Does anyone think Cain is still out there somewhere today?
Im not 100% sure it was Cain, but seems like I recall someone else from biblical times that was cursed by God and God said he will be forced to walk the earth until Jesus comes again…I cannot remember who this was though…anyone know who Im referring to?
It is curious to wonder if someone out there in our world today is this person!!!..Just imagine all they have seen and experienced? WOW…Im assuming they would not want to draw attention to themselves, so they would probably not advertise or even admit to this.
There’s an LDS folkloric account to the effect that Cain is still alive and is…Bigfoot. No joke. That particular legend is interesting because, even though the Cain-is-alive part of it dates back to the 19th century, it had a big revival in popularity following the LDS church’s split from its previous views about black people (because they believe that the Mark was dark skin), when the incorporation of the Bigfoot element served as kind of a way to syncretize the Cain stories with existing folklore that had less of a racist connotation. My biggest critique of the dark-skin theory is that part of Cain’s curse was that he would no longer be able to farm the land as he had before, and since it’s certainly plain enough to see that Africa (and African people) has had and still has flourishing agricultural regions, it just doesn’t go together. Cain is even bigger a villain in the Book of Mormon et. al. because he’s also used as a cheap device for Joseph Smith to attack secret societies (Cain taking the title of Master Mahan, which is probably a deliberate corruption of the term “master mason” in Freemasonry), so he’s said to have contracted with Satan to “murder and get gain”, the whole brother-killing thing being rather secondary to the narrative.
My parents are converts to Mormonism and they don’t appreciate my suggestions as to why I have the worst luck at gardening anyone has ever had (me being the heathen non-Mormon)…
But the theory that Cain is still alive doesn’t really have much weight no matter which religion you look at it through. The curse was not that he could not be killed, it was that if he was killed, clearly leaving open the possibility that he could be, he would be avenged sevenfold (die, become awesome band, seems not so bad!). The Book of Enoch gives an account of him being accidentally killed by his great-great-great grandson, Lamech, who was blind and shot Cain with an arrow when he was far off. That is an apocryphal account, but the same story is alluded to in Genesis 4, where Lamech refers to the curse again, saying “if Cain is avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy-seven times.”
The first of the Lost Books of Adam and Eve says that the Mark is a “trembling and quaking”, as the earth shook when Cain attempted to bury Abel.
