Cain and Abel

Translation notes

Etymology

"Cain" and "Abel" are English renderings of the Hebrew names. Eve's words at Cain's birth (Genesis 4:1) pun on the verb קָנָה (qānâ, "to acquire" or "to get") and the name קַיִן (qayin, "Cain"). Robert Alter and Victor Hamilton both hold that the name itself means "smith" (as in blacksmith), as in Aramaic and Arabic, also attested by Cain's descendant Tubal-cain, described as the first metalworker in Genesis 4:22. However, apart from the assonance, further links between the verb and the name is unlikely, since Hebrew names are often associated with words that sound alike regardless of meaning.

The text does not explain "Abel", as it does "Cain". McKeown suggests this is because the meaning would have been transparent to the original audience. הֶבֶל (hebel) means "breath" or "vapour" and is the word translated "vanity" in the refrain of Ecclesiastes; McKeown, Alter and Waltke connect it with the brevity of Abel's life.

Context of the story

Abel, the first murder victim, is sometimes seen as the first martyr, while Cain, the first murderer, is sometimes seen as an ancestor of evil. Some scholars suggest the pericope may have been based on the Sumerian myth Enlil Chooses the Farmer-God, in which the shepherd-god Emesh and the farmer-god Enten bring their dispute over which of them is better to the chief god Enlil, who rules in favor of Enten (the farmer).

Some scholars view the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel to be about the development of civilization during the age of agriculture; not the beginnings of man, but when people first learned agriculture, replacing the ways of the hunter-gatherer. It has also been seen as a depiction of nomadic conflict, the struggle for land and resources (and divine favour) between nomadic herders and sedentary farmers. However, Hamilton argues that such readings do not fit the narrative because conflicts of the ancient world set nomads of the steppe against urban agricultural societies which kept their own livestock, and in this narrative the farmer Cain is driven into nomadism and ends as the founder of the first city. John H. Walton argues that the occupations are not the source of conflict; they explain the choice of offerings. He points out it is God's response to the offerings that causes the conflict. Walton compares the Sumerian tale of Dumuzi and Enkimdu, in which a shepherd god and a farmer god compete for the favour of the goddess Inanna. McKeown agrees with Walton's comparison and adds that such tensions are only background to a story concerned with acceptance by God. Walton notes brotherly conflict is a rare motif in ancient Near Eastern literature. The Tale of Two Brothers (Egyptian) is the most well-known example. However, since its conflict is over a wife, Walton concludes that the surviving literature of the region offers no close parallels to Cain and Abel.

The academic theologian Joseph Blenkinsopp holds that Cain and Abel are symbolic rather than real. Like almost all of the persons, places and stories in the primeval history (the first eleven chapters of Genesis), they are mentioned nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, a fact that for some scholars suggests that the history is a late composition attached to Genesis to serve as an introduction. The date is also disputed: the history may be as late as the Hellenistic period (first decades of the 4th century BCE) or as early as the 9th-8th centuries BCE, but the high level of Babylonian myth behind its stories has led others to date it to the Babylonian exile (6th century BCE).

Family tree

The following family tree of the line of Cain is compiled from a variety of biblical and extra-biblical texts.

Sisters/wives

Some early commentators have speculated that Cain and Abel had sisters, usually twin sisters, although this is not attested in the text. According to Rabbi Joshua ben Karha as quoted in Genesis Rabbah, "Only two entered the bed, and seven left it: Cain and his twin sister, Abel and his two twin sisters."

Hebrews

Hebrews 11:4, makes a brief reference to the Cain and Abel story:

By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain's. Through this he received approval as righteous, God himself giving approval to his gifts; he died, but through his faith he still speaks.

In Hebrews 11, a chapter on heroes of faith, Abel is cited as the first example. Ben Witherington notes that the original text in Genesis does not say that Abel's sacrifice was greater, nor that he had faith. F. F. Bruce held that it was superior because of the faith and righteousness of the one who offered it. The statement in Hebrews that Abel "still speaks" may refer to the wording in Genesis 4:10 that the blood of Abel was crying from the ground, which Hebrews 12:24 contrasts with the blood of Jesus that "speaks a better word than the blood of Abel". In Matthew 23:35 the span from "the blood of righteous Abel" to the blood of Zechariah represents all righteous blood shed. This representation could be either chronological or canonical.

1 John

Cain and Abel are also referred to in 1 John 3:12:

Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous.

