In the colonial period since 1492, the colonial masters of Europe sent perpetrators within the colonised territories to other colonies where they became slaves – forced migration and diaspora. These slaves started a new life and became, like Cain’s children, the ancestors of a few notable families (e.g. in South Africa) – a typical postcolonial situation of creating hybrid identities where East met West in Africa to procreate. The question this article asks is the following: how can one link migration and diaspora to Cain’s situation? Cain’s punishment was twofold: the earth would no longer yield to him any fruit, and he would become a fugitive and a wanderer (Gn 4:12). It is as if the first logically led to the second in the Hebrew text. Cain’s vulnerability had a positive effect, so that later on in the story he seemed to have settled and procreated to the extent that his children became founders of arts, science and technology. The LXX partly solves this contradiction by making Cain physically handicapped with trembling and groaning. Significantly, in both traditions he is said to leave the presence of the deity to live elsewhere where he would not be confronted with either the deity or his parents. In both instances, a migration is clearly taking place with the implication that once being branded a perpetrator one can no longer reside within the community or society in whose midst the transgression took place. The perpetrator is removed from the victims and the latter need no longer confront him or her. This article will subsequently consider the following: the value of migration in the biblical text, the significance of Cain moving away from his clan and deity, and the effect of settling elsewhere.
What started as a small refreshment colony for Dutch ships during the expanding of commercial sea routes in the 15th century soon turned out to become an integral part of a larger migration process that saw groups of people transplanted from elsewhere to the southern tip of the African continent. Initially, some came as part of the European workforce of the Verenigde Oost-Indiesche Companie (VOIC), enslaving the few they could find inhabiting the area around them. However, migration was not always voluntary – the colonial masters of capital sent perpetrators within the colonised periphery to other colonies for enslavement. They created a forced migration, which, in turn, produced a diaspora. These slaves started a new life in their newly adopted countries, and became like Cain’s children in Genesis 4:20–22, the ancestors of a few notable families (in South Africa, for example, most Afrikaner families have a slave woman as their ancestral mother). In a typical colonial situation, hybrid identities were created: East met West in Africa to procreate. But then the sad irony: some of these slave mothers were indigenous to Southern Africa, and the epistemology of the day saw them as the descendants of Cain, wild people, barbarians, uncivilised, as the tradition of Cain interpretation showed. Both Eben Scheffler and I come from a migratory background. As far as I know, Eben’s migrational history is of a voluntary missiological nature. Mine is further back in history and part of forced migration with my ancestral mother, Catharine of Paliacatta/Pulicat (1631–1683), sent to the Cape as prisoner after her death sentence was commuted in Batavia. In the Cape, she became the washerwoman of successive commanders of the VOIC. She was impregnated by a soldier from Heidelberg, Germany, Hans Christoffel Schneider, who was sent to Robben Island for leaving his guarding post in the process and then banished from the Cape. The boy born from this liaison, Christoffel Snijman, later married a Huguenot woman, Marguerite de Savoie, a religious refugee from Europe (see Upham
The question this article asks is how to link migration/diaspora/exile with Cain. Cain’s punishment was twofold: the earth no longer yielded to him any fruit and forced him to become a fugitive and a wanderer (Gn 4:12). It is as if the first – the soil closing its womb to Cain logically led to the second in the Hebrew text – Cain becoming a wanderer in search of a livelihood and food. In interpretative history, Cain’s mark in verse 15 attached to him a stigma of shame, ‘a punitive symbol that permits a community to humiliate, discriminate, and harm outcast criminals’ (Von Kellenbach
The story of migration and exile starts with Adam and Eve when they are banished from the Garden of Eden and barred from returning with two angels guarding the eastern entrance to garden. Cain, in turn, is forced to migrate after he killed Abel. He receives a mark protecting him and he finds a wife, procreates and builds a city. He moved to the land of Nod, portrayed also as some area east of Eden. It is as if the first human beings and their immediate progeny slowly migrated further east (Léonard-Roques
There are a few similarities with the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 and Cain and Abel in Genesis 4. Firstly, Adam and Eve are driven out of the Garden of Eden. Their migration was for all practical purposes enforced, especially with angels with flaming swords guarding in the east. With Cain, it seems as if he migrates out of his own will. But his punishment, that he would become a wanderer and fugitive, makes it logical that he had to move on to somewhere. If migration is included in the punishment, it is also enforced. In both confrontations, God refers to desire. In Genesis 3:16 it is the woman’s desire aimed at her husband, and in Genesis 4:7 it is the desire of the animal lurking at the door that is aimed at Cain. Wénin (
In verse 12b, Cain is condemned to be a fugitive and a wanderer (נָ֥ע וָנָ֖ד תִּֽהְיֶ֥ה בָאָֽרֶץ), a status he repeats himself in verse 14. Verse 16 alludes to the play of words נָ֥ע וָנָ֖ד when it states that Cain went away from the presence of the deity, settling in the land of
The wordplay of the Masoretic text (MT) version disappears completely in the Septuagint (LXX) where (verse 12) Cain is condemned to be groaning and trembling on earth (στένων καὶ τρέμων ἔσῃ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς). It similarly repeats the words in verse 14, but in verse 16 the land of Nod becomes a geographical place. The LXX reads καὶ ᾤκησεν ἐν γῇ Ναιδ κατέναντι Εδεµ, that is, Cain went away from the deity to live in the land of Naid over against Eden (for a discussion on the land of Nod in the Hebrew text, see below).
