The Cursed People

The Kenite hypothesis and the Jewish “Cain complex”

In my post “Jesus to Israel: ‘Get behind, Satan!’” I argued that, by sanctifying old tales of tribal genocides, and claiming that the corresponding war code is the eternal Word of God, Israel has turned itself into a pre-civilization fossil. A better metaphor, perhaps, is that the Hebrew Tanakh functions as a primitive computer software which cannot be updated, and has programmed in the collective psyche of Israel an inflexible prehistoric mentality or semi-nomadic pastoral raiders.

But it’s worse than that. Israel is not just your average pre-Bronze-age fossil or program. Something very peculiar must have happened in the infancy of this Yahweh-worshipping federation of tribes, something of a traumatic nature. For reasons I will explain, I call it the Cain complex. This expression is a deliberate reference to the Oedipus complex that Freud projected on all mankind (Totem and Taboo, 1913). Not that I believe in the Freudian theory of a universal psychopathological pattern resulting from an original prehistoric murder. Rather, I will suggest that such a theory came into the mind of an introspective Jew, because it does have some truth for Jews. Jewish identity is, among other things, the impression of being under the influence of an ambivalent collective fatum or karma going back thousands of years: what Jews rationalize as being a people “chosen” by God, they also perceive as a burden or a curse. Leon Pinsker has given a smart expression of this ambivalence when he wrote that the Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred” (Auto-Emancipation, 1882). And Theodor Lessing approaches the same idea when he claimed that all Jews without exception suffer from some degree of self-hatred (Jewish Self-Hatred, 1930). If the theory I am about to present is correct, then the Jewish delusion of chosenness — clearly a psychopathological symptom —, is the manifestation of a sense of cursedness, by a process Freud called “compensation”.

Before I proceed, I wish to preclude the usual objection that today’s Jews are not genetically descended from the Biblical Israel. The kind of transgenerational determinism I have in mind has little to do with genetics. Jewishness is a cultural matrix, or a cognitive force field, which may have absorbed different populations at different stages. While there is an ancestral dimension to Jewishness, it need not necessarily go back a hundred generations for every Jew.

(Christians are themselves affected by this force field, simply by the importance they have given to Ancient Israel in their own identity. The Christian doctrine of original sin is, for that matter, an expression of Jewishness.)

So here we go.

According to the so-called “Kenite Hypothesis”, the Mosaic cult of Yahweh originated from a semi-nomadic tribe of coppersmiths, the Kenites (Qayn). Moses’s father-in-law was a Kenite, according to Judges 1:16. He is named Hobab there, but Jethro in Numbers 18:1 and in most of Exodus, except in Exodus 2:18 where he is called Reuel. We’ll call him Jethro.

The Book of Exodus records the following:

- Moses’ father-in-law Jethro was a priest, or kohen (2:16 and 18:1).

- It was while herding Jethro’s goats that Moses found himself on Yahweh’s “holy ground” (3:5).

- It was Jethro who “offered a burnt offering” to Yahweh when Moses and Aaron came back from Egypt, which makes him, by definition, a sacrificial priest of Yahweh (18:12).

- It was Jethro who instructed Moses how to organize the tribes politically (18:19-25): “Now, listen to me,” Jethro told Moses, “and I will give you some advice, that God may be with you.” The passage concludes with: “Moses followed the advice of his father-in-law and did all that he had suggested.”

- It was Jethro’s daughter Zipporah (Moses’s wife) who performed circumcision on their newborn son, to save him from Yahweh’s wrath (4:24-26).

The Kenites are not presented as being part of the Israelite tribes, but are closely and uniquely associated to them, and in particular to the tribe of Judah:

- In the Book of Judges, the “The sons of Hobab the Kenite, father-in-law of Moses, marched up with the sons of Judah from the City of Palm Trees into the desert of Judah lying in the Negeb of Arad, where they went and settled among the people” (Judges 1:16).

- In the First Book of Samuel, the Kenites share with the Israelites the booty of the Amalekites (1Samuel 15:6, 30:26-29).

According to 1Chronicles 2:55, the Kenites are “descended from Hammath, father of the House of Rechab.” This makes them identical or kindred to the Rechabites, of whom we know two things:

- Jonadab the son of Rechab stands at the side of the Judean general Jehu when he exterminates the priests of Baal in the northern kingdom of Israel (2Rois 10);

- the prophet Jeremiah commends the Rechabites for their fidelity to Yahweh and to their ancestor’s pledge not to “drink wine, build houses, sow seed, plant vineyards or own them, but [to] live in tents all your lives” (Jeremiah 35:6-7). This sounds like a recognition of the Rechabites as the remnant of an archaic age of Yahwism.

As I said, Moses’ father-in-law is a Kenite according to Judges 1:16, but he is called a Midianite in Numbers 10:29, and a “priest of Midian” in Exodus 3:1 and 18:1. The scholarly consensus is that Midian was a region rather than a specific people, and that the Kenites were a tribe living in Midian. The Israelites apparently had a special alliance with the Kenites, but not with the rest of the Midianites, who were supposedly exterminated on Moses’ order in Numbers 31.

Midian is located in the northwest Arabian Peninsula, on the east shore of the Gulf of Aqaba. It is a region rich in copper, and copper was mined there by the Egyptians from the end of the 14th century BCE. The name of the Kenites (Qayn) actually means “blacksmith” or “metal-worker”.

