After all, his moral dignity, of course, could only be enjoyed by Abel and no one else. This means that in this respect it was completely indifferent to Cain whether Abel possessed or did not possess any spiritual wealth, but if it happened that God began to help him and he became rich in material goods, then this is a completely different matter, because Cain could also use both God's help and material goods. In view of this, expecting the future material success of his brother, he hated him, and, perhaps, in view of the real successes of Abel, killed him. He killed a man who was in the same need of God's help as he was, and to whom therefore God could give His mighty help as if to his imaginary detriment; he eliminated the pretender to God's help, so that he himself would be the only contender for it.

Obviously, Cain's religious views were so far from the truth that only the decisive enslavement of the spirit to the material interests of life can to some extent explain these views in the first son of Adam. Yet these views were typical of natural human thought, because, depending on man's actual position in nature as one of the things of nature, the necessary content of man's world outlook can obviously be created only by thinking of man's necessary relations to world being, while the world of these necessary relations is in reality limited only by the world of material being. Consequently, the whole essence of the human worldview can naturally be reduced to only one simple consideration: since nature must be fought, it must be conquered. And in order to really be able to conquer it, it is necessary to know with certainty what exactly exists in the world and how it is easiest and most certain to make everything that exists a useful possession of man.

But the point is that helpless ignorance, powerless to create the idea of God, nevertheless has sufficient power to compel man to pray to God, and therefore religion in reality not only necessarily expresses the moral world view of the human person, but can also express the rational and utilitarian world view of man as a thing.

Cain created a religious attitude towards God precisely in the sense of this means, and as a result of this he no longer merely fell on the path to his true goal, but he laid the foundation for a complete falling away from God.

It goes without saying that at that remote time, when the first foundations of culture were just being laid, every step taken by man in his liberating struggle with nature undoubtedly cost him enormous efforts, and therefore there is nothing surprising in the fact that man naively extolled each of his significant successes in this field to the extent of a miracle, i.e. the product of divine power. However, such miracles were actually attributed to God only as long as man was conscious of being weak and helpless. When he felt himself sufficiently secure and could not only fight for life, but also enjoy life, all material success was for him a special kind of stage, on which he could climb only for the self-satisfied elevation of himself. Thus, for example, Cain needed God and desired to worship Him, because without the special assistance of His almighty power he did not even hope for the simple preservation of his life (Gen. 4:13-14). On the other hand, one of his immediate descendants, content with his wealth, and strong in the invention of metal tools of brass and iron, could proudly proclaim that he could defend himself seventy times better than Almighty God could have done for him, v. 19-24, cf. 15. In this boastful statement of the self-righteous Lamech there is evidently a direct mockery of man's faith in God and of the truth of religious service to God. Obviously, to the extent that people ceased to need God, they no longer wanted to think about Him, because they had no moral relationship to Him. And the Biblical information really reveals to us "the great corruption of men on earth" (Gen. 6:5). There was a time when people stopped thinking about their purpose in the world. They disdainfully rejected the religious and moral tasks of life and reduced all their vital interests only to physical contentment, to the desire for coarse pleasures and to the free satisfaction of these desires; so that, according to the Biblical expression (Gen. 6:3), they were flesh, and there was absolutely nothing in them that could point to the truth of their descent from the all-wise and all-perfect God. According to the Biblical account, at that time in the entire human race there was only one family that had not yet had time to submit to the instincts of animal existence and could still disturb people a little more by reminding them of God (Gen. 6:8-10). But even this one family would undoubtedly have perished in the waves of general corruption, unless, as the Bible asserts, God Himself had not intervened in the history of mankind and washed the defiled earth with the waves of the flood, in which everything perished that lived in vain and that threatened even to destroy God's work in the world.

According to the Biblical account, God saved only the righteous family of Noah from destruction, and even this only family He saved only conditionally. God only freed Noah's family from the harmful influence of depraved people, and even God Himself could not take it out of the world of contradictions or restore for it the normal conditions of primitive life of people, because Noah was not the conqueror of evil, but on the contrary – the conqueror of evil, and therefore the salvation of his family, thanks to the external assistance of divine omnipotence, in view of the obvious senselessness of the entire history of mankind from the time of Adam to the Flood, it would be absolutely correct to condemn God's truth and love as an obvious injustice and obvious ill-will towards all lost humanity. For by relying on His omnipotence, God could certainly have prevented the fall of the first people, but He did not want to suppress their freedom, because it was not for Him to disfigure His own image in people, and after the fall of the first people, He could certainly have taken away all Adam's children and, immediately after their birth, put them in the same conditions of life. in which Adam was before his fall; but He did not want to allow the man He created to be really created in vain, and that even in His remote descendant He would not conquer the evil which He allowed to triumph over Him.

