The Jews living as captive refugees in foreign Babylon protested what they heard and saw there by compiling their own stories of how things had come to be as they were. Eden, Cain, and Abel are at their core protest stories, mythology rooted in dissent from Multi Earth ways.
But in addition to saying “No” to Babylon and empires, these stories also plotted a new direction for themselves. Living under Babylon’s Multi Earthers, the Jews saw anew the wisdom of the One Earth worldview. “How had they gotten so far away from it?” they wondered. Shunning the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation story in which humans and empires rise out of acts of violence among the gods, the Jews told stories that reconnected their own origins to an incredibly good Creation brought forth by powerful, nonviolent words of the Creator. They compiled Genesis as their anthology of their origins, including origins of what went wrong.
Once I knew how and where the Eden, Cain, and Abel stories came to be, I recognized them as stories that know our situation today. The authors had lived in the bitterness of Multi Earth conquest more deeply than I have. They knew what it feels like to be living in the Multi Earth culture of a superpower and having to listen to its self-justifying stories. The stories they created in protest then, energize my turning from the Multi Earth story today and to make the story for One Earth living more fully my own.
And now, I’d love to hear your comments on how retelling the stories of Cain, Abel, and Eden in this way radically reorients their significance for you facing the macro-issues today.