“'Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a vagrant and a wanderer on the earth.'”
FYI: I'm writing this post months following my original analysis of the verses which it's linked to (prompted by questions arising from reading about Cain's curse in Genesis 4:11-12).
Curses: How Far?
All Christians - so far as I know - accept the notion that God's original curse upon Adam & Eve (and the serpent) were hereditary and as such, affect us all to this day (a pre-supposition I subconsciously worked from in my analysis of those verses here and here).
Reading about Cain's curse prompted me to backtrack and investigate why it is we make this assumption: Dissecting the verses, we see that God directly curses Adam/Eve/Serpent (i.e. no implication that they are to be hereditary). Is it simply because today's reality affirms it (snakes still slither, women still hurt during childbirth etc)? If so, that's a rather backwards - and potentially dangerous - method of analysis: interpreting the Bible via our reality rather than interpreting our reality via the Bible.
To further make a case against assumptions, a few short verses later, we are told of God's second-ever documented curse (Genesis 4:11-12). Here God curses Cain, again, directly and without implication of heredity, to be "a vagrant and a wanderer" for the murder of his brother, Abel. And yet, a few verses (Genesis 4:17) and a mere generation later, we're told that he builds the city of Enoch for his eponymous son (presumably to settle down in)!
So, how are we to interpret the length of God's curses? Genesis 12:3 records God declaring to Abraham: "And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse." So does that mean that if one of my ancestors a couple centuries back happened to curse the Jews that I, via bloodlines, am also somehow cursed because of him/her? Or did the curse die with them? Or their children?
How then do Christians objectively justify the permanency of the original curse? More generally, how are we expected to interpret the length and scope of any curse handed down by God?
(back to Genesis 4)
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1 comment:
Interesting thing to study.
So far you've only looked up data on two curses, there are others: the curse on Canaan, the curse on those who curse Israel, the curse on Israel if they were to fail to keep the works of the law, and there may be others.
The only thing that I can think of for why the curse on Adam and Eve is different from the curse on Cain, is that Adam and Eve are not only depicted in scripture as our first parents, but also as paradigmatic representatives of the entire human race. Also, within the first of the curse on the serpent there is an extension of "to her seed" "to your seed" suggesting a generational cursing which provides the context for the other two curses. Don't know though. Good question.
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