Cain is cursed with the earth not opening up to him. For him, as a farmer, it is a death sentence because his possibilities to make a living are closed down. He is cut off not only from the soil, but also from the community. Thus, the moment he is declared a fugitive and a wanderer, one with no community and without any residence, he was obliged to move away. Dershowitz (
The words נָ֥ע וָנָ֖ד (a combination of two participles, Byron
In verse 16 Cain is said to have gone to live
Westermann (
If anyone kills his own father or brother, he is not to be killed but is to be excluded from the tribal circle and no strange tribe, or even enemy tribe, is to receive him. By his crime he has lost the right to be a member of the human community. (p. 315)
A murder poisons the sources of life (Westermann
Frazer (
In the LXX, Cain’s curse is transformed. Although the Masoretic text turns Cain into a fugitive and wanderer, the LXX makes the curse physical and personal: Cain receives a vocal groaning and a bodily tremor.
The land of Nod provided many readers or interpreters since late Roman Antiquity (on the basis of the two basic renditions found in the Vulgate and Septuagint) with a gap that can be filled in so as to render Cain’s bad name in proportion to his crime. In the story, Nod sounds like a geographical location, but more than that the reader does not know. In line with the LXX translation, Clement of Alexandria sees Nod as disturbance and Pseudo-Philo sees it as the land of trembling. The commentary on Genesis by Ephrem supports the LXX and explains it as a land in which Cain wandered in fear and trembling. To Byron (
Argues Boucher (
Biblical exegetes obtained the basic material for their extrapolations from the Septuagint and the Vulgate, the two major renditions of the story. Since both documents presented slightly different pictures of the Biblical episode, variations were amalgamated, giving writers a larger pool of basic facts for their extrapolations. At times, as we will see, exegetes incorporated extra-Biblical facts insuring that the myth would extend far beyond the word of the Scripture. (p. 36)
The Judeo-Christian tradition developed Cain into a wild animal-like creature with a conflation of the physical and the moral. Hayden White (
The wilderness is the chaos lying at the heart of darkness, a void into which the soul is sent in its degradation, a barren place from which few if any return. (p. 160)
Thus, wilderness appears in the heart of a human being, manifesting as insanity, sin or evil, in short, reflecting a falling away from God. The archetypes of wildness are rebels against God, for example Cain, Ham and Ishmael. In Hebrew thought, they are men who have fallen even below the condition of animality itself and can be killed with impunity. Thus, when a human being lost God’s blessing and fell into a condition of accursedness, his or her spiritual condition manifested in terms of wildness (cf. Snyman
Subsequently, the land of Nod became a place of exile, compared with a desert, an isolated and dark wasteland (cf. Boucher
If the land were as good as the harbors, it would be a blessing, but it should not be called the New Land, but horrifying and rugged stones and rocks; for along the entire north shore I did not see a cart-load of soil and I landed in many places. Except for Blanc Sablon there is nothing but moss and short, stinted shrub. In short I deem that more likely this is the land that God gave to Cain. (p. 35)
Cartier’s audience were sufficiently acquainted with the myth of Cain and the imagery with regard to Nod and Cain himself, that they would have grasped his description immediately, even when he commented on the indigenous inhabitants as scary and wild. His interest was not ethnographic, but his utilisation of a biblical analogy offers a ‘conceptual bridge’, which ultimately legitimises his depiction of the indigenous inhabitants. As wild men, they are Cain’s progeny. It was then easy to connect the inhabitants seen in this piece of land to the progeny of Cain, as the latter were understood to have been associated with the notion of ‘wild men’. In other words, Cain as a fugitive and vagabond is a law unto himself and an adversary to civilisation. His character found fertile ground as a prototype of many wandering characters in Western fiction and films.
