Bible Study Genesis Part 51-And Cain Said

Welcome to the program Study in the Chapel.

God's Word is supreme at Chapel Ministries.

We consider it absolutely essential to a proper relationship with God.

We study it, we love it, we rely on it every minute of every day.

The following program is an edited recording of the regular Bible studies we hold.

And we decided to share these with you in the hope that you too will be able to find inspiration, encouragement, and ultimately salvation through discovering Christ in Scripture.

Our intention is to travel all the way through the Bible.

It will be a challenging journey, but one that will undoubtedly bring you to a decision.

Through this study, you will be faced with either believing or rejecting what God has said to us.

It is our intention to provide you with enough knowledge to make an informed decision about God and his word.

We strongly encourage you to listen intently and diligently, because though at the moment you may not realize it, these things are truly a matter of life and death.

In fact, these are matters of eternal life and eternal death.

Never treat what God has said lightly.

There's truly nothing more important to you.

Now join us as we seek God's will through his inspired word.

We continue to plow our way through one of the most difficult books in all of the Bible to understand.

Probably not the most difficult, but one of the most difficult, especially these early chapters, where God is just beginning to pick up steam, pick up momentum, telling us about the origins of all of this.

And he's left a lot of it out because in reality, God is not interested in being our encyclopedia.

He has a story to tell us about his son.

And those are the things he's leaving in this book for us to learn.

That makes it highly important for us to spend some time working diligently on this.

So let's get back at it.

We're still in the fourth chapter.

We're at the eighth verse.

Let me go ahead and read it.

And Cain talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.

Now you've heard me comment before that the most dramatic events in human history are described in such decidedly undramatic ways in Scripture.

This is not only the record of the first murder, but it's the account of the very first death of the human race.

This is a phenomenal event.

And it gets three words.

And he slew him.

And slew him.

I added a word.

It's and slew him.

Those are the three words we get.

Now I really and sincerely hate to admit this because it's incredibly sad.

But we are today so used to and desensitized toward death and murder that most of the time we don't even pause when we read this.

But up to this point, until this moment recorded in Genesis 4.8, death had been spoken of, but not yet seen.

Well, maybe that's not entirely true.

We do know of two deaths, but they're animals.

The one whose skin God provided to Adam and Eve back in the garden, and the bloody offering brought by Abel that started all this.

But this death must have been different.

It must have seemed very different.

It must have seemed very new to them.

To our knowledge, no other person had died yet.

And what makes this so shocking is that this death was the result of a murder.

And not just any murder, but one brother killing another.

Now, if these two guys were strangers, well, that would have been bad enough.

But what does it say about the human race when the first homicide occurred among brothers?

And the Bible describes the whole thing in only one verse.

And Cain talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him.

Now, let me say the Bible never fails to fascinate.

And that's especially true of the book of Genesis.

Listen, I know how difficult it is to study this book.

Believe me, as difficult as it is for you to learn it, think about me.

I have to teach it.

But it's all worth it when we realize the things we are being told.

Listen, the devil wants to discourage us from this.

This book, this book of Genesis, does not make him look very good.

Actually, none of the books do, but especially this one.

We find out he's an old SOB from the beginning, from this book.

We see all the things he's done to the human race right here.

So he doesn't want us to study it.

He wants us to believe it's that's hard.

It's old, it's old language.

You won't get it, anyways.

Well, we're moving on, anyways.

The first part of verse eight, and Cain talked with Abel, his brother.

Listen to me, is an egregious mistranslation.

Understandable, but egregious.

There's no way around the fact all scholars agree with this.

The original says, the original Hebrew says, and Cain said unto Abel his brother.

It's not, and Cable, and not, it's not, and Cain talked with Abel his brother.

Properly translating the original results in and Cain said.

Well, and Cain said what?

Here's the extraordinary thing.

We don't know.

It doesn't say this.

Moses reported and Cain said, but no more.

Moses didn't say what Cain said.

Isn't that strange?

But what really tickles me is how we humans try to process this.

It makes me laugh the way this has been handled by the translators.

You see, the Bible scholars responsible for producing the English language Bible came across this obvious omission, but not willing, not willing to put down what they rightfully judged an incomplete thought, decided to change it.

Instead of putting Anne Cain said, and then move on to the event of the murder without any indication as to what was said, they didn't want to do that.

They felt like that would have been leaving something out.

So they decided to avoid grammatical and contextual confusion and say something general but inaccurate.

And Cain talked with his brother.

That's what it says in the King James and many other of the translations in English.

And Cain talked with his brother, is at best a summary of the original which says and Cain said.

Even though the original says and Cain said, as far as we can tell, there is no original record of what that might be.

But why?

My answer is I don't know.

