The Cry of Blood. The ending of Aeschylus s Oresteia. The ending of Virgil s Aeneid. Literary craft and care in Genesis 4. The silences of Genesis 4

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1 The Cry of Blood The ending of Aeschylus s Oresteia The ending of Virgil s Aeneid Literary craft and care in Genesis 4 The silences of Genesis 4 The effects of the fall The cry of blood Only a partial answer Looking ahead to the answer: cities of refuge Atonement for the ensanguined earth Justice for unatoned sin Two applications Life in a fallen world Forgiveness

2 The ending of Aeschylus s Oresteia JOC Conference Paper 2017: The Cry of Blood Readings: Gen. 4:1-14; Heb. 12:18-24 We are going to get deep into some biblical exegesis in this session and the next one so please don t think I ve forgotten the Bible! But to set the scene we are going to spend some time start not in Israel but in Athens and then in Rome. It is 458 BC and in Athens there is a festival to the god Dionysius known as the Dionysia, and as part of it there is a drama competition. Each contestant has produced a trilogy of plays. One of them, Aeschylus, has written a trilogy known as the Oresteia, made up of Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Euminides. There would have been hundreds of such trilogies written, but this is the only complete trilogy that we have today. It is hard to imagine that any others were greater. The story, parts of which were also told by other Greek writers like Sophocles and Euripides, has an extraordinary afterlife. Famous poets have translated it like Robert Browning, Robert Fagles, and Ted Hughes. Many playwrights have written their own versions of the story, including Jean-Paul Sartre. In 2015 there were versions performed at both the Globe and the Almeida in London. A version finished its run in Glasgow only last week. There have been operas (most famously by Richard Strauss), and even a spaghetti western film. Passages are quoted at the start of Watership Down and in the last book of Harry Potter. This is one of the great stories of western literature, ancient and modern. The story is tied to the Trojan war. When Paris took Helen from Menelaus and sailed away with her back to Troy, the Greeks mobilized a great fleet to recover her. But because of the anger of the goddess Artemis, the wind did not blow. As the army languished it grew restive and the leader, Menelaus s brother Agamemnon (NB two brothers!), turned to the gods.

3 The seer Calchas told him that he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia for the winds to come. And he did. Aeschylus s trilogy opens ten years later. In Argos they are still waiting for the army to return from Troy. And Clytemnestra, the wife of Agamemnon and mother of the dead Iphigenia, is waiting for her husband. She has had long years to plot his death. The chorus warns of how blood fallen on the ground cannot be raised to life again (Ag. 1019). Having welcomed him home as a hero, she kills him as he relaxes in his bath. When she kills him, she exalts before the elders of the city in the justice of what she has done. Notice the language she uses it will give you a hint of where we are heading. Here is the Penguin translation: I am jubilant. And, were it seemly over a dead man to pour Thankoffering for safe journey, surely Justice here Allows it, here demands it; so enriched a wine Of wickedness this man stored in his house, and now Returned, drains his own cursed cup to the last dregs. (p. 91) Justice has been done, Agamemnon has drunk the cup of his own wickedness. The scene is vividly depicted in Robert Icke s 2015 version. As Clytemnestra drags her husband s still-bleeding body out of the bathroom, herself covered with his blood, she says: I open my mouth like a plant in the rain and in the red and I feel so awake, it s like liquid rightness pumping into my arteries, he s dead, I am alive and I m free and from this point, from now, this house is set in order ONCE AND FOR ALL. (p. 81) But of course it is not. Blood had been shed. A husband s blood. So now more blood must be shed. As the chorus asks: What rite can sanctify The ground where blood lies spilt? Where earth, man s patient nurse, Has drunk and drunk again

