhwh because he did not gaze upon Cain: Yhwh’s inaction distressed Cain. We cannot determine Abel’s assessment of Yhwh’s gaze, so we cannot confirm that being gazed upon was good. If we read ahead to 4:8 and the events in the field, Abel’s murder, we may conclude that being gazed upon by Yhwh is really not good (from a teleological viewpoint). Job would agree! Yhwh’s gaze (a deed) made Abel the “keeper” of Cain’s identity: Abel is identified first, as one gazed upon, and Cain is contrasted from him. The placement of the brothers’ identity shifts. Prior to their arrival in the field, Cain is usurped as the keeper of their identity. The narrator’s alternating cycle of presenting the brothers since their birth reaches a climax with Cain’s displacement under the divine gaze.35 Was Cain distressed also because of this displacement?


Saul said to Samuel, “But I did obey Yhwh! I walked in the way on which Yhwh sent me: I captured King Agag of Amalek, and I proscribed Amalek. The people took from the spoil some sheep and oxen, the first of what had been proscribed, to sacrifice to Yhwh your God at Gilgal.” 1 Samuel 15:20-21

The story continues with reversals: Like Isaac thinking that he was holding Esau when he was blessing Jacob, Yhwh gazed at Abel and caught a glimpse of Cain. Cain felt not being gazed upon, was “kindled with anger,” and “his face fell” (nphl). Yhwh rebukes Cain: “Surely, if you do good, there is uplift (ns</U>). But if you do not do good sin lurks at the opening; Its urge is toward you but you can rule it" (4:7). The tension between <U>ns and nphl discloses that the problem is not with the element of Cain’s offering, but his action because it did not cause what Yhwh takes to be good. What Yhwh meant by good, though, is ambiguous.36 To “till the soil” is good (2:5, 3:23), but to succeed in it seems not good (3:17b-18). Is Cain’s ability to produce fruits from the soil his sin, the indication that he did not cause good? Yhwh looks very deontological. And by saying that Cain can rule sin (4:7b), Yhwh shifts our attention away from the action that did not cause good to the urging of Cain to react. Like the waving of a rattle before a crying child to distract her from her hunger, Yhwh seeks to control our reading and to silence textual silences. This character grabs. Yhwh names, he subjectifies, “sin:” that which lurks behind the door, its desire is toward Cain (4:7).37 The relation between “desire” (tshwqh) and Yhwh’s command “to dominate” (mshl) sin deserves a closer look. To assume that tshwqh is the only precondition for mshl (Bledstein) is to overlook that a sense of insecurity breeds the desire to mshl. mshl is necessary for creation, it is a trace of tshwqh and of the feeling of insecurity. Yhwh’s command is therefore thorny: While seeking to dominate may or may not eliminate sin, it will surely confirm on the other hand that one is attracted to, and insecure because of, sin. Cain is thus vulnerable to something that objectifies himself, and he can not simply ignore it because of what Yhwh had just explained (threatened?). He is in double jeopardy, a “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation, in which the opposing choices lead to the same effect. This situation undermines Yhwh’s deontological concern: When one chooses a “lesser evil,” how does one cause good? “To dominate” or “not to dominate” is therefore not the question. Rather, it has to do with existing between “thorns and thistles.” We digress to alter-read tshwqh as a quality, rather than synonym, of cht’t (sin). There is more to cht’t than tshwqh, but in 4:7 and 3:16 cht’t may be identified through tshwqh. The “sin at the door” is signified by having desire for Cain. Sin is separate from Cain, otherwise it cannot objectively lurk and have desire for Cain.38 We suggested above that at birth and in their offerings Abel discloses desires toward Cain, he lurks behind Cain “at the door.” Further, Abel’s offering provided the difference between “being gazed upon” and “not being gazed upon,” which defined “doing good.” If Abel is the sin lurking at the door, Cain carries out Yhwh’s command in 4:8b: To “dominate sin” is to kill Abel. Murder signifies obedience.39 So Saul argues! Was Cain establishing order, on behalf of Abel’s firstling victim? For the narrator, rather, Cain is disorderly. Constraints break: A brother does not care for, but kills another; a protector of sheep cannot protect himself. Then, Yhwh breaks his silence. Was he, all along, present in the field? Elusive presence? Assume that Yhwh was in the field, even if otherwise-than-being. Assume also that Cain felt that Yhwh was aware of what goes on in the field. Why would he still kill Abel?

Perhaps he wanted to remain alone: an only child and, after his parents’ death, the only man. Alone like God and perhaps alone in place of God. Like God, he thought to offer himself a human sacrifice in holocaust. He wanted to be cruel like Him, a stranger like Him, an avenger like Him. And like Him, present and absent at the same time, absent by his presence, present in his absence. Cain killed to become God. To kill God. (Wiesel, 58).
