We Who Wrestle with God: Perceptions of the Divine

The story of Cain and Abel illustrates the fundamental conflict in humanity between good and evil and between noble sacrifice and selfishness. In the story, this conflict is dramatized as a rivalry between two siblings of different professions. For Peterson, the story distills social, moral, and psychological truths in a collaboration between word, or logos (See: Index of Terms), and image.

The story of Cain and Abel has political significance because many of the conflicts that mark the world are a consequence of the clash of attitudes depicted in the story. According to Peterson, these include the ideology of resentment and victimization and the abuse of power and success, which are directly related to the character of Cain and which are seen in historical events like the French Revolution and the rise of Marxism. In fact, the ties between the two realms are close since “the sacred has collapsed into” the political (104).

Abel is a shepherd, and the image of the shepherd serves as a metaphor for spiritual leadership throughout the Old Testament. This is because shepherds in ancient times lived difficult, dangerous lives requiring “endurance, skill, and courage” (108), which were conducive to heroism and sacrifice. This carries over to the New Testament, where Christ describes himself as the Good Shepherd. The character of the shepherd combines toughness and kindness and, as such, typifies the ideal man, according to Peterson.

To be such a leader is to live in relationship to the future and the community and to “bargain” with both, therefore making a covenant with what is highest. Yet, ultimately, this relationship to what is highest is not merely contractual but is based on “a deeper reality” characterized by respect for God and the individual—thus making it an essentially personal relationship.

Abel’s sacrifices are pleasing to God because he offers the best (firstborn) of his flock. This symbolizes having the right intent and offering quality and value in one’s offering to God—thus, aiming toward what is highest.

In contrast to his brother Abel, Cain’s offerings are not acceptable to God. This is because, unlike Abel, Cain is not offering the best of himself but is “holding something back, failing to put his best foot forward” (117). In addition, Cain reacts to his failure with resentment and anger rather than seeking to do better, which “amplifies his rebellion” (118). God tells Cain that “sin is crouching at [his] door” (117), symbolizing that Cain has actively welcomed evil into his soul. These details drive home the point of the story, that “life more abundant requires a complete and total commitment, with every glance, with every word, with every action” (129). The story also reveals the seeds of a more interior, psychologized understanding of sacrifice, in which the essence of sacrifice is intent rather than result.

Instead of accepting personal responsibility for his actions, Cain tries to “shape the entire world in the image of his inadequacy” and, in anger and resentment, kills his brother Abel (131). In doing so, Peterson says that Cain illustrates the opposite of what we are called to do: to try to rise above our failures by aiming higher, in the process honoring and reflecting the moral order.

Before the killing, Cain compounds his failures by arrogantly questioning God himself, manifesting the sin of pride. In light of this turn in the story, Peterson stakes a claim that “the deepest of moral requirements” is “to hold life and God to be good—no matter what” (134). As God states to Job later in the Bible, humans are “in no position to question the fundamental order of reality” (134). God responds to Cain that the fault is in his own soul: in his acquiescence to evil. This causes Cain to become “even more unhappy and vengeful” because God is telling him that he is “fully and completely to blame” for his failure and misery (140).

Cain kills Abel in a most manipulative and hypocritical manner, after inviting him to sacrifice together with him. In destroying “God’s favorite,” Cain also destroys “his own ideal,” the person he most aspired to be. Thus, inherently, Cain is also destroying himself, “all that is holding him together” (141). His sin causes a deep estrangement from God and society, symbolized by his subsequent banishment.

God, in response to the murder, curses Cain to a nomadic and fugitive life of hard toil, banished to the land of Nod. Although God attempts to forestall further evil by marking Cain, Cain’s children and descendants continue to walk in his corrupt footsteps, murdering and introducing war into the world, illustrating not only the corruption of the soul but also the “degeneration of the state” and the cycles of revenge that have marked human history (144), according to Peterson. In a more immediate sense, Cain’s sins lead to the next episodes of evil in the Bible.

After the story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve have another son, named Seth, who is regarded as a righteous replacement for Abel and whose line would include King David and Jesus. Peterson attempts to explain an obscure passage in which Genesis speaks of the generation of Seth as including “giants” (Nephilim). Here, Peterson argues that the Nephilim represent men of heroic exploits who were later memorialized in the collective memory: Their gigantic stature is thus figurative rather than literal. This is an instance in which history is “fictionalized,” in the sense of bringing forth an embodiment of meta-truths (See: Index of Terms) in story form. One of the Nephilim, and therefore a “model for admiration and emulation” (159), is Noah.

Cain’s descendants fall into sin, and the dominance of evil becomes so great that God decides to destroy the human race through a flood—a motif that runs through other ancient myths such as the Mesopotamian Enuma elish. Peterson claims that this trope illustrates the truth that “we subvert the spirit of proper order at our peril” (163)—particularly if we rebel against the tradition that sustains us. This theme was reflected later by such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche (the “death of God” motif) and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Noah is characterized as a just man who found favor with God, and for this reason, he is chosen to bear the “entire weight of the world’s renewal” when the flood comes (168). Noah’s election reflects the “terrible truth” that “the salvation of the world itself depends […] on the determination of each sovereign individual, touched by the spirit of divine worth” (169). Further, truth itself is so strong that a tyrannous majority cannot prevail against it.

