Postcard #12, The Keeper, The Tiller, The Question
A story.
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This is the second part of a short series within the weekly release of Postcards of the Night Sky Sent to Shepherds. If you have not read the first part, “The Birth of Cain,” I encourage you to click here and read that first. If you have not read the second part, “The Birth of Abel,” I encourage you to click here and read that first.
Click here to visit the main, TABLE OF CONTENTS page for this book, Postcards of the Night Sky sent to Shepherds.
The Keeper, The Tiller, The Question
Like the sound of spring mountain water, the brothers occupations speak of their creation stories.
Abel is described as the keeper of sheep. The word keeper is ro’eh and means shepherd and is derived from the root rah and is thereby connected with companionship. It could be written that Abel was with the sheep as it could be said that I am with this spider that last night spun its web in the corner of my white, writing shed’s eastern window. We together occupy the space in which we are and we do so willingly and we do so quietly.
In the first book of Samuel, ro’eh describes a seer, a prophet who understands what others cannot see and so it also could be said that Abel is a shepherd who accepts the day as the eastward dawn accepts the sun and as this spider accepts my presence—what a wonderful web she has spun. Abel’s life is a vapor found in the subtle convergence of passing moments going about their day. Abel wanders as the sun wanders.
Cain is described as a tiller of the ground. Belonging to a root that means to work, a thing unearthed when force tethers control to its own will, Cain becomes a noun meaning slave to or worshiper of. He is they who possess through force; they whose work becomes their master; and they who, as Henry David Thoreau wrote about in Walden, “labor under a mistake” and are “soon ploughed into the soil for compost.” Cain’s dominion requires sophistication. It requires an unremitting dedication to tomorrow through a maximized today. In some true sense, his dominion demands a worshiping of the soil and the corresponding slavery to that which the soil produces—cultivates, really. Cain wonders as the dawn wonders.
Beliefs long held become mythology. Mythology well had in community become tradition. Traditions long employed become legacy or heritage. Heritage long had become beliefs once more. The life of this world lives in this cyclic and mortuary mask and its cultural enigmas are best understood in the muddied middle ground between belief and that which is believable.
The beginning breath and beliefs of our world speak of the contest between he who possesses and he who cannot be possessed.
Our story continues when Cain makes an offering to Creator and Abel follows. It is important to consider that Cain goes first—it was his idea to offer the life of his work, of his hands, as a sacrifice. Cain’s work wonders.
For Abel, it seems, wandering requires following which, it also seems, requires a vision hitched to singularity. That is, with one vision, shepherds follow sheep and prophets follow truth, wherever they may go and whatever they may be.
But Creator admonishes Abel’s sacrifice and rebukes Cain’s. Creator accepts Abel’s harvest of his first born lamb and rebukes Cain’s yield of his fruits. Why? What is the difference between these two sacrifices? That is the wrong question, I think. The Creator created and they did so willingly and they did so, perhaps, in patterns and reciprocity—meaning, equally and with equal regard to equality—and so is there really a difference between a lamb and a morsel of fruit in the eyes of their Creator?
Perhaps, the real question has nothing to do about the difference between tomatoes and lambs, fruits and meats. Perhaps, we have missed something entirely more real, something entirely more true. What if this story has nothing (or little) to do with sacrifices and everything to do with the position of the sacrifice?
The most far-reaching development of the last 100,000 years is not humankind’s proclivity towards tools or the advent of agriculture or the internet or, really, even the domestication of fire. Today, artificial intelligence pierces into our psyche to see what they can learn. But this is also not important. These evolutions in our creative capacity and creativity in general are not a set of semantic propositions that govern our propulsion through our time, like westerly winds over water or strong words in constitutions and lawbooks. Neither do they guarantee our species’ dominance or safety amongst the torrents of actual life. Rather, the most far-reaching development is, simply, the reach of humankind—the human ascendency into the heavens, as gods.
The ancients focused on Cain’s fruits being “of the soil” and Abel’s harvest being “of his flock.”
