Related articles and links |  1 of 6

The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism
By Regina M. Schwartz
Univ. of Chicago Press
211 pp.; $22.95

If the power of a book is measured by its ability to keep readers captive and stimulate thought, Regina M. Schwartz has written a powerful book. Some of its power lies in the accessible and often intriguing style, characterized by strong metaphors and stark contrasts. But style will captivate and stimulate only if it keeps offering treasures of content.

The treasure of Schwartz's book is that of a provocation. No doubt the book will make some people furious, partly because, for all its fundamental flaws, it exposes a disturbing underside of lived monotheistic faiths. Even after the dust kicked up by a strenuous debate with her has settled, her main thesis will continue to challenge both Christian thought and practice. What about the Canaanites? What about all those peoples slaughtered so that God can offer the infant Israel, just born out of the Egyptian slavery, a land flowing with milk and honey?

With these disturbing questions, Schwartz sets out on a journey to explore "the biblical sources" of national conflicts, racial hatreds, and ethnic divisions. At the center of her interest lies the relation between monotheism and identity. The subtitle states her thesis most tersely: "The Violent Legacy of Monotheism." She explains, "Whether as singleness (this God against the others) or totality (this is all the God there is), monotheism abhors, reviles, rejects, and ejects whatever it defines as outside its compass." Given that the belief in one God "forges identity antithetically," it issues in a mistaken notion of identity ("we are 'us' because we are not 'them'") and contributes to a violent practice ("we can remain 'us' only if we obliterate 'them'").

Why does belief in one God forge identities antithetically? one could ask, wondering whether the chain with which Schwartz connects violence to monotheism might lack a crucial link. And why is the claim to distinctive identity sufficiently important to spawn violence? The answer, argues Schwartz, lies in the principle of scarcity—the belief that everything is in short supply and must be competed for. This principle, too, is rooted in biblical monotheism, we are told. "Scarcity is encoded in the Bible as a principle of Oneness (one land, one people, one nation) and in monotheistic thinking (one Deity), it becomes a demand of exclusive allegiance that threatens with the violence of exclusion."

The story of Cain and Abel provides Schwartz with the key to the evils of monotheism. She calls it a story of "original violence." Unlike the story of original sin, though, the story of original violence does not suggest that we kill because Cain did, but that we kill for similar reasons. Without stating so explicitly, however, Schwartz implies that, at another level, the story of Cain and Abel is a story of original sin, with this twist: the sinner is not Cain but his divine Maker. We kill because God did something wrong, argues Schwartz. Cain was enraged by God's arbitrary decision to accept Abel's sacrifice and reject Cain's; we all kill because of the same arbitrariness of the one God of the Bible. "What kind of God is this who chooses one sacrifice over the other? This God who excludes some and prefers others, who casts some out, is a monotheistic God—monotheistic not only because he demands allegiance to himself alone but because he confers his favor on one alone."

Just as in the story of Jacob and Esau some "unexplained scarcity makes a human father have only one blessing to confer but two sons to receive it," so also in the story of Cain and Abel "some obscure scarcity motivates a divine Father to accept only one offering from two sons." Thus the one God of the Bible, the God of exclusive identities and artificial scarcities, is an instigator of the violence so pervasive in the Western world.

next page... |  1 of 6

April 27 1998, Vol. 42, No. 5