PETERSON: Cain And Abel: The Hostile Brothers

The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series exploring the psychological significance of the biblical stories in the book of Genesis. You can now listen to or watch the lecture series on DailyWire+.

Back to Genesis. We’re already up to Genesis 4. “And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.” This is after Adam and Eve have been chased out of the Garden of Eden. What’s really cool about this — I really think that the Cain and Abel story is the most profound story I’ve ever read, especially given that you can tell it in 15 seconds. I won’t, because I tend not to tell stories in 15 seconds, as you may have noticed, but you can read the whole thing that quickly. It’s so densely packed that it’s actually unbelievable to me that it can be that densely packed.

The first thing is that Adam and Eve are not the first two human beings; Cain and Abel are the first two human beings. Adam and Eve were made by God, and they were born in paradise — what kind of human beings are those? You don’t know any human beings like that. Human beings aren’t born in paradise and made by God. Human beings are born of other human beings. That’s the first thing, and it’s post-Fall. We’re out in the world. We’re out in history now. We’re not in some archetypal beyond — although we are still to some degree, but not to the degree that was the case with the story of Adam and Eve. We’ve already been thrown out of the Garden. We’re already self-conscious. We’re already awake. We’re already covered. We’re already working. We’re full-fledged human beings. So, you have the first two human beings, Cain and Abel, prototypical human beings.

What’s cool is that humanity enters history at the end of the story of Adam and Eve, and then the archetypal patterns for human behavior are instantaneously presented. It’s absolutely mind-boggling, and it’s not a very nice story. They’re brothers; they’re hostile brothers. They’ve got their hands around each other’s throats, so to speak, or, at least that’s the case in one direction. So, it’s a story: the first two human beings engage in a fratricidal struggle that ends in the death of the best one of them. That’s the story of human beings in history, and if that doesn’t give you nightmares, you didn’t understand the damn story. 

In these hostile brother stories, which are very, very common, often the older brother, Cain — and this is very true in the Bible, but it’s true in all sorts of folk tales and all sorts of stories for that matter — has some advantages. He’s the older brother, and in an agricultural community, the older brother generally inherited the land — not the younger brothers. The reason for that was, well, let’s say you have eight sons and you have enough land to support a bit of a family and you divide it among your eight sons; then they have eight sons and they divide it among their eight sons. Soon everyone has a little postage stamp that they can stand on and starve to death on, and that just doesn’t work. So, you hand the land down in a piece to the eldest son, and that’s just how it is. It’s tough luck for the rest of them, but at least they know they’re going to have to make their own way. It’s not fair, but there’s no way of making it fair.

The oldest son has an additional stake in the stability of the current hierarchy. He has more of a stake in the status quo, so that makes him more of an emblematic representative of the status quo, and perhaps more likely to be blind in its favor. That motif creeps up very frequently in the hostile brothers’ archetypal struggle. Cain fits this — the story of Cain and Abel fits this pattern — because Cain is the one who won’t budge, who won’t move. He’s stubborn. The younger son, who’s Abel, is often the one who’s not so much of a revolutionary but perhaps more of a balance between the revolutionary and the traditionalist, whereas the older son tends to be more traditionalist, authoritarian — at least in these metaphorical representations. 

“And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.” There’s the first human being: Cain. The Mesopotamians thought that mankind was made out of the blood of the worst demon that the great goddess of chaos could imagine. Well, the first human being is a murderer, and not only a murderer, a murderer

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