The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism

by Regina M. Schwartz

Overview

The Curse of Cain confronts the inherent ambiguities of biblical stories on many levels and, in the end, offers an alternative, inspiring reading of the Bible that is attentive to visions of plenitude rather than scarcity, and to an ethics based on generosity rather than violence.

"[A] provocative and timely examination of the interrelationship of monotheism and violence. . . . This is a refreshing alternative to criticism-biblical and otherwise-that so often confuses interpretation with closure; it is an invitation to an ethic of possibility, plenitude, and generosity, a welcome antidote to violence, as important for its insights into memory, identity, and place as for its criticism of monotheism's violent legacy."--Booklist

"Brilliant and provocative, this is a work demanding close attention from critics, theologians, and all those interested in the imaginative roots of common life."--Rowan Williams, Bishop of Monmouth

"A stunningly important book."--Walter Brueggemann, Theology Today

"Artfully rendered, endlessly provocative."--Lawrence Weschler, New Yorker

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226742007
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/01/1998
Edition description:	1
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Regina M. Schwartz is professor of English and religion at Northwestern University and director of the Chicago Institute of Religion, Ethics, and Violence. She is the author of Remembering and Repeating: On Milton's Theology and Poetics; editor of The Book and the Text: The Bible and Literary Theory; and co-author of The Postmodern Bible.

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The Curse of Cain

The Violent Legacy of Monotheism

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By REGINA M. SCHWARTZ

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 1997 Regina M. Schwartz
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-74199-4

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Chapter One

Inventing Dentity COVENANTS

I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God and I punish the father's fault in the sons, the grandsons, and the great-grandsons of those who hate me; but I show kindness to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. —Exodus 20:5–6

Only you can make this world seem right, Only you can make the darkness bright, Only you and you alone can thrill me like you do And fill my heart with love for only you. —Buck Ran and Ande Rand

Many of us imagine that the secular world has freed us from the encumbrances of religion, the rule of one deity and the authority of his priesthood, but the myth of monotheism continues to foster our central notions of collective identity. As a cultural formation, monotheism is strikingly tenacious. Its tenet—one God establishes one people under God—has been translated from the sphere of the sacred to nationalism, and thence to other collective identities. Most historians of nationalism concede that the concentration of power in an omnipotent sovereign was far too useful to divest at the birth of modern nationalism, and so allegiance to a sovereign deity in order to forge a singular identity became, in secular terms, allegiance to a sovereign nation to forge a national identity. That issued in such ironies as the following rhetoric from one of the architects of (secular) German nationalism: "He who does not love the fatherland which he can see, how can he love the heavenly Jerusalem which he does not see?" In other words, the injunction of Romans 13:1—"let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God"—has been farther reaching than Paul could have ever imagined. In our nation's infancy, John Cotton advised John Winthrop of the Plymouth Colony that a "distinction which is put between the Laws of God and the laws of men becomes a snare ... surely there is no human law that tendeth to common good but the same is a law of God." And this has endured. In public school, I pledged my allegiance daily to the flag and the republic for which it stands, "one nation under God." Monotheism is a myth that grounds particular identity in universal transcendence. And monotheism is a myth that forges identity antithetically—against the Other.

But politics are not hardwired into theology, and the relation between monotheism and the social order is not simple. It can and has been variously conceived: as homologous, on earth as it is in heaven; as antithetical, the City of God versus the terrestrial city; as generative, divine kingship as the source of human sovereignty; or one category can subsume the other—depending on your persuasion, religious myths could mirror the social order or the sacral order design the state. Then too, figuring identity under a sovereign deity and figuring identity under a sovereign state could have a common source: some predilection for subjection, for imagining identity "under...." In what can be called America's first constitution, the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims promised "all due submission and obedience."

Before I launch into my critique of the system of thought broadly known as monotheism, I'd like to issue a brief note of caution. First, this critique should not be confused with an assessment of the scriptural religious traditions, all of which have some versions of polytheism in their rich and complex histories (I think of Calvin's frustration when Protestant women in labor insisted on calling upon St. Margaret, or of the rabbinic lore that makes Proverbial Wisdom a divine consort). Furthermore, although I will cite the Hebrew Bible because of the immense cultural influence its narratives have had through dissemination by Christianity and Islam, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as monotheism in it. Monotheism would make an ontological claim that only one god exists. Monolatry or henotheism would better describe the kind of exclusive allegiance to one deity (from a field of many) that we find in, say, Deuteronomy 28:14, "Do not turn aside from any of the commands I give you today to the right or to the left, following other gods and serving them," but it sounds cumbersome, and since everyone uses monotheism to mean monolatry (thereby, with a sleight of vocabulary, turning allegiance to one god into the obliteration of other gods), I will stick to customary usage. Besides, even the monolatry variety of monotheism is not strictly synonymous with the theology of the Hebrew Bible. To know anything at all about the Bible is to know that it is heterogeneous and that, in the history of biblical exegesis, the same text has been understood to convey widely divergent meanings, used to justify widely divergent theologies and policies, and used to justify the oppression of peoples and the liberation of peoples, often the same peoples, usually the same verse.

