The Genesis of Justice (9 page)

The end of Cain overtook him in the seventh generation of men, and it was inflicted upon him by the hand of his great-grandson
Lamech. This Lamech was blind, and when he went a-hunting, he was led by his young son, who would apprise his father when
game came in sight, and Lamech would then shoot at it with his bow and arrow. Once upon a time he and his son went on the
chase, and the lad discerned something horned in the distance. He naturally took it to be a beast of one kind or another,
and he told the blind Lamech to let his arrow fly. The air was good, and the quarry dropped to the ground. When they came
close to the victim, the lad exclaimed: “Father, thou hast killed something that resembles a human being in all respects,
except it carries a horn on its forehead!” Lamech knew at once what had happened—he had killed his ancestor Cain, who had
been marked by God with a horn. In despair he smote his hands together, inadvertently killing his son as he clasped them.
Misfortune still followed upon misfortune. The earth opened her mouth and swallowed up the four generations sprung from Cain—Enoch,
Irad, Mehujael, and Methushael. Lamech, sightless as he was, could not go home; he had to remain by the side of Cain’s corpse
and his son’s. Toward evening, his wives, seeking him, found him there. When they heard what he had done, they wanted to separate
from him, all the more as they knew that whoever was descended from Cain was doomed to annihilation. But Lamech argued, “If
Cain, who committed of malice aforethought, was punished only in the seventh generation, then I, who had no intention of killing
a human being, may hope that retribution will be averted for seventy and seven generation.” With his wives, Lamech repaired
to Adam, who heard both parties, and decided the case [for separation brought by the wives] in favor of Lamech.”
¹³

This midrash reminds me of the old Hays Office, which used to censor any motion picture that failed to show crime followed
by appropriate punishment.
¹⁴
Life, however, is often more like modern films, such as
Primal Fear
and
Sleepers
, in which the criminal gets away with it. Woody Allen’s 1989 masterpiece
Crimes and Misdemeanors
wonderfully captures the frequent asymmetry between crime and punishment—a reality that Genesis recognizes but the midrashic
commentators often seek to deny.

Soon after Cain killed his brother, God “repented” over His creation of human beings because they were so awful. No wonder!
God was not doing a very good job deterring crime. He was sending conflicting messages about the consequences of sin. He was
allowing humans to get away with murder! It is not surprising, therefore, that “the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was
great in the earth.” The system of divine rewards and punishment was not working. The crime rate was skyrocketing. It was
time for God to get tough.

1.
Ginzberg, vol. 2, p. 49.

2.
The Torah with Rashi
, Sapirstein edition (Art Scroll, Mesorah, 1995), p. 45, fn 5. Quoting Gur Aryeh; Leket Bahir.

3.
Midrash Rabbah
(Bereshith), p. 189.

4.
Quoted in Armstrong, Karen,
In the Beginning
(New York: Ballantine, 1996), p. 36. Ironically, these are the same words attributed to Rabbi Elisha; see p. 235.

5.
Armstrong at p. 36.

6.
Midrash Rabbah
, vol. 1, p. 191.

7.
Ginzberg at p. 110.

8.
A shorter variant of this story can be found in
Midrash Rabbah
, vol. 1, p. 157.

9.
The Scopes Trial
, Notable Trials Library (1990), p. 302.

10.
Ginzberg at p. 110.

11.
The Mishnah derives this principle directly from the language of the Cain and Abel narrative:

[I]n capital cases, his [the executed person’s] blood and the blood of his [eventual] posterity lie at his door until the end of the world, for thus have we found in the case of Cain who slew his brother, as it is said, “thy brother’s blood [Hebrew word
damin
] crieth”—it does not say “thy brother’s blood [
dam
—singular]” but “thy brother’s bloods [
damin
—plural],” thus indicating both his blood and the blood of his succeeding generations. . . . Therefore was a single man only created to teach you that if anyone destroy a single soul from the children of man, Scripture charges him as though he had destroyed a whole world. . . . (Mishna Sanhedrin 4:5)

12.
Midrash Rabbah
, vol. 1, p. 187. If the fight began as a legal argument and then escalated into a murderous brawl, the legal consequences might be complex. A litigant who takes the law into his own hands by starting a fight may still be able to raise a self-defense claim if his opponent’s response is disproportionate. Perhaps the complexity of the matter, which is barely hinted at in the text, explains God’s relative leniency toward Cain.

13.
Ginzberg, pp. 116-17.

14.
The Hays Office, which was created in 1922 by movie industry moguls to help prevent government censorship of motion pictures, imposed a self-regulating “Production Code.” The code’s specific rules included

I. CRIMES AGAINST THE LAW

These shall never be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime as against law and justice or to inspire others with a desire for imitation.

1. Murder

a. The technique of murder must be presented in a way that will not inspire imitation….

c. Revenge in modern times shall not be justified.

