A Strange Story

Cain and Abel were born after Adam and Eve got kicked out of the Garden of Eden, so they didn't have anything to do with original sin. Cain was a "tiller of the ground" and Abel was a "keeper of sheep". Both of them made a burnt offering from the produce of their labors. For some unspecified reason, God was pleased with Abel's offering and not so pleased with Cain's offering. Cain complained to God about this, and God basically told him not to worry about it. But Cain did worry about it, which caused him to murder his brother. When God asked Cain where his brother was, Cain came up with the smart alecky remark, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Of course God knew exactly what had happened to Abel, so He wasn't fooled for minute. The "brother's keeper" quote is frequently misapplied to mean we are all supposed to be our brother's keeper when, in the original context, it meant nothing of the sort. When God confronted Cain about the murder, He told him that, since he had desecrated the ground with his brother's blood, Cain could no longer be a tiller of the ground, but would henceforth be a "wandered on the earth". Cain was worried that people would try to kill him for his crime, so God put a mark on Cain which was supposed to prevent anyone from harming him.

This story is obviously allegorical because, if taken literally, there wouldn't have been anybody else on the earth for Cain to worry about except his parents, and he wasn't likely to run into them as he wandered on the earth. Cain later took a wife from another tribe, of which there shouldn't have been any yet, which is another reason to believe that the story was never intended to be taken literally. What then was the true meaning of the story? Well, Cain subsequently "went away from the presence of the Lord and dwelt in the land of Nod, east of Eden." as if God wasn't everywhere like He is today. Then we get a short paragraph of "begats" which tells us that one of Cain's descendants "was the father of those who dwell in tents and have cattle". Another "was the father of those who play the lyre and pipe", and another was "the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron". It seems then, that Cain's primary importance resides in his progeny, which doesn't explain why he had to kill his brother, the keeper of sheep. Somebody else must have been the father of all shepherds because, as far as we know, Abel died childless.

Another interesting story, not from the Bible, is the way the Mayans apparently abandoned their cities and dispersed into the jungle. Nobody knows exactly why for sure, but it has been theorized that they got tired of fighting wars, paying taxes, and sacrificing their children to their heathen gods. Another theory is that their economy just went to hell for one reason or another. I was always fascinated by the pictures of those ancient ruins overgrown with vegetation. As a child, I entertained the fantasy that something like that would happen to Chicago some day. As it turned out, it happened to Detroit first, but maybe there's hope for Chicago yet.

The big cities in the U.S. have always been a magnet for poor people and immigrants seeking cheap rent and any kind of job they could find. After a generation or two, if their situation improved, they naturally wanted to move out to the country, where they could have some elbow room and a nice lawn. I suppose, if their situation didn't improve, they're stuck in the cities even unto this day. You guys in the ivory towers are a different breed, instead of moving out of the city, you moved deeper in, but you still abandoned your old neighborhoods, so maybe you're not so different after all.

I'm not sure that I know why the jobs left the cities. Some of them may have followed their people to the suburbs, but most of them seem to have gone overseas. I doubt that the job drain caused the riots because the job drain didn't begin until after the riots. Of course that doesn't prove that the riots drove the jobs out either. Maybe, like the Mayan thing, nobody will ever know for sure why our cities went down. Archeologists might be still debating it a thousand years from now.