4 Man s blood, and grieving sees The thick unmelted stain Which pleads for vengeance, there the restless curse Waits unforgetful for the guilty soul To teem with foul disease Than nothing can make whole. [ ] though all streams should yield Their purity to swell one cleansing flood, Their force must fail, their power to purge be vain For hands that bear the stain Of unrequited blood. (p. 106) Their son Orestes has been away but now he returns. The god Apollo commands him to avenge his father s death. When he meets his surviving sister Electra he explains why he must kill their mother. Again, note the language: The word of Apollo is of great power and cannot fail. His voice, urgent, insistent, drives me to dare this peril, Chilling my heart s hot blood with recital of threatened terrors, If I should fail to exact fit vengeance, like for like, From those who killed my father. This was the god s command: Shed blood for blood, your face set like flint. The price they owe no wealth can pay. (Penguin, p. 113) In response to Apollo s command, Orestes kills his mother and her lover. But more blood has been shed. A mother s blood. So now more blood must be shed. The cycle continues. Orestes is hounded by the Furies, spirits of justice and vengeance, avenging hounds incensed by a mother s blood. He flees to Athens. And there, in the third of the plays, a remarkable thing happens. Orestes appears before a jury in Athens but their vote is hung, they cannot decide what to do. The goddess Athene has to decide. She clears Orestes. Her grounds? male supremacy in all things. It is more serious to kill a man than a woman, so Orestes was innocent in killing his mother because she had killed his father. The Furies are transformed into the Eumenides, the kindly ones. The cycle of violence suddenly ends. Now that is a good thing! But we are left wondering how it has ended and what has happened to the need for justice to be done, especially given the sexist ground for the verdict.

5 The end of Icke s recent version is very revealing. When Orestes is cleared he cannot quite believe it. He stands on the stage baffled. He asks: What happened?. Calchas the prophet tells him: They find you innocent. But you already knew that. You re free The play closes with these words from Orestes: But I still killed her. Where does it end? Perhaps I always feel guilty. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? (p. 128) And there the question is left, unanswered. The Aeschylan answer to the cry of blood, happy though it is, is no solution at all. It is the right conclusion, but without adequate grounds. All that has been said about the need for justice evaporates in a puff of sexism. The ending of Virgil s Aeneid Now come to the first century BC and to Rome. The ancient world left us three great epic poems: Homer s Iliad and Odyssey, and in Latin Virgil s Aeneid, written just before Jesus was born. Virgil tells a story from the other side of the Trojan war. Aeneas is a hero of Troy who escapes at the fall of the city and goes on an epic journey to found a new city, from which Rome itself ultimately emerges, founded by Romulus when he kills his brother Remus. (A city built on blood after one brother kills another. Ring any bells?)

6 The Aeneid describes many fights and battles, and it speaks of how the ground was running with rivers of newly shed blood (Bk 9, 229). At the end of the book Turnus, who has lost a potential wife to Aeneas, has killed many in battle, including Pallas, an ally of Aeneas. He wears tokens of his conquests, including the sword-belt (baldric) of Pallas. But Turnus is abandoned by the gods and Aeneas overcomes him. The final scene depicts Turnus kneeling before Aeneas, pleading for mercy. Virgil writes: There stood Aeneas, deadly in his armour, rolling his eyes, but he checked his hand, hesitating more and more as the words of Turnus began to move him But then he sees the sword-belt of fallen Pallas. These are the final words of the epic: Aeneas feasted his eyes on the sight of this spoil, this reminder of his own wild grief, then, burning with mad passion and terrible in his wrath, he cried: Are you to escape me now, wearing the spoils stripped from the body of those I loved? By this wound which I now give, it is Pallas who makes sacrifice of you. It is Pallas who exacts the penalty in your guilty blood. Blazing with rage, he plunged the steel full into his enemy s breast. The limbs of Turnus were dissolved in cold and his life left him with a groan, fleeing in anger down to the shades. (p. 332) The moral quality of Aeneas s action in this last scene is much debated. Servius, an ancient commentator, said it was pius both to contemplate mercy and to avenge Pallas. Vengeeance was celebrated by the Romans: when Augustus avenged his adoptive father Julius Caesar he built a temple to Mars Ultor - Mars the Avenger to celebrate. But while Virgil evokes some sympathy for Turnus, he uses what is in his vocabulary a very negative word to describe Aeneas s state of mind, burning with mad passion (furiis accensus) The group of fur- words denote the irrational, uncontrolled state that is the opposite of pietas. Virgil writes earlier of furor being impius (1.294). Importantly, in an earlier book Aeneas s father Anchises describes the virtues of a Roman: Your task, Roman, and do not forget it, will be to govern the peoples of the world in your empire. These will be your arts and to impose a settled pattern upon peace, to pardon the defeated and war down the proud. ( ) Turnus has been defeated. He kneels before Aeneas. And Aeneas does not pardon him.

