Cain and Abel

In the biblical Book of Genesis, Cain^[a] and Abel^[b] are the first two sons of Adam and Eve.^[1] Cain, the firstborn, was a farmer, and his brother Abel was a shepherd. The brothers made sacrifices, each from his own fields, to God. God had regard for Abel's offering, but had no regard^[2] for Cain's. Cain killed Abel and God cursed Cain, sentencing him to a life of transience. Cain then dwelt in the land of Nod (נוֹד, 'wandering'), where he built a city and fathered the line of descendants beginning with Enoch.

In the Qur'an, Cain and Abel are known as Qābīl (Arabic: قابيل) and Hābīl (هابيل), respectively. The events of the story in the Qur'an are virtually the same as the Hebrew Bible narrative. Both brothers offered individual sacrifices to God; God accepted Abel's sacrifice and rejected Cain's; out of jealousy, Cain slew Abel – the first case of murder committed upon the Earth. In Islam, the story of Cain and Abel serves as an admonition against murder, and promotes the sanctity of human life.

The story of Cain's murder of Abel and its consequences is told in Genesis 4:1–18:^[3]

Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, "I have produced a man with the help of the Lord."^[i] Next she bore his brother Abel.^[ii] Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, 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 countenance fell. The Lord said to Cain,

"Why are you angry,
and why has your countenance fallen?
If you do well,
will you not be accepted?
And if you do not do well,
sin is lurking at the door;
its desire is for you,
but you must master it."

Cain said to his brother Abel, "Let us go out to the field."^[iii] And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.

Then the Lord said to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" He said, "I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?"^[iv] And the Lord said, "What have you done? Listen; your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground! And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand.^[v] When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth." Cain said to the Lord, "My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me." Then the Lord said to him, "Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance." And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.

Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch.

— Book of Genesis, 4:1–18^[4]

Cain and Abel are traditional English renderings of the Hebrew names. Cain (Hebrew, Kayin), derives from kinyan, or acquisition. Abel (Hebrew, Hevel) means empty, vain, or transitory.^[5]

The story has interpretations. 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 a Sumerian story representing the conflict between nomadic shepherds and settled farmers.^{[citation needed]} Modern scholars typically 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.^[6] 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.^[7][8]

The academic theologian Joseph Blenkinsopp holds that Cain and Abel are symbolic rather than real.^[9] 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.^[10] The date is also disputed: the history may be as late as the Hellenistic period (first decades of the 4th century BCE)^[11] or as early as the 9th-8th centuries BCE,^[12] but the high level of Babylonian myth behind its stories has led others to date it to the Babylonian exile (6th century BCE).^[13][14] A prominent Mesopotamian parallel to Cain and Abel is Enlil Chooses the Farmer-God,^[15] 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,^[16] who rules in favor of Enten (the farmer).^[17]

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The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in 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.

— Hebrews 11:4, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition^[18]

The story of Cain and Abel appears in the Quran 5:27–31:^[19]

[Prophet], tell them the truth about the story of Adam's two sons: each of them offered a sacrifice, and it was accepted from one and not the other. One said, 'I will kill you,' but the other said, 'God only accepts the sacrifice of those who are mindful of Him. If you raise your hand to kill me, I will not raise mine to kill you. I fear God, the Lord of all worlds, and I would rather you were burdened with my sins as well as yours and became an inhabitant of the Fire: such is the evildoers' reward.' But his soul prompted him to kill his brother: he killed him and became one of the losers. God sent a raven to scratch up the ground and show him how to cover his brother's corpse and he said, 'Woe is me! Could I not have been like this raven and covered up my brother's body?' He became remorseful.

— The Quran, translated by Muhammad Abdel-Haleem

The story of Cain and Abel has always been used as a deterrent from murder in Islamic tradition. Abdullah ibn Mas'ud reported that Muhammad said in a hadith:^[20]

No soul is wrongfully killed except that some of the burden falls upon the son of Adam, for he was the first to establish the practice of murder.

Muslim scholars were divided on the motive for Cain's murder of Abel, and why the brothers were obliged to offer sacrifices to God. Some scholars believed that Cain's motives were jealousy and lust. Both Cain and Abel desired to marry their sister, Adam's beautiful daughter, Aclima (Arabic: Aqlimia'). Seeking to end the dispute, Adam suggested that each present an offering to God. The one whose offering God accepted would marry Aclima. Abel, a generous shepherd, offered the fattest of his sheep as an oblation to God. But Cain, a miserly farmer, offered only a bunch of grass and some worthless seeds. God accepted Abel's offering and rejected Cain's—an indication that Abel was more righteous than Cain, and thus worthier of Aclima. As a result, it was decided that Abel would marry Aclima. Cain would marry her less beautiful sister. Blinded by anger and lust for Aclima, Cain sought to get revenge on Abel and escape with Aclima.^[21][22]

