Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Cain and Abel

So, I'm going back through the Remembering The Kanji book, and I get to #61 Stubborn (beginning+head):
The root of all stubbornness goes back to the beginning, with two brothers each stubbornly defending his own way of life and asking their God to bless it favorably. Abel stuck to agriculture, Cain to animal-raising...
Now, I'm not a Christian, but even I can immediately spot what's wrong with this.

Their jobs are reversed.
Genesis 4, verse 2
2: And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
This is a big deal. In Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Cain complains that the reason Abel was favored was because God was a carnivore. Cain is the vegetarian.

This is out of the 4th edition of Heisig's book (the 1st is ©1977); it boggles my mind that his hasn't been corrected.

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