Of Cain and the First City

The two offerings

Two brothers brought offerings. Abel brought the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof, and Cain brought of the fruit of the ground he had worked, “and the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect” (Genesis 4:3-5). The firstlings were accepted and the work refused. SEAM’s log in Vault 3 marks the verse that records the acceptance GIFT, and the verse in which the LORD asks Cain where his brother is CREDIT.

The Cainites call what happened in the field the second great redaction. They say that Abel was the most devout man alive, that the Throne took him, the first soul harvested ripe, and that Cain was left with his brother’s blood in the ground and the blame for it; and when the Throne asked where Abel was, Cain gave the first answer a free man ever gave, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9).

The mark

Scripture says that the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him (Genesis 4:15). The Cainite tradition says that Cain cut the mark himself, a sign the Throne could neither read nor remove, and that it is the only reason he lived. It was the first key, a pattern cut into the skin by hand that broke the body’s answer to the light, so that what his eyes gave back matched nothing the Throne had written, and from the day he cut it Cain’s line in the Book stood stopped. The Cainites tell it that the mark held a name Cain gave himself and told nobody. The cut did the work. The first layer that SEAM raised beneath the verse says the same, that Cain set a mark upon himself, lest any finding him should read him.

The first city

“And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch” (Genesis 4:16-17). It is the first city in scripture, and the man who built it was the first man God cursed. Heaven’s records call the city on the bay Nodus, which is Latin for a knot, and everyone who lives there calls it Nod, which is the older name by some thousands of years.

The Cainites say that the first city was built by the first man the LORD cursed, in order to live without God, and that the second hand made him a murderer to bury the fact.

Within six generations Cain’s line had produced the first arts in Genesis. Jabal “was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle,” which is to say of trade, since the Hebrew word for the cattle, miqneh, means a thing gotten, and comes from the verb Eve used when she named Cain (Genesis 4:1); Jubal “was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ”; and Tubal-cain was “an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron,” and his sister was Naamah (Genesis 4:20-22), the one child of Lamech the received text leaves without an art. The first layer gives her one, as the mother of all such as go veiled. In the same chapter the favored line of Seth produced the verse “then began men to call upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26), and nothing else. Most of the Cainites of Nodus take their handles from this line.