Cain and Abel
The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve by William Blake.
THE SON OF SATAN AND THE WORLD’S FIRST MURDERER. HERMANN GUNKEL AND ANCIENT TALES. THE NOMADIC KENITES.
The story of Cain and Abel does not even fill a whole chapter, but it has long fascinated readers. How is it that Adam and Eve’s first son turned out to be a murderer—and what does this imply about human nature?
Expelled from the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve soon had their first children, Cain and Abel. The Bible recounts that these two sons chose different professions: Cain became a farmer and Abel a shepherd. When, one day, they decided to offer a sacrifice to God—Cain from his crops, Abel from his herds—God showed a preference for Abel’s offering, and this infuriated his brother.
So, 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?”
Hearing this deceitful (and arrogant) answer, God sentenced Cain to leave his farmland and be a wanderer on the earth. When Cain objected that this would leave him exposed to attack, God reassured him: “Anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance sevenfold.” He then gave Cain some sort of “sign”—what kind is not specified—to ward off any potential attackers. Chastened, Cain trudged off to the life of wandering to which he had been condemned.
Coming right at the beginning of human history, this story seemed to ancient interpreters to contain a lesson about our very nature. It was bad enough that Adam and Eve had been unable to keep the only commandment that God gave them, not to eat the forbidden fruit. Now, however, humanity in its second generation took a turn that was still worse: left to their own devices, this story seemed to say, some people will stop at nothing, not even murder. Yet the story had a positive message as well. Cain’s crime did not go unpunished; there is a moral order in the universe. If he did not receive the death penalty for the crime of murder (as later biblical law would dictate, Exod. 21:12), Cain was nonetheless sentenced to walk the earth forever as a homeless wanderer. The unspecified “sign” given to him came to be understood as a mark of shame, the “brand of Cain.”
All this, however, did not explain what had pushed Cain to murder his own brother. To ancient interpreters it seemed unlikely that a single little incident—Cain’s anger over God’s preference for Abel’s sacrifice—could have led him to such a drastic step. There must have been more involved. And once again, a slight irregularity in the biblical story seemed to hold a clue. At the very beginning of the story, Cain’s birth is announced in the following words:
Now the man [Adam] knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gotten a man with [the help of] the LORD.”
It was odd, to begin with, for a mother to look at her newborn baby and refer to him as a “man.” The Hebrew word ’ish is never used for a baby or even a young boy (there is nothing in Hebrew like the English hybrid “man-child,” meaning a child of the male sex). The word ’ish means a grown man, and was sometimes even used as an honorific title, “sir.” What is more, although most modern translations render the last phrase in Eve’s words as “with the help of the LORD,” the word “help” is not in the text. What the Bible literally says is: “I have gotten a man with the LORD.” But what could Eve have meant by that?
Ancient interpreters did not contemplate these problems in isolation, of course; they knew full well that Cain had gone on to murder his brother, and so of course they tried to find a connection between these puzzling words and Cain’s later sin. The conclusion that they reached was nonetheless surprising: Cain, they came to believe, was a half-human, half-angelic creature, the son of the devil.
The word ’ish, ancient interpreters knew, was sometimes also used to designate an angel (Gen. 18:2; 32:24, and so forth); thus, if Eve called her newborn son an ’ish, perhaps what she meant was that he was actually an angel, or part angel. If, in the next breath, she went on to say that she had gotten him “with the LORD,” that might help explain how a female human ended up giving birth to an angelic being. Of course, she certainly did not mean to say that God Himself was the child’s father! She must have been using “the LORD” elliptically, as a shorthand way of saying “an angel of the LORD.” (This too, interpreters believed, was not altogether unique; a wicked angel is called simply “the LORD” in Exod. 4:24.) Given Cain’s evil nature, it simply stood to reason that the angel involved was a wicked angel, indeed, none other than Satan himself.19
The only problem with this theory was that the first part of the sentence cited above seemed to say unequivocally that Adam was the boy’s father: “Now the man [Adam] knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain.” All modern readers of this text understand it to be using the biblical “know” euphemistically, as a reference to sexual relations. But perhaps not; perhaps what Adam in fact knew was that his wife had been made pregnant by someone else:
And Adam knew that his wife Eve had conceived from the angel Sammael [= Satan], and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. He was like the angels and not like humans, so she said, “I have acquired a man, indeed, an angel of the LORD.”1
Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, translation of Gen. 4:1
This interpretation of the story circulated widely in late and postbiblical times. Cain simply came to be known as the son of the devil; that was why he killed Abel—he was evil from birth. Such an understanding is reflected, for example, in the New Testament:
By this it may be seen who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother. For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning,2 that we should love one another, and not be like Cain who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.
