As I’ve mentioned before, my novel Cain: Son of Adam premieres on October 9th, 2019 (Today!). It is a date I have chosen deliberately. On the face of it, it may seem a rather odd choice: to release on a Wednesday when most books premier on Tuesday. It’s not my birthday either, nor that of a close family member, nor a date when anything momentous happened to me that I can recall. And while the Church commemorates many Saints on this date, such as St. John Leonardi, I don’t have a specific devotion to any of them.
There is, however, one specific celebration that falls of October 9th this year, one that I find highly relevant to my retelling of the tale of Cain and Abel: Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement.
Yom Kippur
The Day of Atonement, occurring on the 10th day of Tishrei (the 7th month of the Jewish Calendar) is the holiest day of the year in Judaism. It is the last day of the High Holy Days, a ten-day period of penance which starts on the 1st of Tishrei (Rosh Hashanah). The full ceremony can be found in Leviticus Chapter 16. The same is presented in the chart below.
At first glance, it does not appear much different than the other sacrificial rites of the Pentateuch (the sheer number of them certainly does befuddle the mind of a modern Westerner unused to such things). But note items #5-8, in which two goats are placed before the High Priest, who casts lots to determine which of them will die. The chosen goat is sacrificed, and his blood brought into the Holy of Holies (the place where the Ark was kept), just as had been done with the blood of the bull sacrificed in item #2 (This is the only time the High Priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies). The other goat was released alive into the wilderness, but not before the High Priest had laid hands on him, imputing on him all the sins of Israel.
There is one other unique aspect of this Feast: we are not told its origin story. Certainly, we are told how God commanded it to be celebrated, and what event preceded the giving of these precepts (the death of two of Aaron’s sons for offering “strange fire” in the Tabernacle). But this is a far cry from what we are told of the rest of Israel’s Feasts. Purim and Hanukkah both have detailed origin stories, as told in the books of Esther and 2 Maccabees. The story of Passover takes nearly half of the Book of Exodus to recount, and while the origin of Pentecost and Tabernacles might be more obscure, the Pentateuch explicitly links them to the Exodus story. But there are no such links to the Day of Atonement.
Given the lack of an explicit story, it is no wonder that this Biblical Holy Day seems to be all but ignored by large portions of the Christian Community. It certainly doesn’t help that Christianity’s holiest day, Easter, generally coincides with and is explicitly linked with Passover (though Christians who have studied the Letter to the Hebrews will perceive links to the Day of Atonement in the Passion Narratives as well.) At one time it was fashionable in academic circles to write off the Day of Atonement entirely. As Margaret Barker, a Methodist theologian relates:
Under the influence of T.K.Cheyne, it was fashionable for a long time to say that the Day of Atonement rituals were a late insertion into the Levitical legislation. He asserted, as one did in those days, that such a ritual showed the low spiritual state to which the Jews had sunk in the inter-testamental period! Opinion has shifted; the rite is now thought to be of ancient origin. Furthermore, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, it was ‘the keystone of the sacrificial system of post-exilic Judaism’. In other words, it could be the link between the pre- and post-exilic cults, and the extent of our ignorance about the Day of Atonement is the extent of our ignorance about Israel’s religion. (Atonement: The Rite of Healing.)
Clearly this is no minor matter. Understanding the Day of Atonement is the key to understanding the religion of Ancient Israel, Post-Exilic Judaism, and Christianity. Still, the lack of an origin story presents a significant obstacle: imagine trying to understand the Mass without knowing about Jesus Christ or the Passion Narratives.
I should say at the outset that I am not a scholar or an expert; just a guy with a blog and an obsession with theology, mythology, and anthropology. However, I believe that I have found the origin story for the Day of Atonement. And it is a story we are all familiar with.
A Brief Refresher on Girard
I have spoken previously of Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory. For our purposes here, recall his assertion that the lynching of the scapegoat (the “Founding Murder”) is the origin of sacrificial cults and the cultures that practice them. Such is the psychological power of the Founding Murder that it brings a new community into existence that did not exist before, binding them together through their shared trauma and relief. The standard practice at this point is to mythologize the whole affair (unconsciously; remember that the murderers do not fully understand what happened, only that their actions have brought peace). The victim becomes an inhuman monster, a supernatural being, or a combination of the two, destined to be split up into good and evil entities by the decedents of their killers. The community, meanwhile, are the victims who triumphed over evil, whether by slaying the monster or obeying the commands of the god who saved them. Indeed, they are likely to be remembered by their decedents as gods themselves.