7 The Aeneid ends in ambiguity, asking a question: is it justice or vengeance for Aeneas to seek pay-back for Pallas s death? If it has a clear message, it seems to be that the establishment of Rome will require such acts. They are a tragic necessity to establish the empire without end. Greece and Rome both ask the same questions. What is justice? How can justice be done without perpetuating the cycle of violence? Aeschylus answers inadequately. Virgil leaves us wondering or resigned. What we have seen in these two great cultures of antiquity we could demonstrate as much from every other human culture, including our own. No human answer has sufficed or will suffice. צ ד ק peace, No human solution can establish justice, let alone find a way for righteousness and and ל ום,ש δικαιοσύνη and εἰρήνη, iustitia and pax to kiss (Ps. 85:10). What does the Bible say? What answer does the Lord provide? To find our answer we will work our way towards another occasion where words were used in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. Literary craft and care in Genesis 4 And so we come to Genesis 4, to look closely at these kinds of question in and beyond the story of the two brothers, Cain and Abel. I begin just by touching on a theme I spoke on at the Banner conference (it is online): the importance of attending to the details of the text of Scripture. We can see this by noting the patterning in the opening chapters of Genesis that is so remarkable that it must be deliberate. One example, Wenham on the number 7: Lamech = 7 th generation from Adam; Abel and brother both occur 7x in 4:1-17; Cain occurs 14x; א ר ץ within 2:4-4:26 (earth, not land of ) occurs 7x; land א ד מ ה,14x

8 God, the LORD, or the LORD God 35x, matching the 35 occurrences of God in 1:1-2:3 That means the last verse of c. 4 is the 70 th mention of God in the book. It is also the 14th occurrence of the word call. (96) The silences of Genesis 4 So we need to attend to the deliberate, Spirit-breathed details. But also to the silences. There are many things we are not told in this chapter, details that we might expect but that are actually missing: We don t know what Cain said to Abel, how he killed him, how he disposed of his body, how he explained his disappearance to their parents, what their reaction was, how they all approached the shocking new phenomenon of death. (LaCocque, 7) How very un-psychological this account is. What does this tell us? It tells us that the narrative has very particular intentions which are not the intentions that a C21st reader expects. The effects of the fall There are lots of fascinating details and indeed puzzles that we do not have time to examine. My selection focuses on God s statement to Cain and its afterlife in the NT: The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. (Gen. 4:10) The first thing to note is that the passage shows the effects of the fall. I say this because various features connect it firmly to cc It is a vivid description of the new human problem. Hauser highlights the similar basic structure: two individuals at peace; a warning; a confrontation with God; a sentencing; an exile to the east. (297-8) Correspondences to Gen. 2-3: (Wenham and Hauser)

9 The where question asked of Adam and Cain (4:9, 3:9) The What have you done? question (4:10, 3:13) You are cursed (4:11, 3:14, 17) Hostility w ground (4:11, 3:17-19) Hiding from "face" in 4:14 like Adam and Eve in 3:8. (304) Clothing of A and E then exile to east // marking Cain and sending east (4:16, 3:24). Desire of Eve for Adam (3:16) and sin for Cain (4:7) same verb Driving out (3:24 from garden, 4:14 from surface of land, garash) (99-100) 5:1 shows this with the ת ול ד ות introducing what follows (189) The murder of Abel is thus a development, an outworking of the fall. In fact it shows the worsening effects of sin: Cain needs no external tempter, resists an immediate warning of God, protests his punishment. (Wenham 100) And an increase of the curse on the earth of 3:17 imposed in 4:12 (Ainsworth, 30). At the start Cain is man of earth (tills it, brings offering from it), but not at the end. It is important to note how his relationship with the earth is worsened because he does not heed God and kills his brother: a lesson for secular environmentalism. We can make no sense of our relation to the earth if we study it in isolation. I take this to be the primary thrust of the passage in its context: to demonstrate the terrible unfolding effects of what has just happened and to show what lies ahead for a fallen world. LaCocque draws the picture: At the end, Eden has never been so remote. Violence has prevailed. Inexorably, the author conducts the story to its final dénouement. Cain s or Lamech s world is doomed. Human violence will be paid off with violence. (4) Or as Steinbeck put it: these sixteen verses are a history of mankind in any age or culture or race (on 5 from E of E). Now we come to the heart of the matter for the perspective of the justice question: The cry of blood The verb for cry (צ ע ק) is often used in urgent circumstances, e.g. woman being assaulted (Dt 22:24, 27), the Hebrews trapped by the Red Sea (Ex. 14:10). We know that blood in the OT stands for life (Lev. 17:11). So it is appropriate for the blood to cry out when a life has been taken.

