Caín by José Saramago
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Portuguese Midrash

Saramago’s Cain is a traditional Midrash, a meditative, speculative commentary on the Torah, the first five books of the Jewish and Christian bibles. Despite its often comedic, mostly polemic assessment of the God of the Torah, conventionally ascribed to Moses, Saramago isn’t the first or the most strident critic to take seriously the personality of Yahweh and what it might imply for humanity and the rest of creation.

The most remarkable aspect of the work isn’t its content but its use of a time-travelling Cain who can peek in on various biblical episodes from Abraham’s preparation to murder his son Isaac, to the annihilation of the residents, children included, of Sodom and Gomorrah, to Joshua’s divinely sanctioned genocide of the Midianites and their neighbours, to the pointless torture of Job, to all of the gore and dispossession in between. Cain therefore has a sort of synoptic view, to anticipate the New Testament term, from which he reports the violence, irritability, irrationality, ruthlessness, injustice and simply arbitrary imposition of misery on the world by the Lord.

The character of the God of the Torah has been problematic since at least the time of Christ. For Christians, because the intellectual and moral chasm between the perpetually vengeful Yahweh and the perpetually loving Father of Jesus appears to be unbridgeable. For Jews, because by the time of Christ the rabbinate was preaching a sermon of love and forgiveness almost indistinguishable from the gospels of Jesus.

From time to time, theologians have attempted to square this divine circle by claiming mitigating circumstances - the distinctly illiberal caste of ancient cultures, for example, or the possible inability of human minds to deal with the full monty of revelation all at once. None of these rationalisations work out terribly well, mostly they just open the way for a free for all interpretation of ‘inerrant’ scripture and further heresy; or they promote the equally worrisome idea of ‘continuing revelation’ which neither dogmatic Jews or Christians - with the exception of the Mormons - can tolerate.

The second century heretic Marcion took some understandable action - not long after the publication of the love-imbued (and anti-semitic) Gospel of John - by simply rejecting the Jewish scriptures in their entirety. The Protestant reformer, John Calvin, took the opposite tack and preached the justified vengeance of a wilful and arbitrary God on a sin-infected, unworthy creation.

The only time the controversy subsides is when believers simply choose to ignore the all too obvious contradictions. Catholics do this as a matter of principle, accepting both divine love and vengeance as a ‘mystery’, thus putting the problem beyond recognition much less discussion. Liberal rabbis generally grab for the nearest shibboleth on the inscrutability of the divine mind.

And this equivocation is something Saramago will not tolerate. The God of the Torah is clearly insane. This would be only a dogmatic issue of sectarian importance if it weren’t for the fact that this God has been a perennial role model of leadership from Joshua to Donald Trump - you’re with me or against me; there is no qualified loyalty; nothing stands in the way of achieving one’s personal objectives; ruthless persistence at any cost is a virtue, etc. This is a God who justifies violence and deceit and patent injustice as a matter of divine right. Cain summarises the situation:

“Burning sodom and gomorrah to the ground had evidently not been enough for the lord, for here, at the foot of mt sinai, was clear, irrefutable proof of his wickedness, three thousand men killed simply because he was angered by the creation of a supposed rival in the form of a golden calf. I killed one brother and the lord punished me, who, I would like to know, is going to punish the lord for all these deaths, thought cain, lucifer was quite right when he rebelled against god, and those who say he did so out of envy are wrong, he simply recognised god's evil nature.”

This is the God of War and very little else. Saramago wants us to remember this.


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