But the Old Testament, alone of the ancient stories, does not do this. The God of Israel, the only God worthy of Worship, is firmly on the side of the victim. This theme permeates the entire Old Testament, as we can see, for example, in the story of the patriarch Joseph, of David’s murder of Uriah, and in the strong anti-sacrificial themes in the writings of the later prophets, (see, for example, Isaiah 1:10-17; Jeremiah 6:20; Hosea 5:6; 6:6; 9:11-13; Amos 5:21-25; and Micah 6:6-8). Girard (and others, such as G.K. Chesterton) regard this as the greatest gift of the Hebrew Tradition along with Monotheism (however defined): the idea that God is with the victims of the powerful, no matter how justified they think they are.
One of the side effects of this is that, aside from God, almost all the characters of Genesis and the Old Testament as a whole are portrayed as humans rather than deities (angelic beings such as Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are the exception, but they are not worshiped). The importance of this cannot be overlooked; it allows us and, more importantly, the people who passed down the stories of the Old Testament to view their forebears in a critical light. In the Hebrew tradition, Men who might have been gods in other cultures are subject to the judgement of God. Including a certain farmer who killed a certain shepherd.
The Cain and Abel Connection
The connection between the Day of Atonement and the story of Cain and Abel seems nonsensical at first; there is no explicitly mentioned connection between the two either in Sacred Scripture or in the apocrypha. I maintain, however, that a connection does indeed exist.
First, consider the story of Cain and Abel. Two brothers offer sacrifice to God, but only one is chosen. The chosen brother is killed, and the other brother is cursed and sent away.
Recall now what is done with the two goats on the Day of Atonement: one is chosen and killed, the other is cursed and sent away.
Much ink has been spilled by many scholars, saints, and wise men trying to decipher the reason why Abel’s sacrifice was accepted and Cain’s rejected. The text of Genesis certainly offers no clues. But the lack of an apparent reason might be the missing clue. One might as well ask why one goat was chosen over the other, especially when the goats selected for the ceremony were supposed to be as similar to each other as possible. (See this excerpt [page 10, footnote 20] from a book by Andrei A. Orlov, Professor of Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at Marquette University).
In other words, the choice between Cain and Abel, as with the goats, was arbitrary, the reasoning only known to God. The one hint the text does give us is in the events that happened afterward: even after receiving a warning from God Himself to get his emotions under control, Cain lures Abel into the field and murders him. This certainly shows us that all was not well in Cain’s heart (and really, is it ever in any one of us?).
As for Abel, all we know is that he was pleasing to God, and the Hebrew, Christian, and Islamic traditions have been content with that, numbering him among their lists of righteous martyrs. His sacrifice is even mentioned explicitly in the Catholic Mass in the Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I). Jewish and Christian commentators have also explicitly linked him with the Slain Goat in the Yom Kippur ceremonies, often citing Gen. 4:10:
And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
The blood of the sacrificed goat, after being brought into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled on the furniture of the Tabernacle, was poured out on the ground in front of the altar. See also Hebrews 12:22-24, which explicitly links the blood of Abel, the blood of the slain goat, and the blood of Christ:
But you are come to mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels, and to the church of the firstborn, who are written in the heavens, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new testament, and to the sprinkling of blood which speaketh better than that of Abel.
Things become even more interesting when Seth enters the picture. After Cain is banished, Eve gives birth to another son, of whom she says:
"God hath given me another seed, for Abel whom Cain slew.”
In some strange way, Seth replaces Abel. Indeed, the death of Abel and the birth of Seth almost completely overlap. Furthermore, in Genesis Chapter 5, the descendants of both Cain and Seth are listed. But the differences between the two lines are striking. As St. Augustine points out in City of God:
“I think it not immaterial to observe that in those generations which are propagated from him who is called Seth, although daughters as well as sons are said to have been begotten, no woman is expressly registered by name” (City of God, Book XV, Chapter 17).
And further on he says,
“For in these two men, Abel, signifying grief, and his brother Seth, signifying resurrection, the death of Christ and His life from the dead are prefigured” (City of God, Book XV, Chapter 17).
