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[External User]

Was Cain's sacrifice deemed unworthy by God through any fault of his own?

I was raised in a Christian tradition. To my recollection, Cain's sacrifice was rejected by God because of Cain's intent in making it. But a friend of mine, in discussing the story, said that wasn't the case and it would rob the story of its moral, which is that sometimes life is unfair and you shouldn't let that unfairness turn to resentment.

What's your understanding of the story? Was Cain's heart in a good place prior to his sacrifice being rejected or was it rejected because of something he thought or did?

[jimwalton]

We're not told, so we're left to do scholarly speculation. Just to start off generally, the sacrifices of Cain and Abel are not depicted as addressing sin or seeking atonement—what the later sacrifices in the Bible were all about. The word used designates them very generally as “gifts”—a word that is most closely associated with the grain offering later in Leviticus 2. They appear to be intended to express gratitude to God for His bounty. Therefore it is appropriate that Cain should bring an offering from the produce that he grew, for blood would not be mandatory in such an offering. It should be noted that Genesis does not preserve any record of God requesting such offerings, though he approved of it as a means of expressing thanks. Gratitude is not expressed, however, when the gift is grudgingly given, as is likely the case with Cain.

His sacrifice seems to have been brought with the wrong attitude. There is a right way and a wrong way to worship God. Read Isa. 1.10-17 and Prov. 21.27. It's not that Cain has brought the wrong thing, but he has brought it with the wrong heart, and it shows right away: Cain was extremely angry. If there was a problem, his first reaction should have been sorrow and repentance: "Oh, I'm sorry. How can I make this right?" But he's angry. First he worships with a wrong attitude. Now He's unrepentant.

The Lord questions him: "Why are you angry?" And then he comes out with what he saw in Cain: "Why is your face downcast?" In other words, "you have a heart problem." But then God gives him another chance to repent (see v. 7), and gives him fair warning that if he continues on this path, it will be his undoing. While Eve had been talked into her sin, Cain will not have even God talk him out of it, nor will he confess to it, nor yet accept his punishment.

In v. 8, Cain gives yet another evidence that his heart was in the wrong place, and he killed his brother.

The two boys bring gifts to God to show their gratitude, but Cain doesn't seem grateful, but begrudging. God calls him on it, and Cain, instead of repenting, snubs his nose at God and plunges willfully into sin, just like his mama, but worse. This will be the trend as the chapters roll by: sin gets worse and worse and worse, despite God's attempts to warn (Gn. 2.17; 4.7), and make things right over and over.

> it would rob the story of its moral, which is that sometimes life is unfair and you shouldn't let that unfairness turn to resentment.

This "moral" is nowhere in the story. It's completely contrived.

The purpose of Genesis is to begin the story of the covenant. Though God created everything just right, sin drew people away from God—so much that they no longer had an accurate idea of what God was like. This was why God decided to make a covenant. … God would use them to give the world an accurate picture of what he was like. The blessings of chapter 1 and 2 quickly turned to corruption (the Eden problem), and chapter 4 is an extension of that. It's not about life being unfair and the consequent resentment, but instead about order.

When Adam & Eve choose to take wisdom (the “knowledge of good and evil,” Gn. 2.17) for themselves, they simultaneously become like God and thereby inherit the responsibility to establish and sustain order. Consequently, they are sent out in to the liminal world and charged with setting it in order themselves, which they attempt to do by establishing cities and civilization, the structures that were thought to establish order in the human world throughout the ANE.

Genesis 4-11 records that these attempts were unsuccessful; cities and civilization (as the attempts of human to bring order to life) do not, in fact, lead to an ordered condition.

The rest of Genesis provides the setup for God's proposed alternative, which is an order established by God through the instrument of the covenant. The covenant is not a return to Eden (which is neither anticipated nor desired in the OT), but it does represent a kind of order that is sustained by the gods (YHWH) rather than by humans through human efforts. This divine-centered order is finally established in Exodus with the ratification of the covenant and the establishment of the Tabernacle, where God takes up His rest among the people (Ex. 40.34).

The text has nothing to do with unfairness, but rather with how God's order and functionality is being ruined by sin, that humans are incapable of being the center of order and the source of wisdom, and that they need a savior.