Envy and the Biblical Narratives

The scriptural texts the tradition reads for envy are the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis 4, where the offering of one brother is accepted and the other's is not; the selling of Joseph by his brothers in Genesis 37; and the Wisdom of Solomon 2:24, that through the envy of the devil death entered the world, which supplied the tradition with its identification of envy as the specifically diabolical sin. Augustine treats the envy of the devil in this way in the City of God. The demon assigned to envy in the sixteenth-century scheme is Leviathan, the sea monster of Job 41 and Isaiah 27, an assignment that has no basis in the biblical text and belongs, like the rest of that scheme, to Peter Binsfeld's classification of 1589 rather than to the theological tradition proper.

The literary critic and anthropologist Rene Girard read the Cain and Abel narrative as the founding text of his broader theory of mimetic desire, arguing that envy arises not from lacking a thing outright but from desiring what another already has because they have it, and that the violence envy provokes, Cain's murder of his brother, models a scapegoating dynamic Girard traced through myth and scripture generally; Girard's reading has been influential in modern theological and literary scholarship on the passage, though it remains one interpretive framework among several rather than the tradition's own doctrinal reading of the text.