Notwithstanding, though Cain’s motivation is eclipsed by the ellipsis in 4:8, a “murder is never justified, even when committed to ensure a better future” (Wiesel, 63). Violence builds up from the transgression of Yhwh’s words to two brothers exiting to the open field. Dead-men walking, displacements inter alia. In 4:4 Abel captures a first-born but in 4:8 a first-born disAbels a character on whom Yhwh gazed. The divine gaze does not protect. Job would agree! Does this event signify that “Cain has not ruled but has been ruled, overcome by the lust that lies in ambush” (Brueggemann, 60). Who rules whom? Who is in (out of) control? Dis\closure. Instances of dis\placement occur at the structural sequence of this altering story, one such moment occurs just before the two brothers arrive at the field: Cain speaks, but what he said is not heard (4:8). Readers fill this gap, to smoothen a troubling story, by surrendering to the narrator’s desire to condemn Cain: “This `empty’ speaking would then suggest, or testify to, the negation of the existence of the other as an equal, as a brother, and it can be seen as pointing ahead to the actual elimination of the other” (van Wolde, 35). Like a dental filling over a cavity, her attempt highlights the gap that is under erasure. In 4:8, a silence problematizes attempts to name the victim. Yhwh had just spoken to Cain (4:6-7), and we expect to hear Cain’s response next. We do hear Cain. But he was speaking to Abel. We assume that Cain is hereby performing his response to Yhwh. Cain’s speech is forgotten as the narrator tells his deed. A character is silenced, his character is to be judged according to his action. The narrator grabs our reading, but textual silences Say from behind the text. Thus far Abel has yet to speak: he was born, spoken of, he acted, was gazed at, and now spoken with. During Abel’s narrative life, only Cain related to him as a subject worthy of speech. A good deed? The narrator on the other hand will not allow Abel to hear anything because the silencing of Cain makes Abel deaf. He denies Abel the ability to respond, i.e., response-ability. Abel was dead before Cain killed him, doubly murdered, by the narrator and by Cain. And inter alia, by readers. Eve replaces Abel with Seth (4:25), and the Gen 5 recorder dehistorizes Cain and Abel both by leaving them out from Adam’s genealogy.40 When Abel gets to Say anything, when he was finally heard, he was already dead and it was his “blood” that cried to Yhwh (4:10). Abel finally had a place, in displacement. He once had a right to speak, in response to Cain (4:8), but he was not allowed. His words are delayed, and they come to haunt Yhwh and Cain. The replacement of speech with deed, disruption of dialogue, and shuffling of addressee and speaker, destabilize attempts to firmly fill the gap. Few characters speak, fewer are heard: Who is disfigured in/by this story? Abel? Cain? Yhwh? narrator? readers? To whom did the blood of Abel’s offering cry? The silences make this story difficult to nip in the bud. At this juncture, Cain and Abel appear different. Not all dialogues are disrupted though, nor are all silences unheard. After the silenced speech comes a dialogue, and we anticipate resolutions. In 4:9 Yhwh suddenly becomes talkative, as if he was guilty of something. He responds to Cain’s deed with a question (“Where is your brother Abel?”) which presumes that Cain knew of Abel’s whereabouts.41 Cain responds with his own question (“Am I my brother’s keeper?”), shifting our attention to Yhwh and his response-ability. These questions remind us of two points of signification identified earlier: at birth, Cain was the “keeper” of Abel’s identity while Yhwh was the “keeper” of Cain’s identity. To link these two identification marks make Yhwh the keeper of Abel’s identity. Cain’s question therefore shifts the blame to Yhwh, their narrative (grand)father and identity-keeper. If a brother’s keeper is “one who faithfully cares for his brother in his need [. . .]” (Riemann, 482), then Yhwh’s gaze, which stabilized this “futile breath,” discloses Yhwh as a good keeper(!). Yhwh continues to be Abel’s keeper by showing concern for the voice of his blood, and when he later punishes Cain for what he did to Abel. Before and after Abel’s murder, Yhwh acts as Abel’s keeper. As such, Cain’s question is taunting: Why ask me Lord? But who is Abel’s brother? Van Wolde insists that “Cain is not a brother and does not behave as a brother. In his speaking, YHWH urges Cain to accept Abel as his brother and to behave as a brother himself” (33). Abel was a brother, but he did not have a brother because Cain did not look upon him as one.42 What about Yhwh? Could Yhwh be Abel’s brother? Recall his ambiguous role according to Eve’s ’t, in which he qualifies as helper, father, husband, man, and child of Eve. This last possibility makes Yhwh Abel’s brother. And since he looked at Abel, if we follow van Wolde’s line of argument, Yhwh is a better brother than Cain. To where then was Yhwh “looking” when “Cain set upon his (Yhwh’s? Cain’s?) brother Abel