Sacred Foe: About the Face of Exemplary Evil

Abstract

This essay aims to summarize and explore two issues that, in the exegetical and representational traditions of the biblical text, have triggered a myriad of semiotic intelligences. First, the nature of Cain’s face at the moment of the sacrifice refused him by the Lord, a face variously interpreted as angry, sad, dejected, depressed, dark. Second, the nature of the sign imposed by God on Cain following Abel’s fratricide. After exploring Jewish and Christian exegesis, ancient and modern, with some reference to contemporary narrative versions (and especially to Saramago’s Cain), the reflection will turn to the question of whether this kind of exegetical questioning can be part of the objects of a discipline like semiotics, the modern science of signs.