CAIN AND ABEL BROTHER HOW TO
Mercifully, a crow lands nearby and begins pecking the ground, showing him how to bury the body. In this particular rendition, the son who kills his brother can’t even manage to dig a grave, so he leaves his brother’s lifeless body in the dust.
Here the emphasis is on the fact that this first murder was fratricide. The Qur’an speaks not of Cain and Abel but of Adam and Eve’s two sons. Through his forceful denial, he also gave birth to a new and depraved logic hell-bent on distorting the truth. It is not just that Cain killed his brother, there in the presence of a living world that had borne witness to his act. When God asks Cain where his brother Abel is, Cain replies, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” This reply continues to resound into the present, disillusioning those who have dedicated themselves to the task of mending the world. On the other hand, we can all agree on the world’s most immoral utterance, found of course in the Bible. Perhaps this is why we have so little faith in civilization: We will never know the world’s most moral words. With its heat, morality alters the air it touches, melts iron, gives glass its shape, changes the way you caress another living being.
Morality stokes reason back to life, finds its tongue anew in those flames. Because morality is an ember that burns eternal. Will never know the world’s most moral words.Įven if we read every last volume in every last library, including those rescued from fire and destruction, even if we shared in the wisdom of every last sage, dervish, philosopher, poet, and saint, every profound word would waste away in the afterglow of the next, each consumed by the light of the others. This is an abridged and edited translation of an essay that appears in Sema Kaygusuz’s book of essays The Tree Between Us (Aramızdaki Ağaç ), published by Metis Yayinlari in February 2019.