And I argue that despite what some may tell you, no one does.

Now, to be sure, there are lots of theories, but blank is blank.

There are some old Bible versions that have a few words added here, just like the King James.

Other, not just English language, but other languages have added words.

For example, the Samaritan version of what we call the Old Testament has, and Cain said to his brother, they got that part right, let us go out into the field.

That last part is added.

The phrase, let us go out into the field, is not there in the original.

It's extra.

Now, let me make a quick correction.

No one actually has the original books of the Bible.

No one.

But there are many, many, many manuscripts, some of very ancient origin.

Now, in case you don't know, a manuscript is a word-for-word copy of an original.

There are no original versions of any book of the Bible.

And by the way, that includes not only the Old Testament, but the New.

Now, that may bother some of you, but it shouldn't.

Some of you may be tempted in light of this fact to doubt.

But let me just say, manuscripts are the standard for all ancient books.

For example, the very famous history written supposedly by Julius Caesar.

Not everybody believes it was Julius Caesar, but let's just say it was.

The book entitled, or the history entitled Gallic Wars, is known solely in manuscript form.

Probably most of you have heard of the history Gallic Wars from Julius Caesar.

You probably studied it in your Roman history section of your world history course.

And your teachers up there telling you the things that it says in Gallic Wars as if it was fact.

Well, did you know no original of the Gallic Wars book or history actually exists that we know of?

Despite that fact, however, Gallic Wars in its present manuscript only status is a well-regarded and cited as a reliable, more or less, dependable reference for historians.

My point is for ancient books, lacking original documents is more common than having the originals, because you have to remember that everything, every page at one time was organic except for tablets, and there aren't many of those either.

You write something down on an organic material, read or skin, it's going to decay.

And people know as they're decaying, if the book is important to them, they'll send in the copyists and they'll say, okay, write it down.

Let's let's make a manuscript.

They review it and off you go.

That is very, very common.

In fact, that is the standard, as I said.

Back to our discussion.

Anne Cain talk was so don't let it bother you that we don't have any originals of the Bible.

Listen to me.

I will stand by this.

I've taught this before.

The Bible is the best documented book on the planet by far, especially the New Testament.

It is above reproach from a scientific analysis standpoint.

Don't let anyone fool you about that.

We have manuscripts that go back almost to 20 years from Jesus' death.

And if you remember 20 years ago, of course you do.

It's easy to remember 20 years ago, especially when it was a very impactful event.

That's why the Bible is very well documented and very reliable.

Don't let it bother you.

Why'd you tell them all that stuff, John?

Because I want people to understand.

Someone is going to come up to them and say, you know, you know, the Bible was written long after the events.

Not true.

Oh, the Bible can't be relied on.

Nobody has the original documents.

Oh.

There are book after book after book after book that doesn't have the original.

It's impossible to have, after a certain number of centuries, to have an original book.

Let's get back on track.

Verse 8.

And Cain talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field, etc.

That part was added.

That is the passage we're covering.

And at the moment, we're discussing the fact that Cain talked with Abel is not a good translation.

The most reliable manuscripts, the ones considered most faithful to the original, say, and Cain said, but leaves blank as to what those details were.

What did Cain say?

We don't know.

Cain said something to Abel because that's what it says in the original, but we don't know what he said.

And scholars don't like that.

And that's it's a good thing that they feel that way.

They trust the Bible.

They want the Bible to be believable most of the time.

The most people that translate the Bible, they want you to believe in it.

So they'll take it upon themselves.

They'll try to avoid confusion and they'll add words.

That's what's happened down through the centuries.

Now, a moment ago, we said that the Samaritan manuscript renders this part of Genesis 4.8.

And Cain said to his brother, let us go out into the field.

The manuscript of the Old Testament in the Syriac language.

That's Samaritan.

This is the Syriac language.

Again, in an attempt to literally fill in the blanks, reads, Let us go to the desert.

And Cain said, that's in the original, let us go to the desert.

Not in the original, in the Syriac, added by the people that translated the Syriac Old Testament.

And Cain said, Let us go to the desert.

Not the Latin Vulgate adds, agree diamor for us, which translates to let us go outside or let us walk out.

That is also an addition.

Now let me repeat: there's no evidence of any of these words in any of the oldest Hebrew manuscripts.

Clearly, as we've said, these words were added in an attempt to clean up the sentence, so to speak, to make the whole verse make sense.

The added words include field or desert, those ones we already talked about.

They added those words since there is an actual reference to something like that a bit later.

Let me read the whole verse and you'll see what I mean.

And Cain talked with Abel, his brother.

Some say, let's go out to the field.

Some say let's go out to the desert.

And Cain talked with Abel, or and Cain said to his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field.

