Mythology

Then follows the curse of Cain, his flight from the scene of the slaying, and the protective mark which he receives from Yahweh. Here there are obvious difficulties. Yahweh curses the slayer and at the same time places him under his protection; also the nature of the mark has been the source of much speculation. Sir James Frazer has suggested that God may have decorated Cain with red, black, or white paint, or perhaps with a tasteful combination of these colours, after the manner of various savage peoples. He concludes his study of the myth with the following humorous remarks, ‘Thus adorned, the first Mr Smith - for Cain means Smith - may have paraded the waste places of the earth without the least fear of being recognized and molested by his victim’s ghost. This explanation of the mark of Cain has the advantage of relieving the Biblical narrative from a manifest absurdity. For on the usual interpretation God affixed the mark to Cain in order to save him from human assailants, apparently forgetting that there was nobody to assail him, since the earth was as yet inhabited only by the murderer and his parents. Hence by assuming that the foe of whom the first murderer went in fear was a ghost instead of a living man, we avoid the irreverence of imputing to the deity a grave lapse of memory little in keeping with the divine omniscience.’ [6] Ingenious as this explanation is, a better explanation of this feature of the myth is to be found in parallels provided by certain seasonal rituals such as the Babylonian New Year Festival, or the Athenian ritual of the Bouphonia. [7] In the Babylonian New Year Festival, whose purpose was wholly agricultural, a sacrificing priest and an exorcist purified the shrine of the god Nabu, Marduk’s son, with the carcass of a slain sheep, smearing the walls of the shrine with the blood of the sheep; after this they were obliged to flee into the desert until the festival was over because they were defiled by their ritual act. [8] In the Hebrew ritual of the Day of Atonement, originally part of the autumn New Year Festival, we find a similar combination of a ritual slaying and a flight, but here the human participants in the ritual are replaced by animal victims, namely, two goats, one of which is slain while the other is driven out into the desert.’ Again, in the Athenian ritual of the Bouphonia, an ox was ritually slaughtered by two men who were then obliged to flee. Hence it is suggested that the flight of Cain originally represented a ritual flight. The sacrificer was defiled by his act and was driven out by the community until he had been purified; his guilt was a communal and not an individual guilt. This explains why the slayer enjoyed ritual protection. He was no common murderer, but a priest or sacred person who had performed an act for the benefit of the community; an act which involved ceremonial defilement and the consequent temporary banishment of the slayer; but his person was sacrosanct. Moreover, the most probable explanation of the mark is that it represented a tattoo mark or other indication that the fugitive belonged to a sacred class. We have evidence from the Old Testament that the prophets bore such marks, [10] and the existence of such marks to distinguish the members of temple staffs as the property of the god is abundantly attested in ancient literature. Thus the original form of the first part of the Yahwist’s story of Cain and Abel, namely, that contained in 4:I-15, was probably a ritual myth depicting a ritual slaying intended to secure fertility for the crops; the slaying was followed by the flight of the slayer, who was protected by a mark which indicated his sacred character. But, like other myths, before it was used by the Yahwist for his own religious purposes it had in the course of transmission acquired other meanings and uses. It had come to represent the feud between the settled peasant, tilling his fields, and the pastoral, half=nomad peoples who

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