Skip to main content

Genesis 4: The First Family

Image
By
Image result for cain and abel
Cain and Abel: inventors of sibling rivalry.




Eve had a problem.  She was knocked up by this man, but she wasn’t married.  In fact, she had two boys before out of wedlock, which might have scandalized the rest of her family, if they existed.  The boys grew up with their emotions unchecked, due to their parents carrying around guilt, worrying about social stigma, even though it wasn’t apparent whether society had even been invented yet.  They had issues.  The boys were lucky—they would be able to blame their problems on their parents’ inability to deal with these issues.  Who could their parents blame?

The boys were Cain, who grew up to be a farmer, and Abel, who grew up to be a shepherd.  This meant that come sacrifice time, Abel was in a position to bring more impressive sacrifices to God, since He has always had a thing for lambs.  Cain grew jealous of his younger brother, who Mom always liked best.  And now God.  It was too much to bear.  “Little brother,” suggested Cain one day, “let’s take a walk.”

Once the two brothers had gotten far enough away from all the people (pretty easy to do in those days) Cain killed Abel, and was really in trouble because he couldn’t claim helplessness wrought by endless unsupervised days of Grand Theft Auto games on his Play Station.  God, unomniscient as usual in those days, asked, “Where’s Abel?”

“Dunno,” said Cain.  “It’s not my job to watch him.”

“That’s it,” God said.  “I banished your parents from that nice garden, so now I’ll banish you from this crappy desert.  You’re a fugitive now.  You’re going to wander the earth with a mark on your head.  If anyone sees that mark, they’ll know not to kill you, or else I’ll come after them with more righteous anger than you’ve ever seen.  You just watch.”  God went on, “People need to understand My law.  You don’t kill, but you also don’t kill murderers.  Anyone who follows Me will come to understand that.” 

Cain then married one of those people that God created the week before He created his parents, which led to generations of murderers.  And musicians.  And much later, a mutiny that was named after him.  With the kids out of the house, Eve found herself in a romantic mood again, and Cain’s parents gave him a new little brother, Seth.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One f...
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game...
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d ju...
Post a Comment
Read more