and killed him” (4:8)? If one who does not look is not a brother, how responsible, in terms of Levinas’ human fraternity (1993:125), was Yhwh in the field? Cain did not act as Abel’s brother, nor did Yhwh. Freedom. Obligation. Cain is on the other hand Abel’s keeper if by shmr we understand a “watcher,” someone who “imprisons,” who “rules over.” In that sense Cain’s question has a submissive tone, “Oh no. Have I become my brother’s keeper?” (cf. Wiesel, 59). Yhwh could have affirmed Cain, “In-deed, you are his keeper!” But Yhwh appears threatened, so he shifts the blame to Cain by means of a harsh sentence. Assuming that the judgment is on behalf of the victim and an indication of the punisher’s jurisdiction, Yhwh brings blame upon himself by judging Cain: To accuse and punish is to assume responsibility for the victim and victimizer both. Yhwh cares, though late. He reacts. Good deed? Yhwh’s reaction testifies that Abel’s blood cried to him and is his responsibility.43 But why wait until it is too late? Why wait to re-act, rather than prevent? Who is in charge? Who is Abel’s keeper? Cain? Yhwh? narrator? readers? Is this story not alter enough so that we may account for Abel? Cain? Yhwh? narrator? How may we account for a silenced character? for a dead literary character? for grabbing characters? How is a literary character murdered? How do we account for a literary character whose subjectivity is denied in this story? Is not the rewriting of a murder-event a critique of the injustice performed? The characters who can speak may shift the blame, and the narrator fixes their desires. Or the narrator may unfix, if she desires. Readers may dis\close and resist these desires, we may read otherwise. Obligation. Freedom. Opening. Dis\closure. Yhwh for his part chose to place a curse, a constraint, upon Cain. Cain is more cursed than all the others. His curse is total: More cursed than the ground, which will no longer yield to him; he will wander ceaselessly, unable to settle. Ha’adamah and ha’adam are placed at odds, the one is condemned not to submit to the other; but neither may be conceived without the other, so they are linked. Différance. The boundaries of ha’adamah and ha’adam cross, resulting in dis\placement of boundaries. Cain is condemned to wander, an activity for which Abram was called (Gen 12) and Israel freed (Exod). A curse later signifies election and liberation: to wander is to be free (until God comes looking), to be free is to be displaced (exodus generation was an exile generation), and to be displaced is discomforting (unless suffering is normalized, “in other words,” good, cf. Williams). In 3:19 Yhwh determines that human destiny is ha’adamah, from which humans were formed, but in 4:14 Cain laments that Yhwh has banished him “from upon the face of ha’adamah.” Was Cain banished from the task of tilling ha’adamah? or from human destiny, death? If Cain’s lament is heeded, it will reverse the curse of 3:19 but endorse the condition of 3:23 by providing what was lacking in 2:15. Was Cain trying to be accountable for ha’adamah? Was he seeking to show Yhwh what it means to be obliged to the creation? how to act between thorns and thistles? how to tolerate ambiguities? how displacement is placement? how closure is disclosure? how freedom is obligation? how obligation is freedom? how response-ability is absent? When Yhwh marks Cain (4:16) we assume that he is protected. Or was Yhwh saving Cain for himself? We should not read-over textual absences.44 The mark (‘wt) dis\closes: in a linguistic event, if we insert the narrator’s w in Eve’s ’t we name Yhwh’s ‘wt. Inter-esse, double voices. The mark does not eliminate the initial curse, nor provide protection for Cain. Rather, it traces what Yhwh will do if (i.e., after) anyone kills Cain. The mark allows Yhwh to be late later. Cain departs from Yhwh’s presence, but he did not become a ceaseless wanderer. Cain transgresses the divine constraints by settling in a land. But he fulfills the curse by settling at Nod, a land named Wander. Cain is free, yet bound. Obligation. Freedom. Fulfillment and transgression overlap. Dis\closure. At the end of Gen 4, which is not the end of the story, Cain escapes the story-world to settle in w(a/o)nder; he is dis\placed, to lurk behind this reading where liberation and exile overlap. Our alter-reading blurs the story’s distinctions, out of our love for Cain. Confusionism (Bal). We retraced the disfiguring process back to the garden, we heard silences and read absences, selectively, and discovered that the difference between the order in the garden and the alienation outside of it is very slight. Separating inside from outside is an opening, an altering story, that invites alter-reading without closing a Nod-y text. At w-point two characters live in displacement, and at Yhwh’s ‘wt a character is displaced because he murdered his brother (displacement par excellence). The one who enters the story in 4:1 is pushed out in 4:16, and he leaves behind the presence of he who was “conceived and born” by the words of a knowee, a mother.


