Chapter 2: The Institution and Corruption of the Adamic Church

The institution of the church according to the rule of post-lapsarian theology — Adam's diligence and duty in building it up — How long it remained pure — The defection in Cain the apostate — The nature, degrees, and manner of that defection — Jehovah's regard for Abel and his offering — The errors of certain ancients — The obscurity of the Septuagint translation — Why the Cainite sacrifice was rejected by God — Concerning the words of Moses: "And Cain said to his brother Abel," (Genesis 4:8) — The fable of the Targums — Cain, moved from the church, flees it, distrusting the promise of mercy — The reformation of the church through the expulsion and cursing of Cain.

I. According to the rule of theology which we have expounded, the first church of sinners was instituted in the family of Adam. That was its immediate end: that an assembly of those worshipping God in the Mediator might be constituted. The care of this work lay upon Adam. For since he was the father and head of the whole human race, and had received the promise of the victorious Seed to be proclaimed to all his posterity, he was bound by the obligation of that duty, by the force both of nature and of positive precept. There are very many considerations which persuade us that he did not fail in this duty. For, without doubt, the very great benefit recently received from God, love and compassion for his own kind, and the most tender sense of the wretched condition into which he had brought his posterity through sin — these things brought it about that he performed his appointed office diligently. And so his whole family, under his care and governance — that is, the entire human race without exception — was the church of God, in which faith, observance, and religious worship flourished. In that state of affairs the church was absolutely catholic. How long a span of time it lasted in blameless profession of the new theology is not entirely certain; it admitted the first stain of defection in the apostasy of Cain. Since that apostasy was the first instance of defection on the part of the church of sinners professing the worship of God in the Mediator, it must be briefly narrated.

II. We have previously shown that this theology had three parts. The apostate sinned against all of them. The foundation of the whole was the promise of the Mediator. That Cain's defection began from unbelief, the apostle shows when he celebrates the faith of Abel (Hebrews 11:4). Nor, when admonished by God, did he acknowledge his sin — which impenitence sprang from the same root. Next, he performed the instituted worship otherwise than he ought, and here the irreverence long lurking within him first manifested itself; finally, anger and envy drove him, already falling away from faith, into fratricide, by which he transgressed the dictate of right reason, or the law of nature. Thus he showed himself a sinner and rebel against the whole divine covenant and each of its parts. Hence he became the first of hypocrites and the leader and prototype of all the rest until the end of the age (1 John 3:12).

III. Some ancients were of the opinion that God testified His acceptance of Abel's sacrifice by sending fire from heaven to devour it. In this sense Theodotion translated those words of Genesis 4:4, "And the Lord inflamed upon Abel" — which rendering Jerome commends in his Hebrew Traditions on Genesis. Remarkable is the strange rendering of the Septuagint at Genesis 4:6–7, which in explaining Cain's sin led many of the ancients astray. The words are: "And the Lord God said to Cain, 'Why have you become sorrowful, and why has your countenance fallen? If you offer rightly but do not divide rightly, have you not sinned? Be still; his return is to you, and you will rule over him.'" What those words mean — "If you offer rightly, but do not divide rightly" — is entirely uncertain. They do not belong to the sacred text. Notable are the blunders and errors of Augustine, in The City of God, bk. 15, ch. 7; of Chrysostom, in his Homily 18 on Genesis ch. 4; of Cyril against Julian; and of others — occasioned by this passage. Jerome in his Hebrew Traditions on Genesis 4 sharply criticizes this rendering of the Septuagint, yet not without his own slip in the matter of the word for sin: "Sin," he says, "is of masculine gender among the Hebrews, but in the Greek speech it is feminine." For it is certain that the Hebrew word is of feminine gender. Jerome was misled because in this passage it is joined with a masculine participle. But among the Hebrews this is not unusual; and those who remove the difficulty from this passage treat the two Hebrew words as equivalent to one another, both signifying the same thing in the masculine gender. The most learned Mercerus reveals the source of these errors. I will say briefly what the matter is. The sacrifice of Cain was rejected — not on account of its material, nor because some portion of his possessions was improperly consecrated, nor because of any defect in external rite — but because of the sin and unbelief of the one offering the sacrifice. IV. Rebuked by God, Cain for a time concealed his envy and anger toward his brother. This seems to be signified by the words: "And Cain said to his brother Abel" — which our translators render: "And Cain talked with his brother Abel." The Samaritan Codex and the Septuagint add: "Let us go out into the field." The Vulgate says, "Let us go forth outside," doubtless from the Jerusalem Targum. In the Masoretic Bible there is a lacuna of one short line after the word. Lindanus, Morinus, and others proclaim that the Hebrew text is corrupted. Jerome rejects the supplement: "Cain said to his brother," he says, "and what follows is to be understood — namely, what the Lord had said; it is therefore superfluous that which is found in the Samaritan and in our volume," Hebrew Traditions on Genesis. You may see also how highly he esteemed that Samaritan codex, which some prefer to the Hebrew. Aben Ezra in his commentary on the passage follows Jerome in his sense: "It seems to me," he says, "that he said or related to him with what reproaches he had been received by God." Onkelos adheres to the bare words of the text. Jonathan, as also the Targum called the Jerusalem Targum, narrates at length a disputation between the brothers. "And Cain said," it goes, "to his brother Abel, 'Come, let us both go out into the field.' And when they had both gone out into the field, Cain replied and said to Abel, 'I perceive that the world was created through mercies' (the Jerusalem Targum puts it differently: 'that the world was not created through mercy'), 'but it is not governed according to the fruit of good works, and there is respect of persons in judgment; on which account your offering was accepted, but my offering was not accepted with good pleasure.' Abel answered and said to Cain, 'The world was created through mercies, and it is governed according to the fruit of good works, and there is no respect of persons in judgment, and therefore because the fruit of my works is better than yours, my offering was received with good pleasure.' Cain answered and said to his brother, 'There is no judgment, and there is no judge, and there is no other age, and no good reward will be given to the righteous, and no vengeance will be taken of the wicked.' Abel answered and said to Cain, 'There is judgment, and there is a judge, and there is another age, and good reward will be given to the righteous, and vengeance will be taken of the wicked.' And on account of these matters they were contending upon the face of the field." This is Ben Uzziel's — that is, foolish.