Meanwhile, Noah did not overcome evil any more than all the other righteous men who had walked with God before him and struggled with evil and departed from the world without seeing salvation. In view of this, it is quite understandable that God revealed His salvation to Noah precisely in the sense of freeing him from the corrupting influences of the environment, because He undoubtedly saved not Noah personally and his family, but people in general, that is, He generally saved His eternal thought about man.

For this salvation, God chose such a means that allowed Noah to stand almost in the primitive conditions of moral life. Noah was commanded to save not only his family, but also all kinds of animals, so that during the flood he was obliged to feed the animals and take care of them and then set them free (Gen. 6:19-21; 8:17), which means that in his ark Noah involuntarily repeated the story of Adam's paradisiacal life, which means that after leaving his ship, he could again begin the history of human life from that very moral moment, from which began the history of antediluvian life after God's blessing of people for the long-suffering struggle against evil. But in the new world there were the same conditions of life and the same conditions of struggle against evil in which the mankind of the antediluvian world lived. People knew the need and knew. suffering, and of necessity turned towards the physical conditions and relations of life, and of necessity found themselves in the circle of contradictions of life. In order to make it easier for people to experience these contradictions, God removed from the human conscience all those abnormalities that necessarily arise from the conditions of man's physical existence. He precisely allowed man's conquests in relation to physical nature, i.e., in addition to moral dominion over nature, He also admitted the possibility of physical domination over it. But with man's natural desire to remove from himself the very possibility of want and suffering, the real limits of necessity can easily be replaced by imaginary limits, and necessity can in fact justify man's completely free actions. From the desire to remove need naturally arises the desire for happiness, and from this desire, when it is taken as the positive goal of human life, there naturally arises the subordination of the religious-moral principle of life to the conditional interests of physical existence, i.e., there naturally arises both a complete distortion of religious truth and a decisive perversion of moral duty. It was this evil that destroyed people by the flood, and it also developed again in the modern history of mankind, and it made this history, in fact, a simple repetition of the history of a lost world. The Bible tells about the new election by God of one righteous family to preserve the truth of religious and moral covenants (Gen. 12:1-3), and about the granting by God of a special code of religious and moral laws for the people descended from the family chosen by Him, and about the embassy to this people of a whole host of chosen people for the deliberate proclamation of God's will. But all these divine interventions in the fate of human history in reality had only one meaning, that the truth of religious and moral consciousness was not extinguished in people, and even this result was achieved not so much by the moral force of the law and the convincing truth of the inspired prophetic word, as by the physical force of material rewards and material deprivations (Lev. 26:3-45; Deuteronomy 28:1-45; Judg. 2:7-15, etc.).

We already know now that such preservation of religious-moral truth was a completely natural phenomenon and, perhaps, even the only possible one, because, under the conditions of man's present situation, moral obligation in itself, i.e., pure, unconditional, had and could not have any significance for people at all. Listening to the moral requirements of the positive law, people, of course, had to judge their lives from the point of view of these requirements. But, discussing these very requirements from the point of view of their positive significance for the personal goals of human life, they saw only that "everything and everyone is the same: one fate for the righteous and the wicked, the good and the evil, the pure and the unclean, the sacrificer and the unsacrificial; both to the virtuous and to the sinner, both he who swears and he who fears an oath" (Ecclesiastes 9:2; cf. Job 21:23-26).

Therefore, any person who wished to judge his life by the judgment of God's truth could in no case free himself from the critical thought that "this is evil in everything that is done under the sun, that there is one fate for all" (Ecclesiastes 9:3); and therefore, for the sake of justifying the meaning of moral activity, he could not help thinking and could not help wishing that death should be only his natural transmigration into a new life. He could, of course, be quite at peace if he had reason to say that with the death of a person "the dust shall return to the earth, as it was, and the spirit shall return to God, Who gave it" (Ecclesiastes 12:7); for then it would have been quite clear to him that not everyone and everything has the same fate, that dead people only "in the eyes of the foolish seemed to be dead, and their departure was considered destruction, and their departure from us was destruction," but in fact "they dwell in peace" (Wisdom Solomon 3:2-3). But the teaching of the Bible is not the product of the considerations of human reason, but the true revelation of God, and it has the strongest proof of its divinity: it does not know the natural transition into a new life, it does not know immortality at all.