This is 1 John's only direct reference to the Old Testament, using the same verb (ἔσφαξεν, esphaxen) used of sacrificial slaughter, perhaps implying that the murder was an even less acceptable sacrifice than Cain's offering. The verb also means "slaughtered" or "butchered" in a brutal way. 1 John traces Cain's hatred to the devil, which recalls Jesus's description of the devil in John 8:44 as "a murderer from the beginning". On Stott's reading the motive the letter gives is jealousy of Abel's greater righteousness. The description of Cain as "of the evil one" may indicate that the Johannine circle interpreted Cain as the prototypical murderer from Satan.

Jude

The Epistle of Jude warns against false teachers who "walked in the way of Cain and abandon themselves to selfish gain" (Jude 1:11). This uses the image of Cain in the Jewish tradition as the archetypal sinner leading others to sin. Bauckham proposes that if the letter was written when the Targumic picture of Cain as a denier of divine judgment was already current, Jude may also be implying that his own opponents (the false teachers referred to in the verse) similarly denf future judgment and use it as licence for immorality.

The "other" and exclusion

Modern theologians such as Miroslav Volf interpret Cain and Abel as an account of how people come to exclude others. Following Claus Westermann, he argues that because its genre is primeval history, it is a description of the human condition, and so cannot be used by one group to cast its opponents as "Cain". He concurs with René Girard that the narrative is told from the victim's side and condemns the perpetrator, but also protects the perpetrator from the victim's revenge through the mark placed on Cain.

The offerings

Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell.

Both brothers bring a מִנְחָה (minḥâ, "offering" or "tribute"), which is the word later used for the grain offering of Leviticus 2:1–16. Walton notes that in principle there was nothing wrong with Cain's offering of grain, since such offerings were common in the ancient world. The Genesis account does not say why one offering was accepted and the other was not. Various explanations have been offered over the centuries: that what grows of itself is a more fitting sacrifice than what has to be cultivated (Josephus); that Cain's produce, unlike Abel's firstlings, was not first fruits (Ibn Ezra and Philo, as well as the Midrash); that God disapproved of farming because it tied a man to one place (Hermann Gunkel); and that Cain was miserly or stingy. Hamilton observes that all of these are attempts at theodicy, a rational defence of God's conduct, and suggests that "perhaps the silence is the message itself": the fault may have been an inward attitude known only to God, which he takes to be the reading of the New Testament.

Gerhard von Rad proposed that Abel's offering was preferred because it involved blood. Bruce Waltke rejects this view because the minḥâ is a bloodless offering in the Pentateuch. He, as well as McKeown, point to the different descriptions of the offerings: Cain brings "some of the fruits" with no indication that they were the first or the best, while Abel brings fat portions from the firstborn of his flock. Waltke calls Cain's sin "tokenism".

The narrative of Cain and Abel is the first of a series of examples of the Bible's subversion of the practice of primogeniture, where the firstborn is the heir.

"Sin is crouching at the door"

The LORD said to Cain, “[...] sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it.”

Robert Alter says that the opening clause is so elliptic in the Hebrew that "any construal is no more than an educated guess". Hamilton calls God's warning to Cain "one of the hardest verses in Genesis to translate and to understand". Difficulties include the pairing of a feminine noun for "sin" with a masculine participle. E. A. Speiser theorises that the participle רֹבֵץ (rōbēṣ) comes from the Akkadian rābiṣu, which is a demon believed to lurk at the entrances of buildings. Walton mentions that alternatively, in earlier Akkadian texts the rābiṣu was an official with a judicial role. However, due to the mention of sin's desire to master Cain, he finds the demonic sense more probable. Waltke interprets the image as sin depicted as a demon or a vicious animal lying in wait, possibly alluding to the serpent of Genesis 3:15.

The rest of the verse ("Its desire is for you, and you must rule over it.") echoes the previous chapter of Genesis. The same word is used for sin's "desire" toward Cain as for the woman's desire for her husband in Genesis 3:16. Furthermore, the verb for Cain's mastering sin is the one used there of the husband ruling over her. The Hebrew verb can be read as a promise ("you shall master it"), a command ("you must") or an invitation ("you may"). Hamilton notes that all these versions preserve Cain's ability to choose.

"Am I my brother's keeper?"

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?”

