Béatrice Bizot, Violence et fraternité. Une lecture du récit de Caïn et Abel, préface d’Olivier Artus. Bruxelles - Bern - Berlin - New York - Oxford - Wien, Peter Lang, 2022, 14,8 × 22 cm, 224 p., ISBN 978-2-87574-655-9

For centuries, our world had been marked by violence in its cruel and destructive dimensions. In our time, the war between Russia and Ukraine and the battle between Israel and Hamas show us that violence does not diminish in any way. These conflicts were caused by those who are near and dear to one another. It is relevant, therefore, to go back to the beginning of the Bible in order to examine how violence emerges within the context of a fraternal relationship. This is what Béatrice Bizot, a professor of the Bible at the Catholic University of Paris, tries to do in her book which results from the dissertation she defended at the same university. Using Genesis 4 as referent text, Bizot formulates the question of her research as follows: why did the biblical authors choose fraternity as a framework to talk about violence for the first time? (p. 18) Before giving her own opinion, Bizot shows her dissatisfaction with what was said by other biblical scholars (p. 159-160). On the one hand, Bizot does not think that Gn 4 serves as an explanation or a justification of the violence that took place in so many families in the first book of the Bible. Thus, the etiological function of the text is rejected. On the other hand, Bizot does not agree with the idea of looking at Gn 4 as a starting point of several fraternal conflicts which progressively end up with a possible reconciliation. According to our author, Cain and Abel are introduced as brothers in the story but their fraternal relationship is not the main focus. Each of them presents himself in an individual manner to God who looks at the offering of one and then of the other without paying attention to their relationship. Following Paul Ricoeur, Bizot considers fraternity not as a given of nature, but as an ethical project (p. 162-163). In other words, it is not enough to be born of the same parents to be brothers and sisters of one another. One needs to learn how to become a brother or a sister. In this sense, it is important to observe the role of God’s intervention in this story. In fact, fraternity is not placed under the authority of human parents, but that of God. His constant presence helps Cain know how to become a brother even at the moment when his brother is no longer there. It is God who establishes Cain as a brother, namely as the guardian of his deceased brother. Thus, God allows Cain to discover himself as a brother, not simply in a biological sense, but in an ethical one: to be a brother of someone is to be responsible of him or her. And violence in all this? For Bizot, violence is not caused by the difficulties related to the fraternal relationship since this relationship is not described as such at the moment of crisis (p. 163). The biblical authors do not place the beginning of violence in the context of a fraternal relationship. Of course, the conflict happens to two biological brothers, but this conflict is not rooted in their relationship as brothers. Violence emerges therefore outside fraternity. In any event, human beings are helpless in the face of violence which is related to an obscure power (roveṣ [croucher], cf. Gn 4:8), present under an animal form, over which neither God nor human beings have a complete control (p. 200). But how does violence emerge in the human life? Relying on the Masoretic text, Bizot wonders about the absence of the complement after the verb …