For Noah, belief in God is primarily an action and commitment: a realization of the need to “batten down the hatches” when the storm comes and to act with courage in the face of the unknown (171). Noah’s faith reflects the sense of believing as “truly and usefully to commit to; to sacrifice everything to; to be voluntarily possessed by” (171). In building the ark to contain his family and animals, Noah shows technical ability but, more importantly, character: “humility, wisdom, goodness and productive generosity” (176), all of which reflect the image of God. Like Adam, Noah is called to be a steward of creation, and he serves as an example to us in this regard, too. In his righteous actions, Noah illustrates that “the honest sacrifice of the wise and good man is what forever forestalls the apocalypse” (181).

At the end 40 days and nights of flooding, Noah exits the ark, and God, pleased with Noah’s sacrifice, renews his covenant with humanity, sealed by the appearance of a rainbow.

After the flood is over, Noah celebrates with his family, drinks too much, and falls asleep naked in his tent. His son Ham sees this and gossips about it to his brothers, who refuse to join in Ham’s mockery and instead respectfully cover their father’s nakedness. Ham’s mockery continues the evil tendencies of Cain, and the story shows the importance of respecting one’s parents and tradition. Noah lives long after this episode, and his descendants are successful seafarers. Peterson says that this drives home the success that follows an upward-aiming life that respects tradition and the word that is God.

The story of the Tower of Babel recounts how a prideful and arrogant group of people—descendants of Cain and of Ham—build a ziggurat, or stepped pyramid, that appears to reach to the heavens. The function of this sort of building in the history of ancient peoples such as the Babylonians has been well studied, and it often served the “celebration of the ego of a given ruler or people” and “could devolve pathologically into the worship of a false god” (193). The story warns against the dangers of hubris and the “Luciferian intellect” that seeks to use technology to prideful and evil ends. This is a theme that has been reflected in a great deal of subsequent literature and fiction, showing its continuing relevance especially in modern times.

The story of Icarus in Greek mythology echoes some of the themes of intellectual pride present in the story of the Tower of Babel. Anthropologists have described instances of tyranny and subsequent social collapse among tribes of animals including chimpanzees, episodes that echo similar events in the human world of dictators and regimes. The distinctive feature of the human stories and myths is that God is proclaimed to be “the transcendent being” who is opposed to prideful authority and proposes “productive upward-aiming dialogue, negotiation” as alternatives to arrogance and tyranny (217).

The story of the Tower of Babel recounts that, following the building of the tower, God punishes the builders’ pride by scattering them and causing a breakdown of their language into multiple mutually unintelligible languages. Peterson reflects on the importance to human beings of communication and shared concepts and assumptions, which form a “shared rock of certainty” that makes dialog and action possible (219). Finding points of agreement is the first necessary step on the road to peace and reconciliation in many walks of life. However, Peterson claims that in the present day, this sense of shared truth is breaking down, even when it comes to the most basic concepts (like male and female), leading to ideological “war.” Peterson stakes a claim about the message of the story of the Tower of Babel: “If the technological enterprise aims itself at something deviating too far from the necessary psychological and social ideal, […] even the possibility of communication vanishes” (220).

Peterson links modern disagreement about basic human concepts with a pride rooted in “the unquestionable primacy of self-definition”—a right that belongs to God alone—and a childish and selfish “subjugation to the grip and immediacy of instinct” and “[t]he whim of the moment” (221). Such “immediate demand of the short-term self” is both personally and socially dangerous (225). Language and communication become confused and impossible as a necessary consequence, as illustrated in the story of the Tower of Babel. Indeed, God’s action in the story is not so much punishment or vengeance as divine truth asserting itself and curbing Luciferian destruction.

Peterson asserts that the moral of the story of the Tower of Babel is that humanity must not claim the right to question the fundamental moral order, or “all is lost.” One cannot “play God” without making the ultimate sacrifices. Without absolute moral standards, it makes no sense to call some actions (the Holocaust, for example) evil, and there is ultimately no reason to follow a virtuous life.

When all standards collapse, the result is a destructive relativism, an “all-too-convenient shrugging off of all moral obligation” and “the maintenance of an increasingly toxic immaturity and self-centeredness” (231-32), which is equivalent to “the totalitarian state.” In such states, the effects are similar to the story of the Tower of Babel: a breakdown of communication and an atmosphere where lies have replaced truth.

Peterson contrasts this with the unifying spirit of God, recapping the functions and guises in which God appears in the stories recounted thus far in the book. Part of the reason why Cain’s descendants idolized technological mastery is that Cain had been “marked” and thus excluded from God’s presence. In the absence of God, he and his progeny had to find a substitute. In Peterson’s analysis, the path from Adam and Eve’s initial sin of pride to the subsequent sins of Cain and Babel is a straight line.