IMAGINING ISRAEL

Identities have of late come to be thought of as provisional, constructed, arbitrary, and one way to understand the biblical stories is to see them engaged in efforts to strengthen the precariousness of collective identity formations. In the Bible, the identity of ancient Israel is shored up with the myth that it is God-given.

Then Moses went up to God; the Lord called to him from the mountain, saying, "Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the Israelites: You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings to myself. Now, therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all peoples." (Ex 19:3–5)

Here collective identity is explicitly narrated as an invention, a radical break with nature and with the past. A transcendent deity breaks into history with the demand that the people he constitutes obey the laws he institutes, and first and foremost among those laws is the requirement that they pledge allegiance to him and to him alone. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." A people are forged by their worship of one deity, Yahweh, and what makes others Other—Egyptian, Moabite, Ammonite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hittite, or Hurrian—is their worship of foreign gods. When Israel is forged as an identity against the Other, it is figured as against other deities, and when Israel is threatened, it is not by the power of other nations, but by the power and wrath of her deity because she has wavered in her exclusive loyalty to him. Inclinations toward polytheism are repeatedly figured as sexual infidelity: "I am a jealous God, you will have none but me"; and Israel is castigated for "whoring after" other gods, thereby imperiling her "purity": "so shameless was her whoring that at last she polluted the country." Jeremiah's kinky confusion of idolatry and adultery condemns Israel for "committing adultery with lumps of stone and pieces of wood" (Jer 3:9).

These preoccupations with divine (and sexual) fidelity are part of that ideology of identity as someone or some people who are set apart, with boundaries that could be mapped, ownership that could be titled. "You are my own people, my very own." This people is to be the exclusive possession of the deity, and none other, and they are to have exclusive desire for this deity, and none other. The Other against whom Israel's identity is forged is abhorred, abject, impure, and in the "Old Testament," vast numbers of them are obliterated, while in the "New Testament," vast numbers are colonized (converted). This tying of identity to rejection runs counter to much of the drive that could be found elsewhere, both in the Bible and throughout religious myth and ritual, to forge identities through analogy, even identification. Instead of envisioning Israel as not-Egypt, in another biblical myth of origin, Israel is part-Egypt with a part-Egyptian Moses (born of one people, bred by another) leading the people out of Egypt, and in another story, Joseph, the son of Jacob/Israel, saves the Israelites by means of the high Egyptian status that is conferred upon him. Amid all the rich variety, I would categorize two broad understandings of identity in the Bible: one grounded in Negation (or scarcity) and another in Multiplicity (or plenitude). When biblical myths carve up humanity into peoples, they make assertions of collective identity in negative terms. To be Israel is to be not-Egypt; identity is purchased at the expense of the Other. But that is not the whole story. The logic of negation should be distinguished from one of multiplicity, a logic that sustains contraries without obliteration, that multiplies difference, and that foregrounds the provisional character of identity. The Bible conceives of Israel's relation with the Other in diverse ways. The spectrum runs the gamut from obliterating the Other to living peaceably with her, from welcoming her into the fold of God's people to demanding that Israelites "put away" their foreign wives, from distinguishing Israel from Egypt with clearly delineated boundaries to deriving Israel from that part-Egyptian Moses. Furthermore, even as biblical narratives establish a logic of negation, they also critique it by exposing its enormous cost. The degradation, suffering, and bloodshed of the Other are depicted graphically, so graphically that this sympathetic depiction of the outcast threatens to overcome sympathy for the insider. The abhorred are not abhorred by us.

Despite the Bible's efforts to shore up Israel's identity with the permanence and stability attached to notions like the "will of God," "natural" kinship relations, or territorial "inheritance," these constructs serve only to highlight the very precariousness they are meant to strengthen. Every effort to deny, repress, contain, and otherwise minimize how tentative the construction of Israel is has instead the effect of underscoring the vulnerability of that model. The text seems engaged in establishing a nation ruled by a lung even as it launches a powerful critique of the institution of monarchy. It narrates the origins of a kinship community that it completely undercuts. It asserts that the boundaries of land define the boundaries of a people but then insists that exile is the condition of their creation. It issues a call for a collective memory, but the memory and even the call for it are forgotten. It founds itself on the notion of a covenanted community and then takes pains to demonstrate how fragile, how easily broken, that is. As the constructed character of identity comes to the fore, assertions of who the people are become unmasked as provisional. The commitment to negation begins to dissolve. Israel in opposition against not-Israel ends up being elaborated into a different understanding, of multiplicity rather than negation. The life and death struggles between Israel and Egypt give way to a another vision of Israel, not against, but among many nations: Moab, Ammon, Assyria, Philistia, Babylonia. If the poison is fixing collective identity in opposition to the Other, then this dynamism is one antidote, striking a hopeful chord in what often seems an intractable intolerance. When identity is mobile and multiple, the Other is difficult to name—and to hurt.

