Cain is the first human known to the earth that we inhabit. As stated in Genesis, Adam and Eve were created from dirt and divine breath from the earth, in Eden. Cain is the first human born of woman outside of Eden, the first human whose experience is theoretically similar to all of ours. As the first human, he maintained the original vocation given to humanity in Genesis 2 as a caretaker of land to produce vegetation from it. So that identity was not taken away from him in spite of the failures of his parents. However, he did remain under the curse of the Fall, having to sift through the thorns and thistles of the field in order to get the plants from it for nourishment, not quite the pleasure of tending a freely producing garden of the best of what’s around without the toil of extraction.
After Cain’s fall, his murdering his brother following his anger from the sacrifice fiasco, and his lie concerning it, this menial dumbed down version of being a farmer of the land is stripped of him, with God stating he is driven from the ground, no longer able to get any crops from it, thistle-filled or not. A major part of the identity of humanity attributed to it in the Garden is now stripped of him.
The second part of the curse is also extremely poignant, God declaring Cain to be “a restless wanderer on the earth”. Humans are intimately connected with the earth as evidenced in Genesis. They are created from adamah, Hebrew for ground or earth. That is the word play for the first man being named Adam, truly an “earthling” with an appropriate earthling name. We come from the earth and we return to the earth, and in between we are intimately connected to the earth. Cain’s version of choosing his wisdom over divine wisdom results in another layer of identity loss, no longer to be connected to his piece of earth from which he came, and cursed to wander it. Cain’s identity is reduced to that of an animal by becoming a vagabond, i.e. grazer of grass, rather than a gardener, another reiteration of God’s plan for humans to work the land for their livelihood. This was Cain’s birthright as the first born of Eve, to inherit the primary vocation that God had set forth for man in Genesis 2. And now it is lost.
This change in relationship with the world is anything but lost on Cain. His agonizing retort to God cuts to the very heart of his former relationship with the earth. It is no hyperbole to state that this cutting off from the land is “more than I can bear.” It doesn’t stand to reason that Cain should be “hidden from God’s presence” as he states will happen if he is driven from the land, for isn’t God all-knowing and omnipresent? The meaning of the statement rests in that this is an irreconcilable severance of the relationship between humanity and God. Humanity is no longer humanity as it was initially. Cain is no longer allowed to carry out his inherent vocation as assigned in the Garden of Eden. Therefore, he loses his identity, which is intimately intertwined with the Creator. All that remains is sure death as a lost wanderer of the planet.
Agriculture had to have formed over the course of thousands of years, rather than over a short period of time. Several factors had to come together over such a long period in order for the harvesting of specific plants for food to work. People had to begin organizing themselves into groups on parcels that may grow crops. They had to find out which crops could be reliably reproduced and under what local conditions, i.e. soil composition, competing inedible plants, growing and ripening at just the right times of year. One of these factors in the Near East was the gradual warming of the climate around 12,000 BC, allowing a new variety of plants, including edible ones, to grow. Certainly, long periods of experimentation were needed to figure out how to make the ground produce what humans needed and wanted.
At this point of societal transition from hunter-gatherer into domesticated, meat eating was integral to humanity, even revered compared with plant eating. It was likely a ritualistic celebration. People gathered together to share in the hunted kill of a wild beast, similar to how wild wolves would hunt and eat. This is not done with gathered foods. Meat was not always available, until the transition into a domesticated order, in which case meat was readily available from the herds that were owned by people. With domestication, an abundance of both plant and animal foods were there in comparatively large supply. Evidence of some of the first agriculturalists has been found in northern Israel and dates back to about 13,000 years ago. Relics of threshing tools have been found that were likely used to cut and gather various grains and cereals. Likely, the consumption of meat continued during this era, as this was the initiation of the experimentation of cultivating plants. It likely took many hundred years to figure out just how to maximize the likelihood of a sufficient harvest, and in the meantime people would have to eat whatever they could find just to survive.
But along with the domestication of plants came the domestication of animals. Initially, domesticated animal meat was likely not immediately eaten, but rather kept for special rituals or sacrifices. If there aren’t many animals to spare in this similarly experimental phase, why routinely kill off what you have? Like plants, this would change as humans selected for those animals with which they could best live. Bovines can live off of grasses and other cellulose-containing plants that humans cannot digest, so they wouldn’t be in competition with humans for food and would be easier to maintain and keep around. Eventually, these animals would be bred, reared, and then slaughtered for nutrition and clothing. Suddenly, what used to be wild beasts turned into captured animals whose lives were dictated and determined by their human captors. As the eating of meat was done only on special occasions, it could now be done more routinely, especially by those powerful few who owned the most animals, thereby further instilling an aura of power around the practice. So despite the newly found abundance of raised plants for consumption, there was still the lure of consuming raised meat as it inherently represented a higher status in society.
We may see that these domesticated cattle represent a figment of their wild ancestors. The tamed pig grunting alongside the hut may seem nothing like the wild boar roaming the forests. It may be as though the essence of its being had been lost over the years to breeding, as though its spirit no longer dwelt within it. The ancestors of the domesticated humans revered the wild animals they hunted as evidenced by the beautiful, mystical, and perhaps religious cave paintings of them that are dated back to the time of the hunter-gatherers. What was a beast to be honored and respected prior to their hunt (i.e. Native American practices) is now an equivalent of currency and investment.
With the ability to produce sufficient nutrition from harvested plants, the memory of this reverence of animals must have made some people question whether it was necessary to exert human power over the entire lives of animals as it had been, simply for nutrition that could be acquired otherwise. Another way of putting this is that somewhere in the human conscience resides a respect and belief in the ruach (spirit) of animals. In periods of scarcity, people had to eat those animals that could consume and process humanly inedible foods for us. But in areas of more temperate, stable climates, in which plants and subsequently foods are more abundant, they could make the choice more easily not to eat animals—farming practices making this more realistic, using tech to create food surpluses.
This progress never could have happened without these stabilizing forces of human settlement upon land that had relatively unchanging characteristics of soil composition and climate. This appears similar to the situation in which Cain found himself, and it explains his torment at being ostracized from his settled land. We see all the time and energy spent over thousands of years for mankind to come to this place of relative security in his fate for survival. All this had been set up according to societal development over millennia, for him to have his place in Creation as a caretaker of the land. It is literally in his DNA. To have this innate identity stripped from him would be tortuous, a reverse evolution back to wanderer-gatherer days, comparable to humans throughout the Bible choosing to elevate themselves to deistic status and then finding themselves in beastly status. For us, we carry the same DNA, the same identity. We obviously are not all farmers as our technologies ensure that that isn’t necessary in order for culture to develop. But the heritage is in us. It may be to our benefit to recognize and honor this.