10 Blood is, as Wenham vividly puts it, the most polluting of all substances in the OT (Wenham, 107). What does it cry? It cries for justice. It calls for a life to be taken in return, as the OT shows, even in Gen. 9 before the Sinai law is given: Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image (Gen. 9:6). Only a partial answer The cry is not therefore answered within Genesis, because Cain is protected. There is a partial answer, because Cain is punished. But the punishment is greatly restrained. In v. 14 we find one of the key elements of retributive punishment, a mirroring of the sin, even in the wording. Cain s face falls when his sacrifice is rejected (v. 6) this is his sin, and then in v. 14 his punishment it to be driven from the face of the ground and he says he must hide from the face of God (Hauser, 303) And the one who has killed now fears being killed. (Brueggemann, 63). There is mirroring here, but it is an attenuated mirror. It is not life for life as it will be in c. 9 and in the law, because Cain is protected. God marks Cain for his protection. The text does not tell us how. Some rabbis thought God gave Cain a dog! Was it the cross-shaped mark of Ezekiel 9? Is it, as Moberly argues quite persuasively, the reputation Cain has for vengeance, so that the first half of v. 15 is the explanation of the second half? Whatever it is, Cain is protected by it. God s role here is actually to stop the spiral of violence, to take it out of human hands. And he stops it at its first occurrence. When he authorizes retribution, it will be in the closely regulated form of the Sinai law. There will be no Oresteian lawlessness. Looking ahead to the answer: cities of refuge

11 We find some of the most illuminating material on the theology of blood and land and justice in the Sinai legislation for the cities of refuge. Numbers 35:33: You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it. Why was the physical land so important? Because it was God s dwelling-place: You shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell, for I the LORD dwell in the midst of the people of Israel. (Num. 35:33) In fact the OT sometimes personifies the land, as when it has a mouth that opens to swallow Korah (Num. 16:30) or when it vomits out Canaanites (Lev. 18:28). (Wenham 107) In this legislation we see how the cry of blood can be answered. When someone is killed, the earth/land itself is polluted, the blood-shedder must pay. In Num. 35:19 we read of the avenger of blood (e.g. Num. 35:19) who will exact retribution from a murderer. If the killer is not discovered then the nearest city must make atonement by offering a heifer (Deut. 21:1 9). If the killing is accidental then the manslayer may flee to one of the six cities of refuge. The manslayer may leave the city only when the high priest dies (35:25). Here the city symbolically anticipates the eschatological refuge of salvation in Christ (Poythress, 131). Indeed, we may say that both the heifer sacrifice and the high-priest point us ahead to Christ who dies in the place of his people. Atonement for the ensanguined earth It is important to note that while the promised land is particularly holy, the OT speaks of the defilement of the whole earth: The Canaanites are vomited out of the land for making it unclean by breaking Lev. 18 laws: 18: (Bahnsen 5v 111) The earth lies defiled under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt; therefore the inhabitants of the earth are scorched, and few men are left. (Is 24:5-6)

