What Did Cain Do Wrong?

I read the Bible for the first time when I was about 13 or 14. I loved the capsules of stories put together in the different Bible storybooks that my parents bought for me and my brothers, and I wanted to get to the origin stories of my favorite Bible characters. So I took up the Bible and started reading.

And I HATED IT!

I mean, now I understand that the negative feelings I was feeling as I read chapter after chapter of the Bible was me hating what I was reading. But back then, to my young teenage mind, I was struggling to understand why the god in the Bible I was reading was such a villain, compared to the good, loving god that was preached to me either by the Sunday school teacher or the reverend from the pulpit.

The malignancy of god was exemplified in many instances in the Bible, but the very first one that struck me – and I remember this vividly because I had a very strong reaction to it – jumped right out at me in the book of Genesis.

The story of Cain and Abel.

Growing up in Sunday school, Cain was often framed to be this bad guy that got what he deserved. It didn’t help that he murdered his brother, Abel. And so, like other Big Bads in the Bible, Cain was the original villain, the very first person you hate once you start getting taught the Bible.

But then, I started reading the Bible, and in Genesis 4, I hit the first bump that made the 13-or-14-year-old me start questioning the goodness of god.

“v1: And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.

“v2: And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

“v3: And in process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord.

“v4: And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering.

“v5: But unto Cain and to his offering, he had no respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

“v6: And the Lord said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen?

“v7: If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.”

How exactly did Cain NOT do well? I have never understood the reason behind this story of god rejecting Cain’s sacrifice and favouring Abel’s.

What did Cain do wrong?

He made a sacrifice from his occupation, which was to farm. Just as his brother made a sacrifice of his occupation, which was to tend sheep. They both offered unto god from their labours, and god chose one over the other.

WHY?

And when PREDICTABLY, Cain felt bad about this, god went on to gaslight him by chastising him that he didn’t do well!!!

I’m a 23 year-old man and I am still as furious with this story as the 13-or-14-year-old me was. Maybe not as much now as then. But by god, I HATED this story.

And I’ll tell you why. I had that strong resentment for it as a child because I am a firstborn. To my very impressionable mind, what I was getting from that story was that I wasn’t good enough for my own father. I was 11 when I started realizing that I may like boys and not girls. And I was 13 when I first kissed a boy and liked it. This was also around the time I discovered my frantic love for writing, a craft that had me tearing out pages from my notebooks to scribble life to the imaginations that crowded my head

I don’t know if it was because of the pages I was ripping out of my notebooks or if it was the writing thing as a whole; whatever was the reason, my father disliked my writing as a child, and he did his darnedest to crush it. He berated me. He flogged me. And when neither of those worked, one time, he gathered all the tiny stories I had written in all my tiny makeshift novels – he gathered them together and he burned them. That broke my heart. I sobbed like someone who’d lost a part of him. And the lesson I finally learned from that incident was: my father hates this part of me.

Another thing I suspected he’d hate? The fact that I liked boys and was kissing boys.

So, for all intents and purposes, I was growing up into my teenagehood, the firstborn son who had all these characteristics that my father disapproved of, this firstborn son that my father would not like.

And then I turned to the Bible, only to encounter the Almighty Father himself invalidating the world’s first firstborn son.

WHY?

Because he made a sacrifice of crops instead of meat?

Why was that such a heinous thing?

Why were his crops so bad in the sight of the Father?

Why was my writing so bad in the sight of my father?

Why did kissing that boy make me feel like I’d done something that’d be so bad in the sight of the father?

I empathized with Cain so much, because I could relate to the struggle of being the firstborn who, through no fault of his, was deemed wrong by the Father.

And because I resented god’s treatment of Cain, I disliked Abel for being the smug chosen one, the goody-two-shoes. I was probably the only child in Sunday school who thought that Abel deserved to get killed.