Hannah answered, she Said, “No, my lord! I am a woman sorely troubled. I have drunk no wine or strong drink, but I have been pouring out my life to the face of Yhwh. Do not take your maidservant for a worthless woman because I have thus far only been speaking out of my great anxiety and distress.” 1 Samuel 1:15-16
What about the repressed people at communities of struggle and cultures of silence, the Cains and Abels at the underside of history? What do we Say? Our alter-reading muddies the subjectification game: victim and victimizer exist not in isolation from one another. Our Abel is not fully innocent, and our Cain has a chance to interact, to mess, with the lord of the story-world. We do not deny Arturo Graf: “No matter what you say, you Cain have killed your brother” (in Quinones, 8). That factual statement though cannot silence the silences of this story. If our alter-reading encourages the Cains and Abels of modern history to confront the lords of history, of texts, and of faith, with the voice of blood, presence of silence, or only with taunting questions, then we have taken a step toward rewriting a repressing story (cf. West 1995:186). In other words, in alter-reading, may we rewrite the wrongs of our various stories even if it involves loving Cain more than God.45 To love Cain demands more loving, and faith, than is needed for the love of God, and it is not in the place of loving God. Nor in the place of loving Abel. Love to Cain is good love. It involves Hannah-like-courage to alter-read for lost figures, and for disfigures, in such alter places like the stories of non-Israelite “firstborns” not passed over at Egypt, of the exodus generation who died in “wandering,"46 of the “dwellers of the land” lurked (Num 13) and displaced in Joshua\Judges, of Ezra-Nehemiah’s “people of the land,” and even in the cries in/of the stories of the Cains and Abels of modern history. Our alter-reading therefore ends not at fulfillment but inter-esse: “At no time can one say: I have done all my duty. Except the hypocrite . . .” (Levinas 1985:105-6). We hope to have given the Cains and Abels of the Bible and of modern history, and the lords, the courage to rewrite their, and our, misrecognitions. We have rewritten an old story, in other words. In our version, according to our desires, voices do not always rule, figures drift and slip, silences and absences dis\figure, and texts interfere with other texts. We have woven an alter story. Through this alter-reading we discover that to constrain is to set free, to set free is to constrain: freedom and obligation, story and text, Saying and Said, voices and deeds, silences and absences, are so Nod-y: they settle at wander. Inter-esse, stuff happens, dis\placement, inter alia, dis\closure, obligation, freedom, différance, and so as an alternative reading we Say that alter is always already native. An-other task of alter-read remains, necessary for dis\closure: we let our reading go.47


**List of references: **Bal, Mieke. 1991. The Politics of Citation. Diacritics 21:25-45. Bassler, Jouette M. 1986. Cain and Abel in the Palestinian Targums: A Brief Note on an Old Controversy. Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 17:56-64. Beal, Timothy K. 1994. The System and the Speaking Subject in the Hebrew Bible: Reading for Divine Abjection. Biblical Interpretation 2:171-89. Bledstein, Adrien Janis. 1993. Was Eve Cursed? (or Did A Woman Write Genesis?). Bible Review 9 (#1):42-6. Brueggemann, Walter. 1982. Genesis. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Atlanta: John Knox. Busenitz, Irvin A. 1986. Woman's Desire for Man: Genesis 3:16 Reconsidered. Grace Theological Journal 7:203-12. Calloud, Jean. 1995. Figure, Knowledge and Truth: Absence and Fulfillment in the Scriptures. Semeia 69/70:61-81. Caputo, John D. 1993. Against Ethics. Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Fewell, Danna Nolan and David M. Gunn. 1993. Gender, Power and Promise: The Subject of the Bible's First Story. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Barnes & Noble Books. Fowl, Stephen. 1995. Texts Don't Have Ideologies. Biblical Interpretation 3:15-34. Gunn, David M. 1990. Reading Right. Reliable and Omniscient Narrator, Omniscient God, and Foolproof Composition in the Hebrew Bible. In The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of forty years in Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield. Eds. David Clines, Stephen Fowl & Stanley Porter. JSOTS 87. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press (pp. 53-64). Gunn, David M. and Danna Nolan Fewell. 1993. Narrative in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford Bible Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. 1983. The Power of the Poor in History. Maryknoll: Orbis. Hauser, Alan Jon. 1982. Genesis 2-3: The Theme of Intimacy and Alienation. In Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical Literature. Eds. David J. A. Clines, David M. Gunn and Alan J. Hauser. JSOTS 19. Sheffield: The University of Sheffield (pp. 20-36). Hendel, Ronald S. 1991. When God Acts Immorally. Is the Bible a Good Book? Bible Review 7 (#3):35-7, 46-9. Irigaray, Luce. 1980. When Our Lips Speak Together. Trans. Carolyn Burke. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6:69-79 _____. 1981. And the One Doesn't Stir without the Other. Trans. Hélène Vivienne Wenzel. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7:60-7. Jameson, Fredric. 1988. Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan. In The Ideologies of Theory and Essays 1971-1981. Volume 1: Situations of Theory. London: Routledge (pp. 75-115). Jobling, David. 1986. The Sense of Biblical Narrative II: Structural Analyses in the Hebrew Bible. JSOTS 39. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. _____. 1994. Hannah's Desire. (1993 CSBS Presidential Address). Bulletin of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies 53:19-32. Krasovec, Joze. 1994. Punishment and Mercy in the Primeval History (Gen 1-11). Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis 70:5-33. Kugel, James L. 1990. Cain and Abel in Fact and Fable: Genesis 4:1-16. In Hebrew Bible or Old Testament? Studying the Bible in Judaism and Christianity. Eds. Roger Brooks and John J. Collins. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press (pp. 167-90). Lacan, Jacques. 1985. God and the Jouissance of The Woman. A Love Letter. In Feminine Sexuality. Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. Eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Pantheon (pp. 137-61). Levinas, Emmanuel. 1975. Ideology and Idealism. In Modern Jewish Ethics. Theory and Practice. Ed. Marvin Fox. Columbus: Ohio State University Press (pp. 121-38). _____. 1979. To Love The Torah More Than God. Trans. Helen A. Stephenson and Richard I. Sugarman. Judaism 28:216-20. _____. 1985. Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. _____. 1987. Time and the Other. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. _____. 1989. The Levinas Reader. Ed. Seán Hand. Oxford: Blackwell. _____. 1990. Nine Talmudic Readings. Trans. Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. _____. 1991. Wholly Otherwise. Trans. Simon Critchley. In Re-Reading Levinas. Ed. Robert Bernasconi. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press (pp. 3-10). _____. 1994. Outside the Subject. Trans. Michael B. Smith. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Magonet, Jonathan. 1991. A Rabbi's Bible. London: SCM Press. Penchansky, David. 1992. Up for Grabs: A Tentative Proposal for Doing Ideological Criticism. Semeia 59:35-42. Phillips, Gary A. 1994. Drawing the Other. The Postmodern and Reading The Bible Imaginatively. In In Good Company. Essays in Honor of Robert Detweiler. Eds. David Jasper & Mark Ledbetter. Atlanta: Scholars Press (pp. 403-31). Philo Judaeus of Alexandria. De Cherubim. _____. De Confusione Linguarum. _____. De Posteritate Caini. _____. Quod Deterius Potiori insidiari solet. Quinones, Ricardo J. 1991. The Changes of Cain. Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rashkow, Ilona N. 1993. The Phallacy of Genesis: A Feminist-Psychoanalytic Approach. Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press. Riemann, Paul A. 1970. Am I My Brother's Keeper? Interpretation 24:482-91. Rosenblatt, Naomi H. and Joshua Horwitz. 1995. Wrestling with Angels. What the First Family of Genesis Teaches Us About Our Spiritual Identity, Sexuality, and Personal Relationships. New York: Delacorte Press. The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition. Vol III. Tractate Bava Metzia. Part III. 1990. New York: Random House. Van Wolde, Ellen. 1991. The Story of Cain and Abel: A Narrative Study. JSOT 52:25-41. Von Rad, Gerhard. 1972. Genesis: A Commentary. OTL. Philadelphia: Westminster. Waltke, Bruce K. 1986. Cain and his Offering. Westminster Theological Journal 48:363-72. West, Gerald. 1990. Reading `the Text' and Reading `Behind the Text'. The `Cain and Abel' Story in a Context of Liberation. In The Bible in Three Dimensions. Essays in celebration of forty years of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield. Eds. David J.A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl & Stanley E. Porter. JSOTS 87. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press (pp. 299-320). _____. 1992. Interesting and Interested Readings: Deconstruction, the Bible, and the South African context. Scriptura 42:35-49. _____. 1994. Difference and Dialogue: Reading the Joseph Story with Poor and Marginalized Communities in South Africa. Biblical Interpretation 2:152-170. _____. 1995. And the Dumb Do Speak: Articulating Incipient Readings of the Bible in Marginalized Communities. In The Bible in Ethics. The Second Sheffield Colloquium. Eds. John W. Rogerson, Margaret Davies & M. Daniel Carroll R. JSOTS 207. Sheffield: JSOT. Westermann, Claus. 1982. Genesis 1-11: A Commentary. Trans. John H. Scullion S.J. Minneapolis: Augsburg. Wiesel, Elie. 1976. Cain and Abel: The First Genocide. In Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends. New York: Random House. Williams, James G. 1991. The Bible, Violence, and the Sacred. Liberation from the Myth of Sanctioned Violence. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.
**Notes: **1A storyteller embraces fragmentation, and risks incoherence. While "our bureaucrats and our police" decide what successful retelling involves, we try inter-esse to loosen the grip of language and trap of dialecticism (cf. Levinas 1989:65f.). We stutter, inter alia, at the risk of facelessness. 2"Dis\placement" is a double voice: it represents thoughts repressed to the unconscious, the station of ideology, and lived diasporic experiences (abroad and/or local). It is always positional, with "\" representing placement "leaning against" dis: displacement is always placement. This "\" is a trace of the "leaning walls" of the Rabbinic study house that will not fall, out of respect for Rabbi Yehoshua, but which will not straighten, out of respect for Rabbi Eliezer (Baba Metzia 59A-B). This "\" is also a reminder that consciousness does not always rule in his house, and that in the reading process our desire for polysemy "leans against" the walls of determinacy. We thus extend God's blessing onto the house of reading: Be fertile and multiply, at the risk of subjugation! 3This alternative, for Levinas, is difficult to perceive because a subject's freedom is "[. . .] immediately limited by its responsibility. This is its great paradox: a free being is already no longer free, because it is responsible for itself" (1987:55). The freedom of obligation is difficile liberté! 4Gerald West warns against trying to "romanticise and idealise the contribution of the poor" by claiming to "listen to" them (1994:154). The separation of speaker from listener, of subject from object, is a condition of language and an illusion of the symbolic order (cf. Beal). To listen only to speakers is to idealise voices/dialogue, which is a privilege of only a few characters, a predilection which limits the freedom of the interpreter. I am drawn on the other hand to Irigaray's appeal: "I can't tell you where I am going. Forget me, Mother. Forget you in me, me in you. Let's just forget us. Life continues . . ." (1981:63). Me voici! I can only read other-wise. Inter-esse, I am of the poor, one of James Cook's Polynesian "common, low fellows" (in Williams, 258). 