The code was accompanied by an official list of “Reasons,” which explained:

The treatment of crimes against the law must not…

2.
Inspire potential criminals
with a desire for imitation.

3.
Make criminals seem heroic
and justified.
Revenge in modern times shall not be justified. In lands and ages of less developed civilization and moral principles, revenge may sometimes be presented. This would be the case especially in places where no law exists to cover the crime because of which revenge is committed.

See Moley, Raymond,
The Hays Office
(New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1945), at pp. 241-48 (emphasis in original).

Now it was when humans first became many on the face of the soil

and women were born to them,

that the divine beings saw how beautiful the human women were,

so they took themselves wives, whomever they chose.

YHWH said:

My rushing-spirit shall not remain in humankind for ages, for they too are flesh;

let their days be then a hundred and twenty years!

The giants were on earth in those days,

and afterward as well
,

when the divine beings came in to the human women

and they bore them [children]—

they were the heroes who were of former ages, the men of name
.

Now YHWH saw

that great was humankind’s evildoing on earth

and every form of their heart’s planning was only evil all the day
.

Then YHWH was sorry

that he had made humankind on earth
,

and it pained his heart.

YHWH said:

I will blot out humankind, whom I have created, from the face of the soil
,

from man to beast, to crawling thing and to the fowl of the heavens
,

for I am sorry that I made them
.

But Noah found favor in the eyes of YHWH
.

[God then flooded the world for forty days]

G
ENESIS
6:1-8

Now God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them:

Bear fruit and be many and fill the earth!

Fear-of-you, dread-of-you shall be upon all the wildlife of the earth and upon all the fowl of the heavens
,

all that crawls on the soil and all the fish of the sea—

into your hands they are given
.

All things crawling about that live, for you shall they be, for eating
,

as with the green plants, I now give you all.

However: flesh with its life, its blood, you are not to eat!

However, too: for your blood, of your own lives, I will demand-satisfaction—

from all wild-animals I will demand it
,

and from humankind, from every man regarding his brother
,

demand-satisfaction for human life
.

Whoever now sheds human blood
,

for that human shall his blood be shed
,

for in God’s image he made humankind
.

As for you—bear fruit and be many, swarm on earth and become many on it!

God said to Noah and to his sons with him, saying:

As for me—here, I am about to establish my covenant with you and with your seed after you
,

and with all living beings that are with you: fowl, herd-animals, and all the wildlife of the earth with you;

all those going out of the Ark, of all the living-things of the earth
.

I will establish my covenant with you:

All flesh shall never be cut off again by waters of the Deluge
,

Never again shall there be Deluge, to bring earth to ruin!

G
ENESIS
9:1-11

L
ike most rulers who are soft on crime and unhappy with the results, God overreacted and swung the pendulum in the opposite
direction. We have seen this happen repeatedly in our own world: In the 1960s enforcement of drug laws was lax; the death
penalty seemed a relic of the past; prison terms for violent crimes were shrinking. Then the public and politicians began
to rail against rising crime rates. The response was draconian drug laws, dramatic increases in capital punishment, and an
exploding prison population. In the early days of humankind God too saw “evildoing.” His response was to be “sorry” that He
made human beings—in the words of our translation—and to kill everyone in the world, except for one family, that of the righteous
Noah.

Before we get to the injustice of such mass murder, we should pause to consider the concept of a God who is “sorry” about
or “repents” His own creation, because He is surprised at what those He created are doing. The midrash describes God declaring
that the creation of humans out of earthly elements was “a regrettable error on My part.”
¹
Quite an admission for a God! Can such a God be omniscient?
²
If so, He should have known what He was doing when He created man whose “every form of their heart’s planning was only evil
all the day.” A midrash compares God to a baker who has made bad dough: “How wretched must be the dough when the baker himself
testifies it to be poor.” Another analogizes God to a planter of trees who knows that someday, he will have to cut them down.
But God is not a fallible baker. Nor are people trees. God is supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient. Yet even He was surprised
by the human capacity for evil and thus decided to destroy not only all the people He created, but also all the animals, birds,
and fish.
³
God’s fit of pique seems more characteristic of an adolescent in a schoolyard who not only quits a basketball game when he’s
losing, but takes the ball home as well. In this case, however, God was playing with more than a basketball, and creators
do not simply have the right to destroy the human life they have created. Parents may not kill their children just because
they turn out bad. A just being can’t destroy and start from scratch, even if He is God. Saving one family doesn’t solve the
moral problem. God would seem to have been obligated to work with what He had created. Yet the Bible makes no reference to
any ameliorative steps God might have taken in an effort to improve human beings before killing them all. Maybe a code of
laws. Perhaps a few examples of proportional public punishment. God could at least have tried something more humane before
He lashed out so promiscuously at all living beings. But no. God moved directly from inconsistent and infrequent punishment
to total destruction, thus setting a terrible example for lawmakers that has, unfortunately, been followed throughout history.