Robert Doak (
The wanderer is an outlaw, but essentially a good man who suffered at the hands of society whose control he challenged. Says Doak (
As sympathetic Cain figures, they reveal that if, in opposing this power, the Western hero must accept ostracization, and even exile, as a small price to pay for maintaining independence and a connection with the sustaining wilderness. (p. 25)
The Cain-like figure may kill someone, but the benefit accrued from the murder outshines the malevolence associated with it. Such a killer is usually banned and not executed (Doak
Cain’s vulnerability in the Romantic interpretation has a positive effect, and can be related to the second part of his story in which he seemed to have settled and procreated to the extent that his children became founders of arts, science and technology. In these films, sedentary life is contrasted with nomadic life, alluding to the figure of Cain as exemplar of nomadic life. In some, sedentary life is seen as the ideal with its association with order and progress, while the errant wild brutish inhuman brother is killed (Doak
In both a migration is clearly taking place. With Cain the implication is that once being branded a perpetrator (murderer) one can no longer reside within the community or society in whose midst the transgression took place. The perpetrator is removed from the victims and the latter need no longer confront him or her. The migration itself seems to have become a spiritual affair. The land has been turned into a wasteland with Cain, a farmer with a sedentary lifestyle, unable to sustain himself. The fertility of the soil is withheld from Cain and he is forced to become a nomad like Abel once was. Later in the story he returns to a sedentary life by building a city. Nevertheless, the city is not the ideal, and a later one, Babel, is destroyed: ‘People who build cities are people who are putting down roots, settling and making claim to more than the wanderer’s existence’, argues Ochs (
In terms of migration theory, in an article on displacement, Peter Admirand (
I understand migration as the crossing of spatial boundaries whereby an individual or a group intends to change his, her or their residence (Kok
Over against a rather positive view on migration,
In thinking about migration, the effects of the movement of people need to be taken into consideration too (Dube
Migration involves diaspora, and with the latter, exile. Diaspora deals with what Segovia (
Migration cannot be imagined in the biblical text without thinking about exile or diaspora and displacement of the former inhabitants: many Jews throughout the centuries lived voluntarily outside of what they perceive as their land; in other instances they had no choice and had to reside in other countries because of enforced exile (Davies
While science testifies to our origins in Africa, the mythical creation stories of Genesis (and with the differences, the Qur’an) outline why human beings were expelled from Eden. This pattern of (forced) migration continues until the next generation with Cain coerced to wander the earth. In fact, from Abraham to Jesus to Mohammed, such a pattern of movement, wandering, exile is a dominant trope. (p. 674)
For this reason, Admirand (
The image Israel had of themselves in the biblical texts is one of migration: the history of the patriarchs is one of migration in search of land, settling for a while in Egypt where enslavement forced them to move again, wandering in a desert before launching a conquest into someone else’s land, displacing them. After a while, they could not retain the land and were displaced by another power, Babylon. They moved into Babylon and Egypt and North Africa, not everyone returning under Cyrus’ decree. Their sojourn in Babylonia enabled them to produce the Babylonian Talmud. Josephus wrote (Ant 14.7.2):
Now these Jews are already gotten into all cities; and it is hard to find a place in the habitable earth that has not admitted this tribe of men [
The diaspora in some instances even refused to help the Jews in Jerusalem in the war against Rome. Exile was not an unmitigated evil (Davies
Exile is closely linked to this image (Pohl
However, migration and exile meant in quite a few instances the displacement of others. For example, in Genesis 12:1 Abram receives the call from Yhwh to move with his family and brother Lot from Haran (in Turkey) to a place the deity will designate for him. Previously, in Genesis 11:31, it is said that Abram moved with his father from Ur in Mesopotamia to Haran. In Haran, it appears Abram acquired a considerable amount of wealth (livestock, slaves and material goods). Verse 5 states he took all his possessions and he arrived in Canaan via Shechem and Bethel, before he moved to Egypt because of a famine in Canaan. Abram succeeded in being deported from Egypt and he then moved into the Negev and back to Bethel where he once set up camp. It does not seem as if he and his entourage assimilated to the communities around them, presumably because they were nomadic. The story states explicitly that the Canaanites as well as the Perrizites inhabited the land. Nonetheless, when Abram and Lot came in conflict with one another, the two of them decided to separate, each taking his own direction, with Abram