Similarly:
Having been made pregnant by the seed of the devil . . . she brought forth a son.
Tertullian, On Patience 5:15
The details thus fit together perfectly. The whole story of Cain and Abel turned out to be a classic struggle between good and evil. Cain, born of the devil, had been wicked from the start. How could God possibly have accepted a sacrifice from Satan’s own offspring? But God’s rejection of Cain’s offering in favor of Abel’s threw Cain into a murderous frenzy; nothing could stop him from shedding his brother’s innocent blood. His punishment was altogether justified, and the story as a whole was intended to serve as a warning to later generations: anyone who allies himself with the devil will be condemned as Cain was, branded as an outcast from the civilized world.3
Cain and Abel in Modern Biblical Scholarship
One question often asked by modern scholars about the stories of Genesis is: why was this written down? Underlying this question is the notion that there is nothing in the biblical world that quite corresponds to our idea of “literature.” Books were certainly not written for individual readers to purchase and read at their leisure; but even the idea of literature, of fictional worlds visited for a time and enjoyed, is a bit out of place in the biblical world. The same is true of our idea of “history,” that is, the systematic narration of past events to give people a knowledge of what happened long ago. Stories set in the past were told, but it was usually with a specific purpose in mind, especially with texts purporting to talk about earliest times. That purpose was neither literary nor historical, at least not in our sense. The purpose was to explain the present.
The first scholar to pursue this understanding systematically with regard to the stories of Genesis was a great German biblicist, Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932).4 Gunkel came of age at a time when the Documentary Hypothesis was all the rage in biblical studies, but he found its focus too narrow and confining. The very idea of constituent documents seemed to him misplaced. Many of the Bible’s tales of Israel’s remotest ancestors must have existed long before they became part of this or that “document,” he believed. They must have been passed on orally, in some cases for generations or centuries—and in order to be preserved they must have served some purpose, and played some role, in the life of ordinary people.
Adopting a concept from the study of folklore and mythology, Gunkel suggested that many biblical narratives had an etiological character, that is, their basic purpose was to explain how things came to be the way they are now (at the time of the story’s composition).5 Thus, if the Bible relates that Abraham and Abimelech swore an oath while standing next to a certain well, that would explain why today the same place is known as Beer Sheba, since in Hebrew Beer Sheba means, or sounds like it might mean, “Well of the Oath.” Other proper names too—place-names like Bethel and Babylon and Edom, or the names of people like Abraham and Jacob and Israel and many others—all have little narratives connected with them in the Bible; the stories explain these names via some incident, something that happened in the distant past, that resulted in a person or place being called in a certain way ever after.
Etiological stories, Gunkel noted, are not limited to names. Institutions in Israelite society, such as the hereditary priesthood or the existence of prophets or the division into twelve tribes, are likewise explained in the Bible as having come about because of this or that incident in the distant past. Thus: why are there prophets—why doesn’t God speak directly to all of Israel instead of using individual chosen messengers? It all goes back to something that happened one day at Mount Sinai. So too with foreign relations: why is it that we Israelites do not get along with our neighbors the Edomites? It all goes back to the two founders of our respective nations, Jacob and Esau, and what happened when they were boys. Even the story of Adam and Eve was found to have a complex of etiological elements in it: it explained how human beings were first created, as well as why women give birth in pain and men must earn their bread through toil and snakes slither legless on the ground and there is enmity between snakes and humans—all because of some incident that took place in the distant past.
Gunkel’s etiological approach to the stories of Genesis has proven to be remarkably influential. Many subsequent scholars have come to discern an etiological purpose behind various biblical stories—including the story of Cain and Abel.
