Your e-mail message:

"Hi Boy

"Could you please open your bible and read  Genesis-chapter 4 verse 11-15.  I know that you have a masters degree in theology.  Am l right in understanding that Cain who killed his brother  Abel is still alive and a nomad ?

"Thanks

"_______"

My reply:

Genesis should not be taken as a factual account. Its meanings are not literal. The passage you indicate is about the justice of God--He will not execute criminals because they are also His children, but the criminals become outcasts and in effect punish themselves by living away from the rest of society.

Most stories in Genesis simply illustrate that there is really only one sin, the sin of disobedience.

It is quite unfortunate that most Christians read the Bible in translation and not in their original form (Hebrew for the Old Testament and koine Greek for the New Testament), and have no interest in the writing conventions of the ancient Jews.

That Cain wandered the earth as a nomad was a Hebrew writer's way of saying that he married, had children, and lived on through his descendants.

Figuratively, of course, Cain lives on because there are many who continue to kill their brothers to the present day, i.e. there is a "Cain" within each one of us.

[To the unenlightened: People who knew me since childhood and who know me in my neighborhood still call me by my childhood nicknames "Boy" and "Bojie". Hence, whenever my high school and college classmates called me on our home phone and asked for "Tony" and it was not I who answered the phone, they were immediately told, "Sorry, wrong number."]