Of course, biblical teaching recognizes the soul as indestructible. While man's body turns to dust, his spirit, according to the biblical expression (Gen. 37:35), goes to hell, i.e. it does not cease to exist, but only leaves the sphere of living relations of existence; for in the grave there is neither work, nor meditation, nor knowledge, nor wisdom (Ecclesiastes 9:10). The souls of dead people have nothing to do with the life from which they emerged, and they have no other conditions of life at all. Therefore, together with the loss of their earthly existence, they lose the opportunity not only to take part in what is happening under the sun, but even to have a vital relationship to the living sphere of purely spiritual existence, and even to have a religious relationship to the omnipresent God: "It is not the grave that glorifies Thee," says the book of the prophet Isaiah, "it is not death that praises Thee, nor those who have descended into the grave trust in Thy mercy" (38:38). 18; cf. Ps. 87, 11-13). It goes without saying that the soul cannot lose its consciousness, and the soul of a dead person undoubtedly has it, but with the deprivation of active life, consciousness no longer creates thoughts, feelings, or aspirations, and therefore it no longer illuminates the soul, and therefore its only content under such circumstances can obviously be the very fact of the impossibility of living. the fact of death. In view of this, the afterlife of the human spirit is presented in the Bible as its removal "into the land of darkness, such as is the darkness of the shadow of death, where there is no order, where it is dark as darkness itself" (Job 10:22).

This Biblical teaching about the posthumous fate of the human spirit, in view of the absolutely correct view of religion as the positive and, in fact, the only basis of moral activity, has long caused great confusion among the apologists of the Old Testament revelation. They fully agreed that the doctrine of immortality, "so useful to every religion, and therefore contained in all systems of paganism, had been utterly discarded in the Hebrew religion," but, fearing the possible conclusion that the Jewish religion should therefore be regarded as the crudest and most base of all the religions of the ancient world, they constantly tried to invent every excuse for this alleged deficiency in divine revelation. Some, for example, believed that at the time of the appearance of the most ancient sacred books, "the human mind had not yet had time to mature for the concept of life after death"; others allowed themselves to guess that the communication of the doctrine of immortality to such a coarse people as the Jewish people "could give them a pretext for superstition"; still others, finally, simply turned to the denial of the fact, and, by all sorts of stretches, tried to prove that the Jewish religion had always preached the doctrine of the afterlife of men, and that, therefore, it was in no way inferior to all pagan religions.33 In fact, however, with the exception of the non-canonical books of the Wisdom of Solomon and the third Ezra, all the Old Testament sacred books unconditionally deny the life of man after death; And therefore it was the Jewish religion that was not only not inferior to all the other religions of the ancient world, but it was the only religion of all religions that was really the true religion, because it alone strictly and unswervingly proclaimed the perfect truth to people. It is true, of course, that with the denial of man's life after death, his moral activity loses all real value for him, but if man does not actually live after death, it would obviously be extremely absurd to demand that the Bible should maintain moral energy in men by means of the false creation of human superstition. Consequently, before making various considerations about why the biblical teaching does not speak of the posthumous life of man, it is necessary to first pose the question: is it true that man lives after death?

Both from the point of view of the biblical teaching about man and from the point of view of modern scientific knowledge about the psychophysical life of man, we can only answer this question in the negative. Both science and the Bible know about man alike – not as a spirit only temporarily settled in the temple of the material body, but as a spirit from the beginning realized in the conditions of material existence. Hence, with the abolition of these conditions, i.e., with the onset of death, it is not only the human body that undergoes decomposition, but first the man himself is dissolved into his constituent elements, and it is not the body or spirit of man that dies, but man. Consequently, he ceases to exist as a man, and consequently to speak of his life after death is the same as to speak of the life of a non-existent. In view of this, it is quite understandable that the biblical writers, being completely free from the pagan errors of human thought, in reality never thought and could not think of death as a kind of natural change in the conditions of life. In fact, they both thought and desired for themselves only salvation from death, and therefore they lived not with the hope of immortality, but only with the hope of this salvation from death: "Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither will Thy holy one see corruption" (Psalm 15:10) – this conviction of the Old Testament righteous man then served as the only justification for faith in the real rationality of life.

However, this suspicion is completely unfounded. If we are to really define the cultural-historical genesis of the idea of the resurrection, then we must also ask about Parseeism where this great idea could have arisen in it. And if such a question is posed, by a comparative study of different religions and cultures, it can be quite convincingly proved that the idea of resurrection is not really the product of the speculative work of cultured minds, but the oldest remnant of the one primitive religion of men. The fact is that, in spite of the universal predominance in mankind of the natural belief in life after death, there is, however, among all cultured and uncultured peoples of the earth a conception of death according to which it is not at all the transition of man into a new life, but, on the contrary, a temporary cessation or temporary cessation of human life. Thus, for example, in the languages of all European peoples, one and the same general view of death is conveyed quite consistently, that it is precisely only dormition = sleep, and that the dead man, in fact, is only the departed. Where could this amazing view have arisen, when in fact the same European peoples also profess a common human belief in the reality of the afterlife of people after death?