An Etiological Tale
Cain’s name in Hebrew is also the name of a tribe in the biblical world, the Kenites. (The two are spelled differently in English, but in Hebrew the spelling is the same, qayin.)20 The Kenites were not part of Israel; they were a nomadic tribe that lived somewhat to the south of Israel’s settled territory. They are mentioned in several places in the Bible—in the books of Genesis, Numbers, Judges, 1 Samuel, and 1 Chronicles. (They seem to have been closely associated with other nomadic peoples who also lived in the southland.)
According to the etiological approach of modern scholarship, a story about someone named Cain is likely to have something to do with the Kenites. Indeed, if, as is often the case with etiological tales, So-and-so is the founder and embodiment of the people or tribe or city named after him, then a story about Cain will most probably be out to explain the particular characteristics of the Kenites—what they are like (from an Israelite standpoint) and more precisely, what happened in the past to make them the way they are now.6
The story of Cain and Abel contains one piece of evidence in particular that offers some support for the idea that its overriding purpose was indeed etiological. After God sentences Cain to leave his farmland and wander about, Cain immediately objects that “anyone who finds me may kill me” (Gen. 4:14). God then replies:
“Therefore, anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance sevenfold.”
There are several ways of saying “anyone” in biblical Hebrew. Normally, “he who kills Cain” or “the man [or woman] who kills” would have done fine here. But this sentence passed up those phrases in favor of another way of saying “anyone” that envisages a whole potential class of people. What it literally says is “every killer of Cain.” By using this phrase, one might argue, the text seems to have tipped its etiological hand. For, why speak of more than one killer? Surely Cain himself could be killed only once, nor was a whole group of attackers necessarily required to do the job. It would therefore seem, according to this theory, that what the text really had in mind was Cain as a representative of all subsequent Kenites. What God says, in effect, is that “every killer of a Kenite” or “anyone who ever kills a Kenite” will suffer seven times the usual revenge. Thus, “Cain” here—and, in fact, throughout the story—seems really to be an embodiment, or a representative, of the tribe that was to bear his name.21
What do scholars know about that tribe? By its location to the south of biblical Israel and its nomadic way of life, the tribe of Kenites was associated in particular with two nearby peoples, the Midianites and the Amalekites. We know a bit more about these—they both have a reputation in the Bible of being fierce fighters, and there is ample evidence that they were feared in Israel because of their brutality. The Amalekites cruelly attacked the weakened Israelites after the exodus from Egypt (Exod. 17:8–16), and God eventually commanded Israel to “wipe out” their name (Deut. 25:19). He likewise commanded Israel to assail the Midianites (Num. 25:16; 31:2) for their hostility. If the Kenites were the close neighbors of these two peoples and shared their way of life, they were probably also viewed with suspicion and fear by Israel. Indeed, a certain Lamech, mentioned at the end of Genesis 4, is said to have boasted of his own ferocity in these terms:
Adah and Zillah, hear my voice! O women of Lamech, heed what I say!
I would kill a man to avenge a wound, or a boy for a mere bruise.
If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-seven!
Lamech says this to scare off anyone tempted to attack him. But it is certainly significant that he can think of no better example of cruel, lopsided revenge than “Cain,” that is, the Kenites. It must have been that, from a very early period, the Kenites already had a reputation for killing seven of your people if you killed one of theirs. (The normal arrangement in the ancient Near East—and elsewhere—was the so-called law of the talion: that is, if you kill one of our people then we have the right to kill one of yours.)7
If so, one scholar has argued, the true import of God’s words to Cain cited earlier is now clear: “Anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance sevenfold” is the story’s way of explaining why the Kenites are an apparent exception to the law of the talion. It was God who granted them the right to take sevenfold revenge. This right was given to the Kenites as a form of compensation for their having been turned into nomadic wanderers: since they would not have city walls to protect them, they would be given the special deterrent of sevenfold revenge.