"For now there was no place for these things."

V. Philo Judaeus says that Cain was a sophist and "had provoked his brother to a disputation" — perhaps because he had dealt craftily with God Himself, Genesis 4:8. But the matter is plain; and our translators admirably intimate the sense of the words by their rendering: "And Cain talked with his brother." That is, after he had resolved in his mind to remove his brother from among the living, nursing the deadly hatred which he harbored from envy in the very marrow of his bones, pressing it down in the depths of his heart and feigning love in his countenance, he spoke with him in a friendly and brotherly manner. That is the meaning of the words. That is the way of those who thirst for the blood of others. So afterward Joab treacherously removed Abner, and Absalom removed Amnon, under the pretense of a simulated reconciliation of affection. Lured by that pretense, the first martyr fell into the ambush.

VI. The devil was, in a special manner, the instigator of this murder for Cain. Therefore Cain is said not only to have been of the evil one on account of this very murder (1 John 3:12), but also the devil is called a murderer from the beginning (John 8:44). For he is called a murderer there not only because he enticed the first human beings into sin, from which death was to follow, but also because he in fact procured and brought about this murder — just as, at his instigation, the Pharisees at that time sought to kill the Lord Jesus. An ancient poet, whose verses are extant in Epiphanius, expressed this elegantly thus:

He who by nature works and brings forth evils, who stores up a treasury of wickedness in the deep, a guide of blazing ignorance, who delights in the groaning and lamentations of mortals.

He who hurls souls into destruction, weaving nets of manifold woes; who first loosed bloodshed in the world through Cain, and caused the first murder — a beginning and first-fruit of eternal lawlessness.

Verses from the tragedy:

O Serpent, first source of calamities and last boundary of them, and you, father of the treasury of evils, blind error, forerunner of ignorance — whose fodder is the tears and sighs of mankind — you who, stirring up with inexpiable hatred the fratricide's arms turned against himself, drove Cain to be the first to stain wrath with blood — you drove them, so that from their eternal state

man first fell down to the lowest earthly depths — you were the cause of it all."

VII. But after the unbelief and hypocrisy of Cain had revealed themselves openly in this manner, so that he could no longer be tolerated in the church, God, who still exercised immediate care over the tender flock lest it be infected by the fellowship of the impious apostate and of those who had adhered to him in his crimes (whose number appears to have been not small, since with their help he had girded himself for building a city), drove him out from the borders of the church, laden with a curse. Such is the meaning of those words (Genesis 4:12), "A wanderer and a fugitive you shall be on the earth" — that is, "Go out into the face of the lands of your world, newly

accursed, inasmuch as you are heaped with a fresh defection from my dominion; wander there wherever you will at last, savoring earthly things, having henceforth nothing in common with my worship, my church."

VIII. This part of his punishment he himself repeats, ver. 14, "A wanderer and a fugitive I shall be on the earth" (not "groaning and trembling," as the LXX renders it); and "From Your face I shall be hidden." He had previously despised the gracious face of God in the promised Seed. He rejects in other words any hope of entering again into grace with God: "My iniquity," he says, "is greater than can be pardoned," or "than I am able to bear." Jonas Schlichtingius, in his work on the Trinity, at the passage cited, p. 119, denies that these words "are to be censured, as though they contained anything evil," as if they had proceeded from right reason. But it is certain that they did not proceed from faith, and therefore were full of despair. Furthermore, he had no hope, nor fear, that he could lie hidden from the providence of God. He therefore acknowledges himself excluded from the fellowship of the saints and from the presence of God in solemn worship. And being driven out from the church, he fled from it (Genesis 4:16).

IX. Now this defection of Cain occurred in the one hundred and twenty-ninth year after the church had been founded in the promise of the Liberator. For it is probable that in the year immediately following the death of Abel, Eve bore Seth. That was the one hundred and thirtieth year of Adam's life (Genesis 5:8). During that space of time, the human race had without doubt grown in number and multitude; and so the church itself, which was still absolutely catholic, embracing the whole of that race, endured. That first blameless church of those professing faith in the Mediator regarding their sins lasted, therefore, for one hundred and thirty years, or thereabouts, walking holy and blameless before God according to the rule of restored theology.

X. Cain therefore rushed into apostasy when he was one hundred and twenty years old. For that which Gregory Abulpharajius, the Arab chronologer, reports on the authority of a certain Theodosius — whose history the distinguished Pococke recently edited — is absurd; namely, "that Adam did not beget Cain until thirty years had elapsed from his expulsion from paradise, and that Abel lived a hundred years before Adam, returning to his wife, begot Seth." But these ravings are plainly refuted by the sacred text (Genesis 5:8); and yet I know not from what source this most foolish rumor arose — it has traversed the whole East and has defiled the writings of very many.

XI. Hypocrisy, therefore, advancing from unbelief against God to the persecution of the saints, brought about the occasion and even the necessity of the reformation of the church; of which reformation we have the first divinely ordained specimen and example in the ejection and cursing of Cain.