5Gunn (1990) and Jobling (1994) demonstrate that the biblical narrator (a figure in our fantasy) has desires, problematizing his assumed innocence and reliability. We too read with suspicions. 6A literary text functions like a work of art: it can only turn an "I" into a subject by subjecting "I" as an object. A text subjectifies and objectifies with the same black marks, it represses the event it narrates by leaning its representation against our imagination. It is due to the illusory nature of language that readers may assume to have captured the "event of the I" (cf. Jameson, Lacan). 7Mieke Bal addresses this issue with regard to cultural analysis: "[. . .] doesn't one repeat the gesture of appropriation and exploitation one seeks to criticize if one reprints as quotations the very material whose use by predecessors is subject to criticism?" (26). We must consequently read with care because, and I cannot help but romanticise the story-world, even the selection of a reading point of view is already to take sides: whether we gaze with Yhwh, lurk with sin, or kill with Cain. We read not to commemorate a disaster by re-cord-ing an event, or re-pressing the suppressed. We read with Levinas's hint: "It is through reading that references take on reality; through reading, in a way, we come to inhabit a place. The volume of a book can provide the espace vital!" (1989:192). 8More sympathetic representations exist in secular literature (see Quinones, 87-152). 9Ronald Hendel offers an alternative reading: In the unexplained punishment of Cain "Yahweh is indeed acting arbitrarily and capriciously" (48, my emphasis). The certainty of Hendel's reading debases its allure as an alternative reading: A different reading (Rabbinic, cf. Wiesel) in old skins. 10We follow Jonathan Magonet's lead: "As I will repeatedly suggest, the Bible is a subversive book and demands from its commentators no less self-criticism and self-awareness" (1, cf. 30-31). 11Interesting and interested are labels used for deconstruction (West 1992). The first signifies its game/play-face, the linguistic turn, and the second its constructive-face, the concern to empower the poor. Caputo makes a similar distinction, between heteromorphism and heteronomism, and he clarifies that "justice" is the goal of Derridean deconstruction (42f., 69f.). We hasten to add that Calloud proposed a Greimassian reading which has a deconstructive effect; a figure and trace case! 12Philo's analysis of types prefigures Calloud's study: For Philo, Adam signifies the mind and Eve the senses. They produced Cain, possession, who is a figure of self-love (Cher, 40f.). Philo identifies various traces of self-love in the Hebrew Bible (cf. Quod Det), one of which is the tower at Babel (Gen 11), a trace of the city Cain set out to build (Post, 49-59; Conf, 122f.). Compared to Abel, virtue, Cain is vice, and these two types may be traced as far as Augustine's De Civitate Dei. Ricardo Quinones jumps the biblical fence to trace representations of the Cain-Abel theme (cf. Calloud) in world literature. With many disguises, such as Abel the preferred of God (Ama-deus) and Cain the terrible and executioner, Quinones shows how the Cain-Abel story endures to address breaches in existence and fractures "at the heart of things" (3). (See also Gunn & Fewell, 12-33.) 13James G. Williams' (cultural, sacrificial) Girardian analysis of mimetic desires and rivalries behind biblical texts of violence and victimization pursues a similar interest. Williams views enemy brother stories, which begins with the Cain-Abel story, as "master texts" (figure) that anchor the mimetic movement toward the "innocent victim" (fulfillment, trace) of the New Testament. 14Other studies have also read in other directions. Jouette Bassler, for instance, examines how targumic texts reconstruct the words Cain is supposed to have said to Abel before they came to the field (Gen 4:8), the imagined Cain-Abel debate. Gerald West (1990) looks in yet another direction. He compares two readings from South Africa's context of struggle: Allan A. Boesak's "reading the text" (relating struggles in the text to South African conditions) and Itumeleng J. Mosala's "reading behind the text" (relating materialist-historical context behind the text, Gen 4's mode of production, to struggles in the text and in South Africa). These strategies of reading, both interested, led West to a deconstructive conclusion: "The challenge is to move away from the notion of biblical studies as the pursuit of disinterested truth to something more human and transformative, something which is shaped by a self-critical solidarity with the victims of history" (1990:318). 15Dis\closure depends on concealment and elusive absences, to dis\close is to wrestle with ambiguities. Luce Irigaray expresses what we picture as dis\closure: "Your body reveals yesterday in what it wants today. If you think: yesterday I was, tomorrow I will be, you are thinking: I have died a little. Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you could have been, might be. Never settle. Let's leave definitiveness to the undecided; we don't need it" (1980:76). 16My "we" includes communities of struggle and cultures of silence (cf. West 1992) which are often idealized, unconsciously, as the Cains and Abels of modernity's history. My "we" is not always rigid, and it includes the "others" of the first world's third positionality (see n.4). 