According to Margaret Barker, this association of self-sacrifice and resurrection is not a Christian invention, but an essential part of the Day of Atonement ritual:
“In the temple, the greatest rite of healing was the Day of Atonement which followed a period of fasting at new year. Two identical goats were chosen, and lots decided which goat was to represent Azazel, the chief of the fallen angels, and which to represent the LORD. The goat to represent the LORD was sacrificed and its blood, that is its life, was taken into the holy of holies. As the high priest emerged, he sprinkled and smeared the blood in various parts of the tabernacle/temple ‘to cleanse and to hallow it from all the uncleanness of the people of Israel’ (Lev.16.19). In the temple context, this meant that the life of the LORD was coming from heaven to cleanse and hallow the creation that had been polluted by human sin. Since the goat represented the LORD, and the high priest also represented the LORD, this was a ritualized self-offering of the high priest as the LORD” (Temple and Liturgy).
The dying and rising aspect can be further seen in Seth’s descendant Enoch, who was assumed directly into heaven and, according to Jewish tradition, transformed into the Metatron, an angelic High Priest who leads the choirs of angels in the heavenly liturgy.
But what of Cain, the banished brother, the scapegoat who fears the wrath of all mankind? Even after his crime, God does not abandon him, but rather sets a mark on him, so that everyone who sees him will know not to kill him, under pain of sevenfold vengeance. The nature of this mysterious Mark of Cain has been the subject of much speculation (and insane racist nonsense) from time immemorial. However, there is a strand of Rabbinic thought that identifies the Mark of Cain with tetragrammaton: YHWH, the holy name of God! (See again the excerpt from Andrei Orlov, pgs. 16 and 17).
There is only one other person in the Old Testament who prominently bears the tetragrammaton on their person: the High Priest (See Exodus 28:36-38). Like the High Priest, Cain is set apart from the rest of the people. Like the High Priest, Cain is exempt from working the land. Like the High Priest, Cain has the ear of the Almighty, and allows him to wield considerable power, even founding (and ruling) a city.
While this may seem bizarre at first glance, this is not unheard of in the Hebrew tradition. Moses killed a man and fled into the wilderness before returning to liberate his people. David arranged the murder of the innocent Uriah to cover up his own sin. In neither case did God remove their authority, but rather reinforced it (Moses went from a Prince of Egypt to a Holy Prophet, and the child of David and the wife of Uriah is Solomon, David’s heir).
Furthermore, modern anthropology has analyzed the genealogies of Cain and Seth, and some anthropologists, especially Alice C. Linsley, believe that the lines of Cain and Seth intermarried, to such an extent that Noah and his sons were the heirs to both lines (see Linsley’s article Cousin Bride’s Naming Prerogative).
The Implications
Given the evidence above, it seems that we can reasonably conclude a strong connection between the Cain and Abel story and the Day of the Atonement. However, I believe that this has much broader implications. If one of the earliest stories in Scripture (preceded only by the Fall and the Creation of the World) is the source of the most ancient Hebrew rituals, and if we accept Girard’s premise that all cults and cultures are created by a founding murder, we find that it is possible that the Cain and Abel story is not only the origin of Yom Kippur, but of the entire Hebrew culture.
Now if this were true, we should expect to see evidence of this in the Biblical text, if not an outright statement than at least evidence of its psychological and spiritual impact on the sacred authors. And that is precisely what we find. The theme of a pair of rivals (almost always brothers) in conflict, with one being chosen by God and the other rejected is so common in the Hebrew stories that it rivals the number of Zeus’s adulterous affairs in Greek mythology. Cain and Abel, Shem and Ham, Abraham and Lot, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and Judah, Aaron’s sons, Saul and David... the list goes on.
In addition, we find Abraham keeping Isaac, his heir, close to himself, but sending his other sons away before he dies (following the tradition of his people, as Linsley relates here). This is exactly what we would expect of a culture whose most ancient stories were of brotherly conflict.
Finally, we see it in the binary world view of the Hebrew tradition, one inherited by Jews and well as Christians and Muslims: things are either one thing or the other (Man or Woman, Heavenly or Earthly, Sacred or Profane, Saved or Damned, etc). Such a worldview makes perfect sense for a culture founded upon a conflict of opposites, in which human choice or Divine election is, in the end, final and irreparable.
I am of course no scholar, and if I have made errors in my evidence or reasoning I hope others will correct me. But what I have presented is true, then all of world history has been the result of a murder and a banishment. The envy of Cain has ruled the fate of many.
Of course, there is one other story that may serve as an origin for the Day of Atonement: The Fall of Adam and Eve. But that is a subject for another post.
Cain: Son of Adam is now available on Amazon!
God Bless, and if you celebrate Yom Kippur, have an easy fast.