Plenitude is another antidote to the poison of forging identity in negation. The very idea that identity is constructed "against" suggests scarcity, as though there were a finite amount of identity itself, and so a space must be carved out for it and jealously guarded, like finite territory. If there were no identity shortage, if Israelites could be Egyptians too, for instance, there would be no need for aggressive or defensive gestures to protect their space. That is, singularity joins hands with scarcity, and both are given powerful expression in monotheism's emphasis on allegiance to one and only one god. The bargain is struck in Exodus, "I will be your God if you will be my people." Henceforth, a people must attach themselves to this principle, and all the biblical preoccupations with the creation and fate of the people, their political formations and their national aspirations, are tied to that deeper concern, monotheism. Just as foreign peoples are regarded as threats to Israel, so foreign gods are deemed threats to Yahwism, and when Israel suffers, its pain is framed as punishment for wavering in her exclusive loyalty to her deity.

CUTTING COVENANTS

Here I will investigate the way collective identity is forged in negation, and then underwritten by inviolable transcendence, by turning to biblical scenes describing the institution of Israel's identity in a covenant. The Hebrew phrase for "he made a covenant," karat berît, is literally "he cut a covenant," and the violence of that ostensibly dead metaphor is dramatized in each of the biblical ceremonies of the covenant: in the covenant with Abraham in Genesis where animals are cut in two and fire passes between them in a mysterious ritual, in the cutting of human flesh at circumcision-the so-called sign of the covenant—and in the covenant made at Mount Sinai where words are cut to inscribe the law in stone tablets.

According to biblical scholars, severing an animal typically attended covenant ceremonies in the ancient Near East, but knowing that this was customary hardly helps to familiarize that bizarre passage in Genesis in which God first makes his covenant with the father of the Hebrew people.

"Look at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be." ... "I am the Lord, who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans to give you this land to take possession of it." But Abram said, "O Sovereign Lord, how can I know that I will gain possession of it?" So the Lord said to him, "Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon." Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each other; the birds, however, he did not cut in half. Then birds of prey came down on the carcasses, but Abram drove them away. As the sun was setting, Abram fell into a deep sleep, and a thick and dreadful darkness came over him. Then the Lord said to him, "Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own, and they will be enslaved and mistreated four hundred years. But I wd punish the nation they serve as slaves, and afterward they will come out with great possessions.... In the fourth generation your descendants will come back here, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure." When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking fire pot, a blazing torch, appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day, the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates— the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaim, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites." (Gen 15:5–21)

Ancient Israel is constituted in this scene, formed as a people and as a nation. Its history is also narrated, for in the Bible, collective identity is typically imagined historiographically. This history—of servitude and subsequent freedom from bondage, of building a great people in a mighty nation, of immense land acquisition, of establishing an empire—this entire foundational narrative of ancient Israel is framed by the account of severed pieces of animals. Why? In ancient Near Eastern rituals, the cut made to the animal is symbolically made to the inferior who enters into the covenant with a superior. An Aramaic treaty from the eighth century B.C.E. reads, "Just as this calf is cut up, so may Maltiel be cut up," and an earlier one describes how "Abba-an swore to Yarim-lim the oath of the gods, and cut the neck of a lamb saying, 'If I take back what I gave you,"' presumably addlng a gesture indicating that his own throat would be slit. What must Israel's forefather do to avoid the fate of the severed animals? Why does a blazing torch pass between the pieces of animal instead of Abraham? Does "cutting a covenant" create Israel's identity or destroy it? Must identity be forged in violence?

One possibility, the suggestion of Rene Girard in La Violence et la sacre, is that such violence is substitutive, directing the violence of the community onto scapegoats and hence away from the persons whose identity is being forged. "The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence.... The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice.... The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony in the community, to reinforce the social fabric." Would that sacrifice could expiate violence. This logic of sacrifice is compatible with that illogic so evident in the "binding of Isaac" episode, where Abraham is willing to give up his "only" son to the sword in order to let his progeny live.

Because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. (Gen 22:16–17)

But I have abbreviated Girard's perception about sacrifice, for he also stresses that for identification in sacrificial rituals to work, the original object of violence must not be lost sight of in the substitution. Isaac is not fully replaced by the sacrifice of the ram; uncannily, the story has come down to us in English as "the sacrifice of Isaac." And in the covenant ceremony, Abram is not only replaced by the flaming torch and the severed animals, he is also one with them. Substitutive victims are victims nonetheless.