So they said, Oh, he must have said, let's go to the field.

So they added those words.

The assumption is that since they were that they went to the field, that must have been the words Cain used.

But I have to say, all those additions are simply trying to deal with what is in essence an empty space.

But why does that empty space exist in the original?

I'm going to repeat my answer.

I don't know.

Why do you tell us so much?

Why do you tell us I don't know so much?

What do I need you for?

I already don't know.

Why are you telling me you don't know?

You're adding your don't know to my I don't know.

What good are you?

I'm just telling you it's okay to say I don't know.

I'm not throwing the whole book out because I don't know why there's a blank in there.

There's a lot of things to say.

And you know what?

Almost every time I've been confused about something in the Bible, God fills in the blanks Himself.

Those are the fill-ins that work.

So I'm telling you, it's okay to say I don't know.

I wish more Bible scholars and pastors and priests and ministers said to you more often, I don't know.

Come down off the pulpit and say I don't know and join us so that we can roll up our sleeves and learn it together.

I don't know.

But we do have theories.

Some say that the fault is with clumsy, careless copyists, the ones producing the manuscripts from earlier manuscripts where maybe the words were there, the ones we don't know anything about.

Well, those copyists just got lazy and missed it.

They left the words out.

And once that happens, then all of the copies after it are inaccurate.

They flat out skipped those words.

Now, the only people who would come up with that theory know nothing about Hebrew scholars, know nothing about how important the Bible is to the Hebrew people.

I find it nearly impossible to believe, given what we know about the care that was taken in reproducing faithfully the originals into manuscript form.

The ancient Jews revered their scriptures, still do.

There can be no doubt that the task of producing manuscripts was considered a sacred duty by the one performing it.

And no evidence has ever existed that there was any carelessness ever.

In fact, when you find copies of Bibles that go back so long, there's amazing agreement through all of them.

That's what the the uh what's the name of that cave, honey, where they found all the uh all of the manuscripts of the Bible.

Somebody knows this.

Uh that Dead Sea Scrolls, thank you.

They were amazed at how much agreement there was in what they found in those ancient scrolls wrapped up inside those caves with the original Bible.

There's them in complete agreement.

They care, Jewish scholars care, they did not make a mistake.

And then there are some who say that, well, Moses purposely left out the words Cain spoke to Abel as a sort of protest against Cain kind of being brotherly with the man he's about to murder.

Now, he may not have had murder on his mind when they first headed to that field, but we know he certainly probably, I should say, we know for certain, he probably harbored anger and resentment toward his brother.

And in response to those negative emotions, well, Moses just decided to omit any words of faux civility, or so this particular particular theory goes.

Now, my reply to that is that I don't think it's very prudent to start assuming that Moses decides what does and what does not end up in God's word.

And then some of the Targums even get elaborate, quite elaborate with the words they use to fill in the missing information.

They didn't like it was that it was blank either.

So they said, well, I mean, you know, this blank gives us free exercise to put in what we want.

And by the way, Targums are notorious, at least in my opinion, for their fast and loose interpretation of scripture that is there.

Now, if you don't know, Targums are, let me call it rewording of scripture originally in Aramaic.

The Targums were an attempt to get people to understand scripture in Aramaic.

It was originally written in Hebrew.

Many people lost their understanding of Hebrew, they became, they became more used to Aramaic, which is a form more or less of Hebrew, and so they wrote the Targums in Aramaic, and they, as I said, took quite a bit of license with the translation.

Now, I guess the initial intent.

Of the Targums was to improve the people's understanding of the sacred writings, but much of the time an unreasonably complicated, very often inaccurate, sometimes fictionalized expansion of the biblical text was the result.

Now, with that prep, let me read from Adam Clark's commentary on Genesis 4.8.

Quote, the Jerusalem Targum and the Targum of Jonathan Ben Uziel, he says, pretend to give us the subject of their conversation.

Now he then quotes from said Targums.

You might agree with Adam Clark in a second.

Quote, this is a quote directly from the Targum.

And Cain said unto Abel his brother, that part were good.

And Cain said unto Abel his brother, here's where it gets deep, let us go out into the field.

And it came to pass that when they were in the field, Cain answered and said to Abel his brother, I thought that the world was created in mercy, but it is not governed according to the merit of good works, nor is there any judgment, nor a judge, nor shall there be any future state in which good reward should.

This is in the targums.

I'm just telling you, this is what is written.

This is what was taught to Jewish people that was in there.

Nor shall there be any future state in which good reward shall be given to the righteous or punishment executed on the wicked.

And now there is respect of persons in judgment.

On what account is it that thy sacrifice has been accepted and mine not received with complacency?

There's more.

And Abel answered and said, The world was created in mercy, and it is governed according to the fruit of good works.