The fraternal relationship between Cain and Abel is emphasized in the text. Waltke notes the word "brother" is used seven times in Genesis 4:2–11, and Alter notes that the victim is twice called "his brother" at the murder and repeatedly "your brother" in God's accusation. Miroslav Volf cites Ellen van Wolde in observing that Abel is repeatedly called Cain's brother while Cain is never called Abel's brother.

The first half of Cain's reply ("I do not know") is a lie and the second half is a rejection of God's question. The word translated "keeper", שֹׁמֵר (šōmēr, "keeper" or "guardian"), was taken by David Daube to be a legal term for a person entrusted with the custody of something. Waltke points out the irony of Cain later fearing for his life, because no one will be "his keeper".

The interrogation scene is part of a pattern started in Genesis 3. First, there is God's question ("Where is Abel your brother?"), similar to his question to Adam, "Where are you?" (Genesis 3:9). Then, both Adam and Cain face a curse involving the ground, and then both are sent away from God's presence to the east of Eden. Alter finds here the start of a biblical pattern in which history is a cycle of "approximate and significant recurrences". The verb used for the cry of Abel's blood in Genesis 4:10 is the one used elsewhere of the cry of the oppressed, such as the Israelites in Egypt.

Punishment, the mark and Nod

In Genesis 4:11–16, Cain's punishment is to be נָע וָנָד (nāʿ wānād, "a wanderer and a fugitive"); both words describe aimless swaying movement. The name of the land where he settles, Nod, comes from the same root, so that the wanderer comes to live in the land of wandering. Cain's reply in Genesis 4:13 (“My punishment is greater than I can bear.”) is a double entendre, and can be read either as a complaint that his punishment is too heavy to bear, or as an admission that his iniquity is too great to be forgiven.

The mark placed on Cain is a sign of protection and not the stigma suggested by the English idiom "mark of Cain". The text does not specify what or where it was. Waltke suggests it could have been a protective tattoo. "Whoever finds me will kill me" could refer to the practice of blood feud, in which the clan avenged a murdered member, as in the Middle Assyrian laws.

Who else might have found Cain, and where his wife came from, is a popular question. Hamilton notes that critical scholars see in it evidence that the Cain and Abel story was once independent of the Adam and Eve narrative, but himself prefers to take Cain's wife and potential killers as his own siblings. McKeown sees this as "further evidence that the narrator was not answering the sorts of questions that people ask in the 21st century but was addressing issues of his own generation, and any attempt to provide one would be speculative and debatable".

Latter-day Saint interpretation

The Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price describes the seed of Cain as "black" (Moses 7:22), without explicitly stating whether this description is symbolic or literal. While some early church leaders interpreted this to imply that all people of African descent were descendants of Cain (for example, Brigham Young taught that The Mark of Cain could be seen "on the countenance of every African" and used this interpretation as part of the rationale to bar Black men from priesthood ordination in the 19th and 20th centuries), the modern leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has formally disavowed such teachings. An official Church statement on race declares that the Church "disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse" and affirms that "all are alike unto God" (2 Nephi 26:33).

In Latter-day Saint theology, Cain is considered to be the quintessential Son of Perdition, the father of secret combinations (i.e. secret societies and organized crime), as well as the first to hold the title Master Mahan meaning master of [the] great secret, that [he] may murder and get gain.

Sethian interpretation

In the Apocryphon of John, a work used in Sethianism, Cain and Abel are Archons, being the offspring of the lesser god or Demiurge called Yaldabaoth, placed over the elements of fire, wind, water and earth. In this narrative their true names are Yahweh and Elohim, but they are given their earthly names as a form of deception.

Hermetic interpretation

A treatise on Christian Hermeticism, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, describes the biblical account of Cain and Abel as a myth, in that it expresses, in a form narrated for a particular case, an "eternal" idea. It argues that brothers can become mortal enemies through the very fact that they worship the same God in the same way. According to the author, the source of religious wars is revealed. It is not the difference in dogma or ritual which is the cause, but the "pretention to equality" or "the negation of hierarchy."

Serpent seed interpretation

The serpent seed interpretation for Cain being capable of murder is that he may have been the offspring of a fallen angel or Satan himself, rather than being from Adam. This is rejected by mainstream theologians because the first sentence in the narrative (Genesis 4:1) describes Cain being conceived by Eve with Adam.