In the scene of the covenant at Sinai, where the covenant is made in stone rather than flesh and hence where we might expect substitutive violence to be in full play, something very different happens. The violence is not symbolized, it is literalized. And it is not deflected away from those who are part of this covenanting community, it is suffered by them.

Moses went and told the people all the commands of Yahweh and all the ordinances. In answer, all the people said with one voice, "We will observe all the commands that Yahweh has decreed." Moses put all the commands of Yahweh into writing, and early next morning he built an altar at the foot of the mountain, with twelve standing stones for the twelve tribes of Israel. Then he directed certain young Israelites to offer holocausts and to immolate bullocks to Yahweh as communion sacrifices. Half of the blood Moses took up and put into basins, the other half he cast on the altar. And taking the book of the Covenant he read it to the listening people, and they said, "We will observe all that Yahweh has decreed; we will obey." Then Moses took the blood and cast it toward the people. "This," he said, "is the blood of the Covenant that Yahweh has made with you, containing all these rules." (Ex 24:3–8)

Moses does not refer to the inscribed commands as the "Book of the Covenant" or the "Words of the Covenant," but as dam habbedît, the Blood of the Covenant.

The demand of exclusivity proves an impossible demand, one violated even as it is enjoined. When Moses comes down from the mountain, with the tablets in his hand that create the people as a people with the stipulation that they must obey one deity, he discovers them worshipping another. And the blood that flows next is not the blood of bulls.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Curse of Cain by REGINA M. SCHWARTZ Copyright © 1997 by Regina M. Schwartz. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rebuilding Babel
Murder
Identity and Violence
1. Inventing Identity: Covenants
Imagining Israel
Cutting Covenants
The Blood of the Covenant
2. Owning Identity: Land
Possessing Land
Exodus and Conquest
Polluting the Land
Whores in Exile
3. Natural Identity: Kinship
Exogamy, Endogamy, and the Foreigner
Rape and the Other
Incest Is Best
Kinship, Race, and Property
God the Father and Homosexuality
4. Dividing Identities: "Nations"
Nationalism in the Discipline
Nations in the Bible
Defining Israel
5. Inscribing Identity: Memory
Remembering the Exodus
The Politics of Memory
Forgetting
Joseph (He Adds)
Typology and Totality
Living Memory
Notes
Index

What People are Saying About This

Homi K. Bhabha

By exploring the dark side of monotheism, Regina Schwartz unlocks a brilliant and enduring argument. Secular forms of life and governance, she suggests, are profoundly underwritten by the sacred terror of the Hebrew Bible. Identities crafted through covenant and exclusivity, traditions founded on the terror of the Truth, nations built on the homogenization of peoples and cultures— these idioms of nationalistic and imperialist ideology are now placed in a passionate and revisionary genealogy.

Editorial Reviews

A stunningly important book.
— Theology Today

Walter Brueggemann

Schwartz (English/Northwestern Univ.; Remembering and Repeating, not reviewed) has written a strange, discomfiting book on the Bible's legacy of violence.

The author uses the Bible as a lens to explore Western culture's heritage of violence, but defines violence in such a broad way—as "acts of identity formation" and "the very construction of the Other"—that the reader is left wondering what isn't violent behavior. Indeed, the book is far more deconstructive than constructive; it is only in the last chapter that Schwartz rather generically envisions a Bible that embraces generosity and pluralism, not scarcity and a totalizing monotheism, as ethics to cultivate. The book also suffers from a certain eco-preachiness (as in such first-person assertions as "we cannot really own anything"), which systematically undermines what is truly prophetic here. Yet there is also a coldly brilliant realism at work. Schwartz writes with style and verve, gracefully teasing out new meanings from the Bible's elusive Hebrew text. Her chapters on land and kinship are as insightful as they are disturbing. Particularly significant is her connection between monotheism, land, and female sexuality: Hosea's denunciations of the adulterous wife, for example, can be understood as more than an embrace of a strict moral code. The wife (who represents faithless Israel) has also violated Yahweh's property rights, because unlike a self-respecting whore, she doesn't even receive money for her favors, but pays her lovers. The story, Schwartz argues, is a metaphor for Israel's transgression of the boundaries of monotheism, which is basically "a doctrine of possession." Ultimately, both monogamy and monotheism function to set a people apart in a covenant relationship—but, Schwartz reminds us, this otherness is always inherently dangerous, potentially violent.

The construction of boundaries, Schwartz asserts, leads to nations, and then to bloodshed. Unfortunately, the few alternatives she offers are vague and touchy-feely.

Kirkus Reviews