From Cain to Babel
Driven from the garden, man enters a history in which sin, once entered, never ceases to grow. The chapters that run from Cain to the flood, then to Babel, show evil spreading from generation to generation, from the murder of a brother to the corruption of the whole earth, and God answering it by turns with judgment and with mercy. This long night prepares, in hollow, the dawn of a salvation: the call of one man, Abraham, through whom all the nations will be blessed.
Cain and Abel
The first generation after the fall gives the first murder, and it is between two brothers. Cain and Abel each offer to God; the offering of Abel, the shepherd, is accepted, that of Cain is not, and Cain conceives from it a jealousy that gnaws at his face. God warns him still, as one holds back a raised hand: evil is a crouching beast that he can overcome. “if you do not do well, sin is crouching at your door: it desires you, but you must master it.” Genesis 4:7 Cain does not master it; he lures his brother into the fields and kills him. Then, questioned by God, he adds to the murder lying and indifference. “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Genesis 4:9 But the blood shed does not keep silent before God. “Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” Genesis 4:10 Yet, even in the sentence that exiles him, God protects the murderer himself, setting on him a mark so that no one may kill him in turn: justice is already mingled with mercy. “the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who met him would strike him down.” Genesis 4:15 From the descendants of Cain is born a line in which violence swells still further, up to Lamech, who boasts of killing for a mere wound. Abel, for his part, the just man killed out of jealousy, whose blood cries to God, is the first figure of the martyrs, and already the shadow of Christ, whose shed blood will cry out louder still, not for vengeance but for pardon.
The Flood and the Covenant with Noah
From Cain to his descendants, violence swells, until evil covers the whole earth. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that his heart conceived nothing but evil.” Genesis 6:5 Before this corruption, God decides a judgment, the flood, which wipes away a creation become unlivable; but he saves a just man, Noah, with his family and the pairs of animals, in an ark that passes through the waters. “Noah was a righteous and blameless man among his contemporaries; Noah walked with God.” Genesis 6:9 The flood is not only chastisement: it is also a passage, the waters that engulf the ancient world bearing the ark toward a world begun anew, which the tradition will read as a figure of baptism, where water makes sin die and a new life be born. When the dove released by Noah returns with an olive branch, it announces peace restored between heaven and earth. “there in its beak it held a fresh olive leaf. Noah then knew that the waters had gone down on the earth.” Genesis 8:11 The waters withdrawn, God makes with Noah and all the earth a covenant, the first, and he gives a sign of it in the sky. “I set my bow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” Genesis 9:13 This covenant tells the patience of God, who, knowing the heart of man, henceforth gives up destroying, and who, in forbidding the shedding of blood, restates the sacred worth of a life made in his image. “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, for the heart of man is inclined to evil from his youth.” Genesis 8:21
Babel and the Dispersion
After the flood, men multiply, but pride is born again with them. They set out to build a city and a tower whose top would touch the sky, to make a name for themselves by themselves and to stay united in their own glory, without God. “let us build ourselves a city, with a tower whose top touches the sky. Thus we will make a name for ourselves, and we will not be scattered.” Genesis 11:4 It is the reverse of the vocation received: instead of receiving a name from God and filling the earth as he had blessed them to do, man wants to make himself his own god and to fold back upon himself. God answers by confusing their language, so that they no longer understand one another, and they scatter of themselves over the whole earth. “let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they no longer understand one another.” Genesis 11:7 The very name of Babel, which Hebrew links to the verb balal, “to confuse,” remains the seal of every unity built against God, which turns fatally into division. This confusion of tongues will one day be reversed at Pentecost, when the Spirit will make all peoples understand one single word, no longer the pride that divides, but the Gospel that gathers.
From the Dispersion to the Call
Thus ends the history of the origins: begun in a garden, it ends in dispersion, humanity scattered into peoples and tongues, turned away from God. Evil has shown its full extent, from the first couple to the whole earth, and each time God joined to the judgment a door of salvation, a mark on Cain, an ark for Noah, a renewed patience. But it is upon this dark background that the design of God takes a new turn. Instead of saving the world all at once, he chooses to call one single man, to draw him from his kindred and his country, and to make of him the source of a blessing for all the nations that Babel had scattered. The long night of the fall calls for a dawn, and this dawn has a name: Abraham. The history of salvation, properly speaking, begins there.