Cultural references

Citations

Bibliography

• Alter, Robert (2008). The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393070248.
• BDB, Francis Brown; Samuel Rolles Driver; Charles Augustus Briggs (1997) [1906]. The Brown Driver Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon: with an appendix containing the biblical Aramaic; coded with the numbering system from "Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible" (7. print. ed.). Peabody: Hendrickson. ISBN 978-1565632066.
• Blenkinsopp, Joseph (2011). Creation, Un-creation, Re-creation: A Discursive Commentary on Genesis 1-11. New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark. ISBN 978-0-567-37287-1.
• Byron, John (2011). Cain and Abel in Text and Tradition: Jewish and Christian Interpretations of the First Sibling Rivalry. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. ISBN 978-9004192522.
• Craig, Kenneth M. Jr. (December 1999). Shepherd, David; Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia (eds.). "Questions Outside Eden (Genesis 4.1-16): Yahweh, Cain, and Their Rhetorical Interchange". Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. 24 (86). SAGE Publications: 107–128. doi:10.1177/030908929902408606. ISSN 1476-6728. S2CID 170152565.
• Day, John (2021). "Problems in the Interpretation of the Story of Cain and Abel". From Creation to Abraham: Further Studies in Genesis 1-11. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 78–97. ISBN 978-0-567-70311-8.
• Doukhan, Abi (2016). Biblical Portraits of Exile: A Philosophical Reading. Oxon: Routledge. ISBN 978-1-4724-7241-0.
• García Martínez, Florentino (2003). "Eve's Children in the Targumim". In Luttikhuizen, Gerard P. (ed.). Eve's Children: The Biblical Stories Retold and Interpreted in Jewish and Christian Traditions. Themes in Biblical Narrative. Vol. 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. pp. 27–45. ISBN 978-9004126152.
• Gmirkin, Russell E. (2006). Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus. Bloomsbury. ISBN 9780567134394.
• Hendel, Ronald (2012). "Historical Context". In Evans, Craig A.; Lohr, Joel N.; Petersen, David L. (eds.). The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation. BRILL. pp. 51–81. ISBN 978-90-04-22653-1.
• Kramer, Samuel Noah (1961), Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C.: Revised Edition, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 978-0-8122-1047-7 {{citation}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)
• Kugel, James L. (1998). Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as it was at the Start of the Common Era. Cambridge, Massachusetts [u.a.]: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674791510.
• Kugler, Robert; Hartin, Patrick (2009). An Introduction to the Bible. Eerdmans. ISBN 9780802846365.
• Luttikhuizen, Gerard P., ed. (2003). Eve's Children: The Biblical Stories Retold and Interpreted in Jewish and Christian traditions (Vol. 5 ed.). Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. ISBN 978-9004126152.
• Mann, Steven T. (September 2021). Shepherd, David; Tiemeyer, Lena-Sofia (eds.). "Let There Be Cain: A Clash of Imaginations in Genesis 4". Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. 46 (1). SAGE Publications: 79–95. doi:10.1177/0309089221998390. ISSN 1476-6728. S2CID 238412495.
• Najman, Hindy (2003). "Cain and Abel as Character Traits: A Study in the Allegorical Typology of Philo of Alexandria". In Luttikhuizen, Gerard P. (ed.). Eve's Children: The Biblical Stories Retold and Interpreted in Jewish and Christian Traditions. Themes in Biblical Narrative. Vol. 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers. pp. 107–118. ISBN 978-9004126152.
• Sailhamer, John H. (2010). The Meaning of the Pentateuch: Revelation, Composition and Interpretation. InterVarsity Press. ISBN 9780830878888.
• Schlimm, Matthew R. (2011). "Part 3. In Search of A Brother's Keeper: Anger and Its Antitheses in Genesis – Ethics outside Eden: Cain and Abel". From Fratricide to Forgiveness: The Language and Ethics of Anger in Genesis. Siphrut: Literature and Theology of the Hebrew Scriptures. Vol. 7. University Park, Pennsylvania: Eisenbrauns, imprint of Penn State University Press. pp. 135–143. doi:10.5325/j.ctv1bxgwgm.15. ISBN 978-1-57506-224-2. S2CID 209438529.
• Schwartz, Howard; Loebel-Fried, Caren; Ginsburg, Elliot K. (2004). Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism. Oxford University Press. p. 447. ISBN 978-0195358704.
• Zucker, David J. (February 2020). "My Punishment Is Too Great to Bear: Raising Cain". Biblical Theology Bulletin. 50 (1). SAGE Publications on behalf of Biblical Theology Bulletin Inc.: 7–21. doi:10.1177/0146107919892839. ISSN 1945-7596. S2CID 213466632.