Broken, bereft, Cain staggers away from his brother’s corpse. Blood has been spilled. Abel is dead, and Cain has been told to go. In Genesis, God reprimands Cain, “What have you done? Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:10–12).
Cain complains that the penalty is too harsh. “My punishment is greater that I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me” (Genesis 4:13–14). Then the Lord said to him, “Not so!” And he put “a mark” on Cain “so that no one who came upon him would kill him” (Genesis 4:15).
It is a dark, disturbing and difficult tale of murder and exile. And Henri Vidal’s 1896 sculpture of Cain captures the transitional moment in the account, when Cain first recognizes that he has become both a murderer and exile. In 19th-century poetry and art, Cain came to be seen as a lost soul, troubled and wicked, but still to be pitied. In Samuel Coleridge’s “The Wanderings of Cain,” he is buffeted by God: “The Mighty One that persecuteth me is on this side and on that; he pursueth my soul like the wind, like the sand-blast he passeth through me; he is around me even as the air! O that I might be utterly no more!”
Broken, bereft, Cain staggers away from his brother’s corpse. Blood has been spilled. Abel is dead, and Cain has been told to go. In Genesis, God reprimands Cain, “What have you done? Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” (Genesis 4:10–12). Cain complains that the penalty is too […]
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