According to another tradition, the devil appeared to Cain and instructed him how to exact revenge on Abel. "Hit Abel's head with a stone and kill him," whispered the devil to Cain. After the murder, the devil hurried to Eve shouting: "Eve! Cain has murdered Abel!" Eve did not know what murder was or how death felt. She asked, bewildered and horrified, "Woe to you! What is murder?" "He [Abel] does not eat. He does not drink. He does not move [That is what murder and death are]," answered the Devil. Eve burst into tears and started to wail madly. She ran to Adam and tried to tell him what happened. However, she could not speak because she could not stop wailing. Since then, women wail broken-heartedly when a loved one dies.^[23] A different tradition narrates that while Cain was quarreling with Abel, the devil killed an animal with a stone in Cain's sight to show him how to murder Abel.^[24]

After burying Abel and escaping from his family, Cain married and had children. They died in Noah's flood among tyrants and unbelievers.^[25]

Some Muslim scholars puzzled over the mention of offerings in the narrative of Cain and Abel. Offerings and sacrifices were ordained only after the revelation of Tawrat to Moses in Islam. This suggested to some scholars, such as Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib, that the sons of Adam, as mentioned in the Quran, are actually two Israelites, not Cain and Abel.^[24]

In the Apocryphon of John, a work used in Gnosticism, 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.^[26][27]

Allusions to Cain and Abel as an archetype of fratricide appear in numerous references and retellings, through medieval art and Shakespearean works up to present day fiction.^[28]

The serpent seed explanation 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.^[29][30][31]

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."^[32]

There were other, minor traditions concerning Cain and Abel, of both older and newer date. The apocryphal Life of Adam and Eve tells of Eve having a dream in which Cain drank his brother's blood. In an attempt to prevent the prophecy from happening the two young men are separated and given different jobs.^[33]

Like other prominent biblical figures, Cain and Abel appear in many works of art, including works by Titian, Peter Paul Rubens and William Blake.

Multiple plays allude to the story. In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, the characters King Claudius and King Hamlet are parallels of Cain and Abel.^[34] Lord Byron also rewrote and dramatized the story in his own play Cain (1821), viewing Cain as symbolic of a sanguine temperament, provoked by Abel's hypocrisy and sanctimony.^[35] The 2008 Danish stage play Biblen discusses and reenacts various Biblical stories, including Abel's murder by Cain.^[36]

Many novels feature the characters, or are closely based on them. Miguel de Unamuno's 1917 novel Abel Sánchez: A Story of a Passion is a re-telling of the Cain and Abel story.^[37] John Steinbeck's 1952 novel East of Eden (also a 1955 film) refers in its title to Cain's exile and contains discussions of the Cain and Abel story which then play out in the plot.^[38] James Baldwin's 1957 short story, "Sonny's Blues", has been seen as alluding to the Cain and Abel story.^[39][40] Author Daniel Quinn, first in his novel Ishmael (1992) and later in The Story of B (1996), proposes that the story of Cain and Abel is an account of early Semitic herdsmen observing the beginnings of what he calls totalitarian agriculture, with Cain representing the first 'modern' agriculturists and Abel the pastoralists.^[41] José Saramago's 2009 novel Cain (novel) is a ironical re-telling of Cain's history.

They have also featured in television series and, allegorically, in film. In Dallas (1978), Bobby and J.R. Ewing have been described as variations of Cain and Abel.^[42] More direct references include the appearance of Cain and Abel as characters in DC Comics since the 1950s. In 1989, Neil Gaiman made the two recurring characters in his graphic novel series The Sandman.^[43] In Darren Aronofsky's allegorical film Mother! (2017), the characters "oldest son" and "younger brother" represent Cain and Abel.^[44]

The Bruce Springsteen song "Adam Raised a Cain" (1978) invokes the symbolism of Cain.^[45] It is also the title of a season 2 episode of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.^[46]

American heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold has a song called Chapter Four (2003) which is based on the story of Cain and Abel.^[47] American heavy metal band Danzig has a song named Twist of Cain which lyrically is inspired by the story of Cain and Abel.^[48]

• Biblical figures in Islamic tradition
• Biblical narratives and the Qur'an
• Debate between sheep and grain, Sumerian creation myth that has been compared to the story of Cain and Abel
• Debate between Winter and Summer, Sumerian creation myth that has been compared to the story of Cain and Abel
• Nabi Habeel Mosque, considered to be the burial-place of Abel
• Seth, third son of Adam and Eve

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Kugler, Robert; Hartin, Patrick (2009). An Introduction to the Bible. Eerdmans. ISBN 9780802846365.
• 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
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• Aptowitzer, Victor (1922). Kain und Abel in der agada: den Apokryphen, der hellenistischen, christlichen und muhammedanischen literatur (Vol. 1 ed.). R. Löwit.
• Glenthøj, Johannes Bartholdy (1997). Cain and Abel in Syriac and Greek writers: (4th – 6th centuries). Lovanii: Peeters. ISBN 978-9068319095.
• A Practical Christian Commentary on Cain and Abel by Friedrich Justus Knecht, London, B. Herder (1910)

• Media related to Cain and Abel at Wikimedia Commons
• Texts on Wikisource:
  • Bible (King James) / Genesis 4
  • Book of Moses, Chapter 5 in Pearl of Great Price
  • Cain
  • Abel

• Genesis 4 (KJV) at BibleGateway.com
• Story of Cain and Abel in Sura The Table (Al Ma'ida) Archived 2013-11-13 at the Wayback Machine
• Rashi on Genesis, Chapter 4, by Rashi
• Sanhedrin 37b, Sefaria