Abraham’s migration story illustrates the fragility of the human being in their reliance upon others for survival. Abram looked for pasture and food. Whether that was the reason for the initial migration, I do not know, but during the course of the narrative, it is clear that the lack of food and pasture pushed him into the direction of Egypt from where he is eventually deported. This fragility constitutes a ‘constant state of anxiety, uncertainty and compromise’ (Admirand
As Israel is depicted just before starting their conquest of Canaan receiving the last instructions from Moses in Deuteronomy, one of their first duties, after having entered the land, settled and tilled the soil, would be to take the first fruits to the sanctuary and declare the following (Dt 26:5–10 [New Revised Standard Bible]; Machiela
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The context of Deuteronomy 26 is that of being in the Promised Land and the occasion of the offering of the very first fruits. In other words, wandering is no longer an issue and the presence of first fruits imply that famine is no longer endangering the life of the covenant community. The history of the patriarchs was one of starvation with Abram going to Egypt when he experienced starvation in Canaan and Jacob sending his sons to collect food as they similarly experienced starvation at some stage (Janzen
And Cain? Cain was forced to leave his tribal setting. His perpetration of murder cut through various ties making it impossible for him to till the soil or raise a family. Life to him was only possible outside of the closely knit fraternity woven around Adam and Eve and their other children. His journey was dangerous; he could not reckon on security and safety. His only protection a vague mark given to him by the deity. He enters the land of Nod without any claims. His entering of the land stands in contrast to Abraham’s entering and later the conquest where the indigenous inhabitants were driven out. Cain, the perpetrator, perpetrates no more in the land of Nod. The progeny of Seth, born with the blood of Abel crying from the soil, ironically, enters a Promised Land with a genocide. Cain, in the land of Nod, eventually goes from strength to strength: his progeny builds a city and became the founders of arts, culture and technology. Did the mark end with Cain’s death?
A wandering European man and a Bengali woman were my ancestors who went down to South Africa, the one for work, the other for punishment, where their progeny as freed slaves started to become part of the colonial machine displacing indigenous inhabitants depicted as monstrous and wild, marked just like Cain. In the end, they too partake in the characteristics of Cain in acting in a fratricidal way.
This is the contradiction I see in Cain: in contrast to the role the story of Cain played with the advent of modernity where Cain and his progeny were associated with wildness and barbarity, monstrousness with bestial qualities threatening the individual of modernity, my reference to Cain is an exercise to come to terms with the apartheid in South Africa, embracing accountability and commemoration, while being transparent about the processes I am obliged to engage with.
In other words, I engage with Cain in terms of the perpetrator dealing with his legacy of fratricide (in my case, racism) that proceeds through many stages and many formats. In the past, the figure of Cain was used to create certain hierarchies of power between colonial powers and the colonised, the wild people. But recently, with the decolonial turn asserting itself more and more, the exoticness and grandiosity of early associations between Cain and the colonised got exposed for what it is: racism. In Germany, Cain is utilised to engage the legacy of the Holocaust within the third generation of Germans.
The link between Cain and migration is perhaps less based on the notion of wandering and more on the interpretation of the effect of wandering with a mark. A vagabond with a mark constituted to modernity a wild and barbaric creature, or at least a being unsuitable for what has been perceived as civilisation. The marking of others has now returned to bite the marker and to be marked as racist. For the moment, the question remains whether it is possible to get rid of the mark of Cain.
The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.
Byron
Manson (
Irvin (
The essay by Grosfoguel et al. (