Sororocide?

In his meditation on the births of Cain and Abel ( The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis ) , Leon Kass notes the difference between male/female and brother/brother relations.  Man and woman “are defined relative to each other, and their relationship is incited by desire seeking fusion, which in turn points forward toward offspring.”  Brothers are not complementary; though they share the same parents, they are not oriented to each other: “the relation of the sons to one another [is] rather like parallel lines, not intersecting ones,” both lines pointing backward to parents.  To be man and wife is to look ahead to children; to be brothers is to look backward to common parents.

As a result, brothers are natural rivals, not naturally complementary.  Sisters too are rivals, he admits, but the rivalry is different.  Instead of rivalry for mastery and primacy in the world, sisters (Leah/Rachel) are rivals over the power of procreation and the love of a husband.  Thus, “the prototypical story of sibling rivalry to the point of fratricide is not sex-neutral.  It is not by chance a story about brothers .”  He adds: “Very likely for the same reason, there is no special word for sister killing; ‘sororocide’ is not an English word.”

This is a very provocative line of argument, and highlights, among much else, the difficulty of healing brother-brother relations.  It is no less a miracle of the Spirit that brothers get along than that sinners are restored to fellowship with God.