Music is unavoidable. On an average day just about anywhere in the world, one encounters music, even in the simplest forms, from street performers with home-made instruments in developing countries to sold-out stadiums with star-studded ensembles to the ubiquitous and oft-annoying jingles heard on advertisements across our media. Writing in 1909, German scholar Carl Heinrich Cornill declares:
Music belongs to the inalienable rights of man. It is the effort to make one‘s self intelligible to his fellow men by means of the stimulation of sounds of all kinds. Music exists wherever men are found upon earth and everywhere they show a genuine refinement in the discovery of means by which to originate sounds. There is hardly anything that can not be brought into use for its purposes.1
But from where did music originate? Two theories emerged from antiquity, one with roots in Greek reason and mythology and the other from Genesis 4.2 It will be the assumption of this article that the account in the first book of the Pentateuch, chronicling the invention of musical instruments by Jubal, a descendant of Cain, is historically accurate and true.
This article will attempt to present the invention of musical instruments as described in Genesis as an apologetic for three key ideas: the presence of common grace, music as an essential development by image-bearers in God’s good creation, and the sober reality that mere technological progress, while a fulfillment of the cultural mandate, is not enough to solve humankind’s deepest needs.
Common Grace and the Cultural Mandate
It is not the purpose of this article to argue, in detail, the Mosaic authorship of Genesis. However, it is the assumption here that Jesus’s affirmation of the pen of the patriarch is correct (John 5:46). John Walton characterizes this position: “The founder of Israel is the most probable person to transpose its national repository of ancient traditions into a coherent history in order to define the nation and its mission.”3 Writing to the people of God as they emerged out of Egypt, Moses, having been schooled in the finest of Egyptian educations (Acts 7:22), sought to reframe their thinking away from the myths and origin stories they undoubtedly imbibed from centuries in this pagan land and that characterized the surrounding nations and reorient them toward God’s revelation of himself as Creator and Lord.4 “The purpose of the Torah in this section,” Umberto Cassuto writes, “is to teach us that the whole world and all that it contains were created by the word of the One God, according to His will, which operates without restraint. It is thus opposed to the concepts current among the peoples of the ancient East, who were Israel’s neighbors, and in some respects is in conflict with certain ideas that had already found their way into the ranks of our people.”5 Walton concurs, asserting that “Moses of necessity would have given Israel its prior history, meaning and destiny as well as its laws. Every political and/or religious community must have a memory of history that defines and distinguishes it.”6
In telling Israel her own origin story, embedded in the larger origin story of the human race (including the fall in the garden in Genesis 3), Moses’s narrative continues through the first part of Genesis as a parallel story whose antecedent is in the protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15: “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel” (CSB). Emerging with Cain’s murder of his brother Abel in Genesis 4, the subtheme of human violence continues to develop until it culminates in the flood narrative in Genesis 6–9 (though one might argue that it continues as a subtheme throughout Scripture until John’s Revelation about the end of the age). As Derek Kidner affirms, “Chapters 1–11 [of Genesis] describe two opposite progressions: first, God’s orderly creation, to its climax in man as a responsible and blessed being, and then the disintegrating work of sin, to its first great anti-climax in the corrupt world of the flood, and its second in the folly of Babel.”7
The clash between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent is brought into sharp relief in the dual geologies presented in Genesis 4 and 5. Cain’s rebel lineage (Gen. 4:17–22) is contrasted with the righteous line of Seth (Gen. 4:25–5:32), Abel’s divinely appointed surrogate. This narrative advances toward the wickedness of the former overtaking the latter in Genesis 6, necessitating God’s saving and cleansing action in the judgment of the flood.
For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the line of Cain and, specifically, the invention of musical instruments by his pagan progeny. Genesis 4 details humankind’s dual descent, both into further depravity and further innovation. It is the former that often occupies our attention, but the latter is just as important, chronicled as it is by Moses in Genesis 4:19–22:
Click Here to Read More (Originally Published at Equip the Called: Artistic Theologian)
Daniel Darling is an author, pastor and Christian leader. Prior to his leadership of the Land Center and faculty role at Texas Baptist College, Darling served as the Senior Vice President for Communications of the National Religious Broadcasters. He also has served the Southern Baptist Convention as the Vice President of Communications at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
