![fratricide like cain and abel in the godfather fratricide like cain and abel in the godfather](https://cdn.onebauer.media/one/empire-legacy/uploaded/sibling-rivalries-The-Godfather-II.jpg)
What is surely clear is Eve’s satisfaction in having conceived (v.1) and given birth. Translations have rendered the sentence differently: “I have gained a male child with the help of the LORD” (JPS) “I have got me a man with the LORD” (Alter) and “I-have-gotten/ a man, as has YHWH” (Fox). It was now clear that “the crowd of future humanity resides in the parental body.” The replication of human life was not initiated when a male god delivered a bone from a surgical wound in the צלע, “side,” of Adam, and Adam declared it his, but when an infant engendered in the way of all mammals emerged from the body of humankind’s first mother. In Genesis 4:1, only one verse away from Eden, the place of their own origin, at the very start of life outside of YHWH’s garden, Eve and Adam initiate the cause-and-effect progression of sexual intercourse, conception, and birth that is the biological template for the proliferation of human life. However, if Eve’s verses are read as an inclusio, a literary device in which a story is bracketed by similar language at its beginning and end, thus forming a frame for the material captured in between, we gain insight-through the character of maternal loss, and Eve’s expression of that loss-into the articulation of human grief. In between, the reader’s attention is deflected from Eve onto the murder of brother by brother, commonly called the Cain and Abel story. However, if we look at Eve’s speech, which is restricted to a scant two verses, we notice that the verses appear at the very start of Genesis 4, when she named her first son, and at its end, when she named her third. There, too, frank disclosure of maternal loss is checked and must await comment from outside the text. She merits our empathy, not our gaze, because grief, Blake understood, when fresh and piercing, is private.īlake’s Eve is consistent with the biblical text. Her hair is knit into Abel’s hair-she has literally tied herself to him.īlake’s insight into the character is especially astute-she is suffering the death of her child, and he protects her in her moment of loss from our intrusion. We’re met with her naked back and the vulnerable nape, bared to us as she arches over Abel’s supine body, causing her hair to spill on his chest. His Adam looks at Cain, Cain looks out of the picture frame, Abel’s eyes are closed, and Eve’s face is hidden. Artist William Blake (featured above) imagined this burial as mother, father, and Abel’s body on one side, and the lone murderer son on the other side of a precisely shoveled-out earthen grave. The Bible’s inaugural murder was carried out by Eve’s elder child, Cain, against her younger child, Abel, and thus its first interment-though missing in the text-was of a son by his parents. Abel’s Funeral as Pictured by William Blake