12 Again, the earth is personified: The earth staggers like a drunken man; it sways like a hut; its transgression lies heavy upon it, and it falls, and will not rise again. (Isa. 24:20) The whole earth is ensanguined, and the blood that defiles it will not stay silent. On the day when the Lord judges it will be revealed: For behold, the LORD is coming out from his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity, and the earth will disclose the blood shed on it, and will no more cover its slain. (Isa. 26:21) The א ר ץ in question here is clearly the whole earth not just Israel given the earlier references. Isaiah is paralleling Israel and the nations. Just as the promised land was polluted through sins against the Sinai covenant, so the whole earth is polluted when the eternal covenant is broken (24:5), which, with E. J. Young, I take to be a reference to God s covenant with Adam. Israel then is at this point, as at so many, not an exception to but a microcosm of humanity in general. As the tabernacle, so the land; as the land, so the whole earth. How then will the whole earth find its cleansing? Who is its sacrifice? Who will be its high-priest? It is a sign of how seriously Vern Poythress takes the OT law that he asks if we would in a Christian society have cities of refuge and wait for pastors to die! His answer is surely spot on: Christ has died the death of the great high priest once and for all. His blood is permanently efficacious, since He lives forever to make intercession (Hebrews 7:25). He continually recleanses all the pollutions of the earth. (p. 175) His blood therefore speaks, as Hebrews 12:24 says, a better word than the blood of Abel because the cry of blood is satisfied by it and the spiral of vengeance ceases. The spiral of vengeance described in the Oresteia can find an end at Calvary. That is where sin is answered with justice and, in the extraordinary wisdom of God, forgiven at the same time. Justice for unatoned sin And what of the unrepentant to whom the work of Christ is not applied?

13 Outside of Christ the cry of blood finds its answer in the judgements of God within history, or on the last day. Those judgements may take the form of judgements by governments, instituted by God to bear the sword (Rom. 13). Or they may be in those moments of divine government when the justice of the last day intrudes in history, such as AD 70. This takes us to another NT mention of Abel, Matthew 23:34 5: I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Note the restraint here to that generation then living. Poythress: The destruction of the temple loomed Everest-high in the consciousness of Matthew s generation as the great inner-historical (punitive) judgment of God. (2:457) Here is an intrusion of judgement in history. Apart from that, complete justice will be done on the last day, the day that the martyred saints long for, crying for justice to be done for their shed blood (Rev. 6:10). Two applications Let me close with two thoughts about how this material may be applied in our lives and our churches. First, we have seen something of the character of life in a fallen world. Abel s name (ה ב ל) you may recall, means something like foggy vapour, and it is the word used 38x in Ecclesiastes to describe life in a fallen world. This is no coincidence. Abel in Genesis 4 appears as insignificant as foggy vapour. After making his sacrifice he does almost nothing apart from appear in the field and die. All the conversation and the action is Cain. Unlike the major characters of Genesis, Abel s name is not unpacked or explicitly played on. There are plays on Cain s name. Abraham is the father of many, Isaac is associated with laughter. But nothing is done with Abel s name.

14 Most strikingly, we do not even know what Cain said to Abel in v. 8: Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field. Other versions (LXX, Samaritan, Syriac, Vg) supply what Cain said. Ellen Van Wolde comments: This empty speaking would then suggest, or testify to, the negation of the existence of the other as an equal, as a brother, and it can be seen as pointing ahead to the actual elimination of the other. We ve been reading Ecclesiastes as a family which has been a challenge. But I was struck that there could hardly be a more vivid summary of Genesis 4 than Eccl. 8:14: There is a ה ב ל that takes place on earth, that there are righteous people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the wicked, and there are wicked people to whom it happens according to the deeds of the righteous. I said that this also is vanity.(ה ב ל) (Eccl. 8:14) We find here a preparation for life in a fallen world. This is what it will be like to be righteous. At times the righteous will be culturally insignificant, hardly even mentioned, even done away with. And yet as we read ahead we find also the reminder that the insignificant righteous will not be forgotten. The cry of blood will echo on, and it will be answered: in historical judgements, at the last judgement, or with forgiveness. Second, you will recall Matt 18:21 2: Then Peter came up and said to him, "Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?" 22 Jesus said to him, "I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times. Where have we heard such language before? The Greek here for 77 times is identical to the LXX of Genesis 4:24 (ἑβδομηκοντάκις ἑπτά). The cycle of vengeance is broken at the cross, and it is to be broken in the church. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, and it is not ours. A temptation for wronged pastors.