Their skill in copper or bronze metallurgy is consistent with the hypothesis that they worshipped a god coming from a volcano, as Exodus 19:16-19 makes quite clear. Northwest Arabia happens to be a volcanic area, unlike the Egyptian peninsula which later mistakenly came to be named Sinai (explorer Charles Beke was the first to point this out in Mount Sinai a Volcano, 1873). Israeli Biblical scholar Nissim Amzallag is of the opinion that Yahweh was originally a god of metallurgy worshipped by semi-nomadic copper smelters between the Bronze and the Iron Ages.[1] In that case, Moses’s major innovation to the Kenites’ religion was to build a wooden chest (the Ark) and a tent (the Tabernacle) to carry their god to Canaan.

But here is where the Kenite hypothesis becomes interesting and possibly enlightening about the inborn character of Israel.

As a rule in the Torah, peoples bear the name of their supposed ancestor: just like the Edomites are named Edom, the Kenites are simply named Cain (Qayn). It is therefore surmised that the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4 is adapted from an etiological myth of the Kenites. The myth explained the Kenites’ wandering lifestyle as resulting from of a divine curse for the fratricide committed by their eponymous ancestor Cain on his younger brother. Yahweh said to Cain:

“What have you done! Listen: your brother's blood cries out to me from the soil! Therefore you shall be banned from the soil that opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it shall no longer give you its produce. You shall become a restless wanderer on the earth.” (Genesis 4:10-12)

However, Yahweh’s curse is balanced by a special protection: “‘Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.’ Yahweh puts a mark on Cain, so that no one coming across him would kill him” (4:15). One of Cain’s descendants, Lamech, changed the rule to seventy-sevenfold vengeance (4:24).

The descendants of Cain are described as tent-dwellers, inventors of copper and iron metallurgy, and makers of musical instruments (4:19-24).

Jewish-British scholar Hyam Maccoby has suggested that other biblical stories and laws may have derived from Kenite folklore and traditions, but the evidence for that is thin.[2]

The third brother Seth, conceived by Adam and Eve as a substitute for the dead Abel (Genesis 4:26) was not part of the Kenite myth. He was added to the story by a biblical redactor who, on second thoughts, decided to give the tribes named as descendants of Cain an alternative, blameless ancestor. This is the likely explanation for why the names of Seth’s children in Genesis 5:6-32 are a rough copy-and-paste of the names of Cain’s children’s in Genesis 4:17-18.

The general picture we can form based on this scriptural material is that the Kenites were a semi-nomadic tribe known for their skill in copper and brass work, but also feared, not only because metallurgy was a secret art often associated to magic, but also because they had a reputation — which they used as protection — for being extremely vengeful. It is quite plausible that, as keepers of a secret art associated to the cult of a jealous god, they cultivated a rigid tradition of separateness.

The legend of the fratricide committed by their eponymous ancestor suggests that they explained their wandering lifestyle and their strict separateness as a divine punishment for an original fratricide, which would also instills in them a collective paranoia.

The parallel between the story of Cain and Abel and the story of Jacob and Esau, in which Jacob cheats his elder brother of his birthright, also suggests the possibility that the Kenites’ ethnogenetic myth was appropriated by the Israelites, who reinterpreted the divine curse as a divine election. It may even be that in a primitive version of the Jacob and Esau story, Jacob killed Esau and later wrestled against Esau’s ghost in the form of an angel at the ford of the Yabboq (Genesis 32).

The Cain and Abel story also strongly resonates with the Egyptian myth of Osiris’s murder by his younger brother Seth. In his treatise on Isis and Osiris, Plutarch echoes an Egyptian belief that Jerusalem was founded by Seth, the donkey-headed god — hence the rumor, mentioned by Apion (as reported by Flavius Josephus in Against Apion), as well as by Tacitus (Histories), that the Jews worshipped a golden donkey’s head in their temple.

Finally, it is also interesting to recall that, when he was adopted by a Kenite priest, Moses was himself a murderer on the run: “Looking this way and that and seeing no one in sight, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Exodus 2:12).

It may seem improbable that a people would attribute their nomadic and separate lifestyle to a divine curse, but there are other examples. Yuri Slezkine mentions some ethnic groups of wanderers who conceived their mode of existence “as divine punishment for an original transgression.” For example, “of the many legends accounting for the Gypsy predicament, … the most common one blames the Gypsies for forging the nails used to crucify Jesus.”[3] This is an interesting parallel to the Christians’ blame on the Jews for having crucified Jesus, and to the Christian myth of the Wandering Jews.

Should we then seek the secret source of Jewish psychology in a “Cain complex” dating back to a primordial fratricide, like Freud seeking the key to the human psyche in a universal Oedipus complex dating back to a primordial parricide?

Whatever truth there is in that theory, it is interesting to think of the Jews’ assertion of their being chosen by God as a compensation for a deep-seated belief in their being cursed by God. The implications of that hypothesis are immense, both for understanding the Jews and for dealing with them.

Cain attracted Abel in the field by deception and murdered him (Genesis 4:8). Since individuals stand for peoples in the Torah, this can be interpreted as a tribe exterminating a kindred tribe (as the Israelites did to the Midianites). From that time, the genocidal tribe lived haunted by the guilt, the sense of being cursed, the fear of being themselves exterminated in retribution, and the need to both deceive and build a reputation of extreme vengefulness in order to preclude that possibility. Another name for the Cain complex would be psychopathy.

In the next post, I will explore the hypothesis that these psychopathological traits became epigenetically ingrained, in part, through the eighth-day circumcision of every male, which, based on Exodus 4:24-26 (Zipporah circumcising her newborn son, so that Yahweh would not kill him), can be interpreted as a substitute for the sacrifice of every firstborn son.

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[1] Ariel David, “Jewish God Yahweh Originated in Canaanite Vulcan, Says New Theory,” Haaretz, April 11, 2018, on haaretz.com.

[2] Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner, Thames & Hudson, 1982, pp. 13-51.

[3] Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 22-23.