There is a judge, a future world, and a coming judgment, where good rewards shall be given to the righteous and the impious punished, or as the Brits say, impious.

And there is no respect of persons in judgment, but because my works were better and more precious than thine, my oblation was received with complacency.

And because of these things they contended on the field, this is more, and contended on the face of the field, and came rose up against Abel, his brother, and struck a stone into his forehead and killed him.

That's all in the Targum.

That's in those Targums.

And not a bit of it is authentic, and it's nothing more than trying to smooth off the rough corners of the original Hebrew while at the same time delivering a lesson in morality and religion.

Very, very dangerous.

Imposing upon God your thoughts.

This is what God should have said, and then bang, you have four or five paragraphs.

Now, what do I think about these blanks?

Well, as I said, I don't know.

What is going on about what's going on here?

I don't know.

But if everyone else wants to speculate, let me give it a shot.

I believe that this isn't really a blank, but really it's telling us that Cain said unto Abel what God had just said to him as recorded in the previous verse.

Now, this is another one of those spots where I can't be very certain of the validity of my opinion, but I just can't see any other possible explanation.

It's difficult for me to believe that this is just blank.

Now let me read the two verses again with this in mind, with this theory of mine in mind.

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

If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted, and if thou doest not well, a sin offering, that's not what it says in the King James, but if you were here with us last week, that's what I believe it says.

A sin offering lieth at the door, and unto thee, you Cain, shall be his Abel's desire.

Thou shalt rule over him.

You shall rule over, you shall rule over Abel.

God was telling Cain that he was not to worry about his place in the family, that Cain was going to be continued to be the superior to Abel as God had wanted him to.

Verse 8, and Cain said to Abel his brother, Cain said unto Abel his brother the things God said to him.

And it came to pass and so on.

Doesn't that make sense?

And Cain said, what did he say?

Well, what God just said.

No, it may be a stretch, but I think if we consider the fact that God actually referenced Cain and Abel's relationship, how God verified with Cain that he would remain the superior to Abel, that Abel was a part of the topic.

It seems natural that Cain would then, as soon as he could, tell Abel, say unto Abel what God had said to him, especially since it would be to Cain's advantage to do so.

As I said, I don't believe Cain intended to kill Abel as they were walking and talking in the field.

I don't think this was first degree murder.

I don't think this was premeditated murder.

I think something about that conversation, the thing that Cain said to Abel, whatever that was, it caused Cain to go over the edge, and his act of murder was one that was not premeditated, but brought on by some sort of rage.

Similar, I believe, to the vast majority of murders committed right to our very day.

Listen, no one ever promised that the Bible was going to be easy to understand.

We have a lot of forces working against us.

The world, the flesh, and the devil don't want us to understand this.

We have this precedent of people telling us this book is too hard.

We have people telling us it's all fables.

So we we go into it thinking that.

That becomes our problem.

Now, I have long advocated for conducting thorough analyses of God's word.

Browsing through it is not going to cut it.

Listen to me.

Just reading Gray's Anatomy is not going to make you a good doctor.

You have to study medicine in order to be effective.

Though I love that people want to find a way to read their Bibles more often.

There's no shortage of guides out there to help you read the whole Bible through in a certain amount of time, a year, two years, whatever.

Christian bookstores are stocked to the ceiling with references that will get you there.

But I don't like any suggestion that reading scripture alone is going to give you a good understanding of what's contained therein.

It's taken me more than 25 years to learn what a wonderful woman my wife is.

If I just read her resume, I would never know all the things that she's really about.

It takes work, it takes discipline.

And most of all, with the study of scripture, you have to be ready and willing to trust what God says and not what your brain says.

Now, I'm not saying we should shut our intellects off.

Of course not.

Quite the opposite.

But we must be prepared for times when we just have to walk away not knowing for certain what God is saying.

And let me tell you, when that happens, it drives us to our knees in prayer for assistance by the Holy Spirit Himself.

I'm convinced that's God's strategy.

I think that's the way God wants it.

He wants to make sure we lean not on our own understanding as we read in Proverbs 3:5.

Proverbs 3:5

Thus far, we've had to work very hard in our Bible studies, and that trend will continue.

But believe me, as I've been saying, it'll all be worth it.

Okay, with that, I think we'll call it a night.

Next week we will continue looking at verse 8.

By the way, it gets pretty ugly from here on out.

We're about to see what being separated from God's presence leads to.

Be prepared.

See you next time.

We hope this study has blessed you.

God's word is a great treasure, and it's our belief that a thorough, purposeful study of it will bring all of God's children to an understanding of his eternal plan of redemption.

It is our prayer that this will be so for all of our listeners.

Please join us again soon.

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