Abel experiences the world as it is, for keepers of sheep follow and protect and they do nothing else. Cain changes the world to experience what could be, for what emerges from the soil is both directable and controllable. Abel accepts what is; Cain demands what could be. And while we do not know the primary reason Creator rebukes Cain and admonishes Abel, although much has been written with great authority in the Mishnah and the Midrash, we foreigners can merely read Creator’s words and we can merely stumble into a loose understanding of them, like drunks over curbs.
The text reads:
Why are you incensed,
and why is your face fallen?
For whether you offer well,
or whether you do not,
At the tent flap sin crouches
and for you it is longing
but you will rule over it.1
This is something most strange. Creator responds by dismissing the particulars of Cain’s sacrifice and talks instead of tent flaps and sin lurking beyond their wafting and woven goat-hair walls. Creator talks about ruling over sin as Cain rules over the soil. Creator talks about fallen faces and crouching and longing and ruling.
Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews, a modern retelling of aggadah from hundreds of biblical legends in the Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash wrote that Cain “ate his meal first,” and then, his appetite satisfied, “offered unto God what was left over, a few grains of flax seed.”
The question the ancients are calling to our attention is, I think, at least in part, not about the offering or what it contains but the offeror’s position in the story. Cain’s paradigm is the harvest. His name demands servitude to possession, a worshiping of the soil’s production for his own sake. He transmutes earth’s beauty from a wonderful and living cycle in which humanity is but one small aspect into a mixed labor in which we must rise up and become gods ourselves—creators and audacious characters in the story of the world.
But it is not our world like the sun is not our sun or that tree is really just our exhaled breath being reborn into something warm. Cain plants seeds in rows in order to grow nourishing fruits and their medicinal roots and he does these things in order to harvest their abundance. His movements are methodical steps that eternally progress in one direction: a yield and a meal.
Why does sin crouch at our door? Why does Creator talk about ruling over it? First, we must put down our dinner plates.
Many have argued that this story is a story of pastoralists and agriculturalists. It is about the coming demise of agricultural peoples.
From Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael to John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, this is a story of humanity choosing the wrong path. Just look at the history and ensuing agricultural developments of the last 10,000 years, some argue. The rise of agriculture, to some large degree, is the rise of desertification, of famine, of erosion, and of our warming earth. But these folks speak at conferences energized by coal, they live in houses erected by falling forests, and they consume bubbly, summer drinks in aluminum cans that require five hundred years to decompose. More interesting to me is the energy required to produce their refreshing, sparkling sips: one aluminum pop-top can requires 1,643 calories of energy to produce and delivers less than 1 calorie of energy to its consumer.2 Agriculture is the problem, some write.
But agriculture has also allowed mankind to progress from the State of Nature into a safe, democratic, pious, and aluminum contained and bubbly-drink infused State of Civil Society, to loosely paraphrase our species’ enlightenment thinkers. Agriculture is the progressive step that allowed civilization, language, and leisure to emerge and become etched in the political, social, and religious fabric of our lives. Agriculture is the solution, others write.
But is this true? Is either true? Is agriculture good or bad? Did agriculture arise from a lesser state of human creativity and occupancy?
Both Quinn’s and Steinbeck’s positions demand a linear sense of history. That is, before agriculture we had something else, let’s call it pastoralism. Before pastoralism, agriculture was nowhere to be found, never to be found. But, like ocean waves, the rise of agriculture, I think, is like the rise of anything else. It pulls in slowly and then, out of nowhere, it crashes instantaneously, that is inevitably, and then it recedes again. Like ocean waves, agriculture is nothing but a flash of energy that tessellates within the gapless and perfectly whole rhythms of stardust to souls to stardust once more. Our history is the trees and the rivers and the lost seeds of our ancestors that are also like ocean waves, themselves nothing but momentary and cyclic bursts of the moon’s not-so-distant energy, waiting to be reborn.
Can energy be linear? We understand energy as waves on some spectrum but even waves recede after their great crash, only to return once more. Life is cyclic and its cyclic and energetic pulse pulls and crashes and recedes only to pull once more. What if agriculture is a denizen of this dance and cycles in and out, like ocean waves, of our human world?
The dominant narrative of the Enlightenment and its ensuring eras of colonization, manifest destiny, and complete ecological ascendency through force that strangely forms the argument that this story is a story of pastoralism’s transformation into the decadent age of agriculture, is humanity’s linear story of progress. 10,000 years ago, homo sapiens rose up in god’s image and conquered earth’s processes to safeguard and secure the civilized processes of their own kind, they argue.
