Cain draws food out of the ground, but the name “Abel” is derived from the word for “mist”, evoking the imagery of clouds from heaven. Sacrifice and offering is a heaven-earth relation wherein creatures of earth ascend up the steps of the sacrificial altar to commune with the God of Heaven. Scripture suggests that in addition to being the “earth” in the heaven-earth pair, the human race replicates heaven and earth relations internally. And in being patterned in the appropriate mode of relationality in internal human relations, mankind becomes disposed to appropriate relation to God externally.
We also see a number of examples of upwards and downwards language in Genesis 4 that underscores the nature of the crisis as a crisis in relation between heaven and earth. God had promised that the serpent would “eat dust.” Thus the serpent is “Sin” which is “crouching” at the door (Genesis 4:7). Cain’s face has “fallen” (Genesis 4:6). He seeks to exalt himself towards heaven when Cain “rose up against his brother” and killed him (Genesis 4:8). But the voice of Abel cries up to God “from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). Cain has rebelled up towards heaven, horizontally towards his brother, and receives judgment from the ground.
3. Genesis 6:1-4 describes the union of the sons of God and the daughters of Man. We again see a replica of the basic archetype of heaven-earth relations. The sons of God are heavenly beings who descend in predatory marriages with the daughters of Man. This is the complete inversion of the original pattern. Originally, the divine Breath of Heaven unites with the feminine dust of the ground to bring forth Adam. Now, the heavenly sons of God unite with the daughters of Man to bring forth the nephilim. The world has been turning over for the entirety of human history until this point of its complete inversion.
The flood restructures the world to restore the appropriate relation between heaven and earth. Noah is called and given the pattern of the ark. The precision of the blueprint anticipates the same degree of precision used to provide the blueprint for the tabernacle (Genesis 6:14-22, Exodus 25-31). Moses went up into God’s Heaven to receive the blueprint of the tabernacle- so also are we told that Noah “walked with God” (Genesis 6:9), a phrase which recalls the description of Enoch, who had been taken into Heaven (Genesis 5:21). Noah takes the trees of the ground and shapes them into the pattern of what he beheld in Heaven- the ark, which is an idealized representation of the creation. The flood deconstructs the world in reverse order from its original creation in Genesis 7, and then reconstructs it in Genesis 8 in the order of the original creation. The ark “floated on the face of the waters” (Genesis 7:18ff), recalling the language of the Spirit’s hovering over the deep in Genesis 1:2. And when “God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark” (Genesis 8:1) the world is reborn step by step. The ark, having been raised up to the peak of the world, never descends. It “came to rest on the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4) and Noah “removed the covering of the ark” (Genesis 8:13). The word used for “covering” here is related to the word for “Mercy Seat” or “Covering” which signifies the link between heaven and earth, the bright golden lid on God’s footstool.
The world is constituted out of a complex set of relations mirroring heaven and earth at every level. From Adam to the Nephilim, the ordering of creation was twisted until it was inside out. But through Noah, heaven is placed in appropriate relation to earth again and the world is born again from the dead.