y Lois Tverberg
Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And he said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground. – Genesis 4:9-10
We often miss the major point of biblical texts if we don’t take into account the wording and poetry of the story. Often, a word is repeated over and over in the story to make a point in a subtle way. The first time we read the word “brother” in the bible (ach, in Hebrew) is when Eve gave birth to Abel after first having Cain. It says, “Again, she gave birth to his brother Abel,” (Genesis 4:2) showing that the first person in all of the Bible to be a brother to someone else is Abel, and the first person to have a brother is Cain.
Interestingly, in the next several verses, the word brother is repeated seven times, and the middle time is in God’s question, “Where is Abel your brother?” The writers were very sensitive to word repetition and pattern, and to repeat a word seven times emphasizes its centrality to the story. 
The unspoken message is that God’s question, “Where is Abel your brother?” is central and very important – Abel is the first brother, and the only brother to Cain, and he is responsible for him. Cain’s response, the first words after Abel’s murder, shows that he has rejected his responsibility to his one and only brother.
The Bible often uses the first of a kind to represent all of that kind, as Adam is the first and representative man. So the take-home message of this story is that all who are human are our brothers, and we are our brother’s keepers. The minute we forget that, sin starts to crouch at our door and we start moving down a path toward evil that may even lead toward murder.
We might think that this is self-evident and not something to be reminded of. But modern culture today emphasizes our individuality to the point of amazing self-centeredness. Materialism and consumerism prey on answering every need of ours, and pornography feeds the desire to use others’ bodies for our own pleasure. Every possible convenience is available to us, showing us that the world will obey our every whim. As a result we become self-centered and short-tempered in our relationships with others, expecting everything to go our way at all times. Only when we are reminded that other humans are our brothers, and that we must love our brothers as ourselves, will we begin to live as God wants us to.
Photocred: Art Renewal Center
Then the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “Where are you?” He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.” And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate. Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Genesis 3:9-13
Here we read that Peter asks him how many times we need to forgive – up to seven times? The number seven is symbolic of completeness, hinting that Peter was saying that we should forgive repeatedly and completely. But then Jesus says “up to seventy-seven times,” which we often want to translate as “seventy times seven,” because 490 times is larger than seventy-seven. But the key to understanding is not in the quantity of 77 or 490, but in the fact that the phrase “seventy-seven times” or “seventy-sevenfold” (shiv’im v’shiva or hebdomekontakis hepta) is a unique phrase, found only once in the Hebrew scriptures, in today’s verse from Genesis 4:23.