17Reading is a hermeneutics of desire (Jobling 1994, Penchansky). We read for the desires of literary characters, of the narrator, and of ourselves. When these desires clash, we take sides, but we are not obliged to always side with the narrator, nor with the divine literary character (cf. Gunn & Fewell, 30-32). This reading for desire echoes a popular critique of structuralism and semiotics: the refusal to read behind the systems of signification and textual structures (cf. Williams, 6f.). To desire a text is to surrender to it, not in submission, but in commitment to wrestle with it in so far as we can (response-ability), like Jacob at Peniel, hoping to limp away with a reading. And because the act of surrendering involves resistance, at least the resistance to other desires, we are always readers in/of texts (cf. Rashkow, 26f.), inter-esse and inter alia. We must learn to bear with painful readings and be satisfied with desires, because to capture a text is to give up desiring it. 18We assume that the distinction between "text" and "interpretation" is not clear. A biblical text is always an interpretation, it is already ideological (pace Fowl), and it needs re-interpretation. It is like Jameson's concept of History (unconsciousness, ideology): "[. . .] history is not so much a text, as rather a text-to-be-(re-)constructed. Better still, it is an obligation to do so [. . .]" (107). 19The significance of the disfigured other person is taken into account by liberation readers. Gerald West presses this interest: "[. . .] biblical studies and other trained readers need `the other', particularly those `others' from the margins, in our readings of the Bible. Our readings may be critical, but they are not truly contextual without the presence of ordinary readers" (1995:191). 20To begin again suggests that earlier attempts may have failed, and that this is a slippery story. We do not imagine that we will capture it (cf. Deut 2:24, 31; Josh 3:19f.; Ezra 1:2f.; 2 Chr 36:23). 21The sexual connotation of "to know" indicates the interestedness of these labels, which force us to reexamine what it means that Yhwh "knew" Abraham (Gen 19:18) and Israel (Amos 3:2). 22The assumption that unwillingness to deal with differences is an 'ys-quality is drawn from 3:18, where the man rejects other animals as his helper because they were not "fitting" (suit, like, appropriate) for him. The woman on the other hand was a fitting helper because she was his type, she was 'ysh-like. Here is a case of imitatio hominis, another illusion of language. 23The distinction implied is displacement of Adam-as-husband versus Adam-as-father (above). A similar silence may be read when Samson's barren-mother (!) reports to her husband, "A man of God came to me . . . He said to me, `You are going to conceive and bear a son'" (Ju 13:6-7). 24That Eve may have been an observer to the events of 4:1-16 cannot be ruled out. We imagine Eve looking from a distant, maybe with a smirk on her face, at the events following 4:1 especially the absurdity of Yhwh dealing with a mere mortal, her son, who challenged his curses. We assume a woman who was not happy being pushed from the garden, even if leaving the garden was a sign of freedom (Magonet, 111-7). We picture Eve as a woman who dares to talk back at Yhwh, who too wills to shift the blame (so Fewell & Gunn). The chain of curses in Gen 3-4 are announced and renounced, prefiguring the Book of Esther where later edicts challenge but could not reverse earlier ones. Those are our fantasies, our sublime elusive absences. 25We imagine that Yhwh is involved with, responsive to and responsible for, both brothers. If a conflict develops between them, there will be a corresponding conflict in Yhwh's responsibilities: "Indeed, if there were only two of us in the world, I and one other, there would be no problem. The other would be completely my responsibility. But in the real world there are many others. When others enter, each of them external to myself, problems arise. Who is closest to me? Who is the Other? Perhaps something has already occurred between them" (Levinas 1975:137). 26We are writing-in a phonetic pun, r`h (to shepherd, 4:2) as echo of r'h (to see, to look, 2:19), the motivation for Yhwh's presentation of gifts to Adam: Yhwh wanted "to see" what names the man would call the creatures which he intended to be his helper. 27How do we account for the double Genesis account of creation? To appeal to sources (P and J), and their historical-social locations, is to overlook the ideological significance of textual double voices. This double voice is beyond this essay, but a silence that we can no longer silence! Another silence is Moses' journey, depending on which "rupture" (Arnon or Jordan) signifies the "finish." 28Those of us who have experienced the "loss" of a parent, or who may be a single parent due to the loss of a partner, the Levinasian group of widow, orphan, and stranger (see Exod 22:20-21; compare Fewell & Gunn, 102), find the parent's absence troubling. We demand response-ability. 29Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yohai presents another dilemma: "Two athletes fight to entertain the king. At the outcome of the contest will the victor be indicted for murder?" (in Wiesel, 54). 30Magonet reads Cain's offering within the context of a "test" given by Yhwh, which began in the garden (117-120). The result of the test is liberation: "I can think of no more telling proof of the Rabbinic view that far from being a `fall from grace', the eating of the fruit and the subsequent expulsion from Eden, was ultimately a great liberation for it gave the `children' in Eden the chance to grow up. God cut the strings of the puppets and let them walk erect upon the earth" (121-2). Our alter-reading, on the other hand, catches Yhwh with his hands on the strings: the difference between seeking to control and out of control is so slim. 31The sudden acceleration of the momentum portrays Yhwh as one who cannot handle the "painful truth." A similar effect may be read in the garden episode when Yhwh suddenly appears to pass judgment on Eve. We imagine Yhwh as a character who is not too secured in his interactions with other characters, destabilizing the story's divine-human class hegemony. 32At issue is the difference between speech and action, which will resurface in the silenced speech of 4:8. 33If Cain's success is due to his ability to know good-w-bad then the serpent did not deceive the woman, problematizing the motivation for the curse of the serpent (3:14-15). In this instance, also, we encounter a literary character who is troubled with the possibility of being equaled (cf. 3:22) and who prefers to uphold the divine-human class divide. A double voice lurks behind the text. 34Yhwh's sudden appearance in 4:4b is repeated in 4:9, and in both instances Cain is the target of the judgment. In both instances, Yhwh also fits the description of one "lurking at the door" and whose "desire" is towards Cain. Yhwh lies low, waiting to ambush Cain. Otherwise-than-being? 