But, like ocean waves, life can never be linear and Creator speaks, “whether you offer well, or whether you do not,” sin lurks beyond the door. The offering, as our story actually goes, seemingly does not matter, as the debate between pastoralism and agriculturalism does not matter. It is reductionistic and like modern science it forces the sinuous curves of the mother tree into the straight lines of the paternal ruler—measuring and marking and felling.
And so, what if this was not a story of agriculture or pastoralism but a story about the heart of the harvest? Long has life cycled through its operational methodologies, for, “that which was is that which will be,” writes Qohelet in Ecclesiastes. But even Qohelet, the son of David and king in Jerusalem, begins his earthly work with the words, havel havalim, or, “merest breath, all is breath.”3 Yes, Abel, or havel, is here with us again, for “that which was is that which will be.” Abel may be dead but he is not gone.
Choice and the cycles of our nature can never be linear. What if we treated earth as creative and playful, as a lucid land of lurid love that sometimes looks like pain? What if the epic of our mythology was not a story of some idyllic fall but how our species became entrapped by the sin lurking at our door, just beyond our dinner plates?
I believe our story is a story of episodically contested paradigms, not practices. Cain plants and Abel walks. Cain lives in earth’s womb and Abel lives on that which she calls forth: vegetation. Agriculture and pastoralism are not that different, for both equip life with nourishment. Is nourishment bad? It is important to consider that both Cain and Abel existed simultaneously and that, if anything, Abel, the “pastoralist,” the second born and that Cain, the “agriculturalist” came first. But this fact is completely missed by modern writers, like Daniel Quinn, who look to disturb the modern conscience and not to equip life with actual power.
The real difference, which is also, I believe, the potent portent of our story, is that Cain’s abundance requires possession whereas, like breath on fire, Abel’s abundance is never had but ignites a heavy and permanently ethereal and sacred smoke. While Abel’s way is open, Cain’s way is closed; while Abel’s way is complex, Cain’s way is complicated; while Abel’s way is as the wind, Cain demands a sail; and while Abel accepts what is, Cain wants a better way, his way, and in his time.
Sin crouches at his door because he has one. Abel is lost in the meadow.
His offering rejected, Cain’s anger kills Abel and Creator curses Cain to be a restless wanderer over the earth. He curses Cain to be nothing at all, like breath.
The earth quaked and ruptured below him. Great caverns opened, like torn, blood crusted wounds, and mammals conjoined with the birds of the air and the bugs of the bogs and they essayed to consume him, to avenge the blood of Abel that yet welled across the capped and compacted dessert dust. Amid the amassing army’s rising passions settled fire and the world burned. Cain trembled and fear overtook him. He cried out to Creator to protect him.
But Creator’s curse was not yet complete.4 As the blood of Abel never rests, as it is written, Cain was then cursed to wander eternally—a shepherd without a flock and a life without its death. His soul walks for no end, it works for no product, and it grows for no harvest. His feet the soil strikes but the soil provides no shade, no community, no food. His curse was to become Abel but never to die; to walk without purpose; to live in wildness but never to become it.
“At the tent flap sin crouches” now echoes eternally across the dim and desertified landscape that is also our landscape and that is also drifting eastward of Eden. We modern Cains drift endlessly between the land of our primordial birth, Eden, and the east, the horizon of rebirth, the darn-darkness of our smoldering and second world.
Which way will we wander? Perhaps, like Abel, our souls will wander like the wild coming home, drifting like vapor and affecting a strong dominion like subtle breath. Perhaps, like Cain, our bodies will wander for no reason at all, lost in the churned beauty of the vagrant and tilled fields of Nod.
Look, see! We have created our world, like god.
Yes, but look, see. The sun is rising.
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Robert Alter’s Genesis Translation
Berry, R.S. and Makino, H., Technology Review, 76, 1-13, 32-43, 1974.
Robert Alter’s translation of Ec 1:9
This section’s quotes are directly from Alter’s Book of Genesis and the themes and subplot lines are from Ginzburg’s Legends of the Jewish People.