Start here · day 3 of 14 · The world, and what a person is
דָּם
Am I my brother's keeper?
Genesis 4
First, read it
Genesis 4
Read it before the notes below. They are worth more once you have your own impression of it.
Open Genesis 4Then, the idea
Two brothers bring offerings. One is accepted, one is not, and the text does not fully explain why. Cain is furious.
God speaks to him before anything happens, and the warning is almost gentle: sin is crouching at the door, and you can rule over it. Cain kills his brother anyway.
Then the question — where is your brother? — and the famous, bitter answer: am I my brother's keeper? The Bible never answers it directly. It spends the next thousand pages answering it by example.
One word of Hebrew
דָּם
dam — blood
God says Abel's blood 'cries out' from the ground. The Hebrew is plural — bloods — and the old teachers read that as his blood and all the descendants he would never have.
And one question
Cain was warned and still did it. What is the difference between knowing better and doing better?
Nobody is marking this. Sit with it on the way to work.