35Note the disruption of the pattern, with Yhwh taking the place of Abel in the final rotation: 4:1 Birth: Cain first then Abel 4:2 Task: Abel is introduced first then Cain 4:3-4a Offering: Cain offers first then Abel 4:4b-5a Gaze: On Abel but not on Cain 4:5 Reaction to gaze: Cain is distressed, and Yhwh interrupts in 4:6. 36What Yhwh considers good is a value judgment. It is therefore necessary to distinguish good in being from good in perception. When God declares that the creation was "very good" (1:31), it did not necessarily mean that it was "very good in being." Rather, for God, it was "very good in perception," and we should not rule out the possibility that God too may misrecognize: after 1:31 for instance (crossing sources) we learn that the creation was not good in being as God perceived because "it was not good for man to be alone." This, though, does not mean that the creation was evil. What good means to Yhwh is obscure, and we wonder if in 4:7-8 he did not misjudge a non-good in being for a good, or a good in being for a non-good (even evil, or sin). 37The lexical similarities between 4:7 and 3:16 has led many readers to associate sin with the woman, projecting 4:17 onto 3:16, and they claim that the husband shall rule over the woman just as sin rules Cain (cf. Bledstein). These readers forget that sin, the one who desires in 4:7, is the one who rules. As such the woman, the one who desires in 3:16, should rule in order for their projection to stick (cf. Busenitz, 206f.). These readers therefore undermine their own desires. 38This alter-reading differs from van Wolde's identification of sin with rbts ("to lurk," "to lie in wait"): "at the door is sin, the sin of lying in wait. rbts specifies the contents of cht't: we are not concerned with a sinful deed in general, but with the specific, well-defined sin of `prowling' or `lying in ambush for'" (31). For van Wolde, sin is an internal attitude that one may control. 4:7 on the other hand indicates that cht't is distinctive from rbts and tshwqh. 39Recall that no code against murder was given prior to 4:8. How then was Cain to know that murder was wrong? So asks Elaine Robinson, testifying to the ambiguity of God's command. His command to subjugate is a double voice event: "The desire to subjugate is an ethically ambiguous one, for it may mean the desire to subjugate good (where subjugation is evil) or to subjugate evil (where subjugation is good)" (Fewell & Gunn, 25). 40Williams claims that this replacement is part of P's "vision of a nonviolent society" (29). But by showing that nonviolence is confirmed by exclusion, by textual re-pression, Williams and P testify to the ideological nature of the text. Williams' support of P indicates a blind spot: defining categories according to a notion of violence (Girard) suggests orientation to force. In communities of struggle, on the other hand, where power is not always in the form of force, being excluded is already violent, and resistance is not always with brute force. Silence is also a form of resistance! 41Yhwh's question echoes his earlier question in the garden, "Where are you?" Like a reader, Yhwh is curious to know what is not obvious. On the other hand, like Yhwh, we raise questions in order to trap the text. 42Instead of looking at Abel Cain "lies in ambush" for him as his enemy; and for van Wolde, "looking" is "the supreme form of expression for a good relationship" (32). Cain is the brother who is not a brother. Van Wolde's reading seems coerced by "Yhwh's gaze," making "looking" a good act. She overlooks (!) the outcome of Yhwh's "looking," Abel's murder, and that Cain was the only one who spoke with Abel. To "look at" implies distance and objectification, but to "speak with" presupposes involvement. Whether one form of expression is better than the other is a matter of judgment; recall that speech is also means for cursing, and that sight is sometimes blind-ing. 43Westermann perceives in 4:10 an element that dramatizes this story: "Cain wanted to be done with Abel. But he is not to be done with; the life that has been stilled cried out" to God qua blood avenger, who hears and confronts the killer (305). This portrayal of Yhwh as avenger is, however, problematic. First, there is no indication that Cain's curse was for the purpose of avenging Abel's blood. How is someone avenged in the curse of another? Abel, after all, remains dead. Second, the modification of Cain's curse in 4:15 begs the question whether the avenging of Abel's blood was also modified. Can Yhwh modify the curse without modifying the deliverance? Dis\closure. 44This proposal is paradoxical because it exposes us (!) to our bureaucrats and police, the ones who write up over-reading tickets. Inter alia, we dis\close their silences by naming our selectivism. 45We echo Levinas's love of Torah: "Man will love Him in spite of all that God may attempt in order to discourage man's love. [. . .] It is necessary that God unveil His face; it is necessary that justice and power be rejoined. There must be just institutions on this earth. But only the man who has recognized God obscured can demand this unveiling" (1979:219-20, cf. 1990:16). 46The clear distinction between "murderer" and "manslayer" in Nu 35:16-28, and the cities of refuge designated in Deut 4:41-3 for manslayers, suggest that Cain would have a more sympathetic reading by the wilderness wanderers. 47In this re-vision of this paper I gleaned the help of many people. My adviser Danna N. Fewell, who is too often present to be quoted, shares the responsibility for making this essay an event in re\reading! Gary Phillips's encouraging "go to it!!" turned my freedom into obligation, and Elaine Robinson and Joerg Rieger offered critical readings. I trust I have not met all of "our" expectations because I am only saddling at Nod.     © Copyright 1997, Jione Havea
j.havea