The other etiological element identified by modern scholars in this story is a bit harder to pin down, but it concerns the odd association of Israel’s God with the territory—and peoples—to its immediate southeast. Normally in the ancient Near East, gods were associated with this or that city or nation and would be located right there. That was true of Israel’s God as well—he “dwelt” on Mount Zion in Jerusalem or in other sacred sites within the country. Yet some of the Bible’s most ancient texts suggest that that had not always been the case—that His original locale was in Sinai, far to the south or southeast, or that He had “come from” Mount Seir or Mount Paran or Teman. The Kenites were in roughly this same area. If so, modern scholars reason, perhaps the Kenites had at one time worshiped the same God as the Israelites. Indeed, the Bible says that Moses married the daughter of a Kenite (Judg. 1:16), and it is while he was living with his father-in-law that Moses chanced upon the “mountain of God” and was summoned to His service (Exodus 3). To some modern scholars, this seemed a further indication that Israel’s religion had actually originated in the region of the Kenites and was only “imported” at some later stage to the land where Israel came to dwell.8
Thus, according to this theory, an etiological story about the Kenites would have to reckon with what, for later Israelites, were this tribe’s two outstanding characteristics, its ferocity and its odd association with Israel’s God. And that is exactly what the story of Cain and Abel appears to do. It tells about the Kenites’ eponym, Cain. He killed his own brother in a fit of jealousy—that certainly would explain why later Kenites are so fierce: they are all descended from a cruel murderer! What is more, when God exiled Cain and made him a wanderer for this crime, He allowed Cain to be an exception to the law of the talion and to take sevenfold revenge on his enemies. This further accounts for the Kenites’ ferocity. As for their worshiping Israel’s God, this too is explained by the story—naturally, from the standpoint of later Israelites. Cain, the story says, had once been a farmer—presumably he lived in the farmlands that Israel now inhabited. So of course he had worshiped the God who holds sway there. After Cain was exiled, he continued to worship this same God—which explains the Kenites’ odd connection to “our” religion.22
One further observation followed from this analysis. If the story of Cain was an etiological tale about the Kenites, then it could not be that Cain was originally thought to be the son of Adam and Eve; the sentence that asserts this (Gen. 4:1) must have been added on later, when the story was incorporated into the Bible.9 The reason is that biblical history relates that there was a great flood after the time of Cain, and it wiped out every human being except Noah and his immediate family. How could Cain be the ancestor of the Kenites, who lived long after the flood, if he were also the son of the first two humans and, consequently, lived before the flood? He and all his descendants would have perished in the flood, so there could be no Kenites later on. Therefore, according to this reasoning, the etiological tale of Cain must originally not have been located specifically before the flood; it must simply have taken place “sometime back there,” in the distant past, but not necessarily at the beginning of human history.10 Indeed, there are other indications within the story that its present location is artificial. For, if Cain is the eldest son of Adam and Eve and he has only one brother, whom he has just now killed, why does he complain to God that once he is exiled “anyone who finds me may kill me”? There is no “anyone” alive except his own mother and father.
The Sign of Cain
What about Cain’s “sign”? In the light of modern biblical lexicography, it would appear that there was none. The word translated as “sign” here, ’ôt, can indeed mean that, as in “signs and wonders.” But it also can mean “distinguishing mark” or even “pledge” or “oath”—and these seem far more appropriate in context. God says, “Anyone who kills Cain [= a Kenite] will suffer vengeance sevenfold”; the text then continues, “and He set it as a distinguishing mark [or perhaps, a pledge or oath] for Cain, to prevent any who might find him from slaying him.”11 In other words, Cain’s “sign” or distinguishing mark was God’s granting him the right to sevenfold vengeance.
Ancient interpreters, however, preferred to think that some actual thing, some physical sign, was given to Cain. Since this same word ’ôt came to mean, in later Hebrew, a letter of the alphabet, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and other texts suggest that God actually engraved a letter of the alphabet on Cain’s forehead. Other ancient interpreters theorized that the sign consisted of a pair of ferocious-looking animal horns that might scare off any potential attacker. Still others proposed that God might have given Cain a dog to signal him at the approach of danger. Others said it was some kind of mark without entering into details; as already noted, this mark came in time to be thought of as a mark of shame, “the brand of Cain.”
The Typological Cain
One of the favorite ways of early Christians to read biblical stories was typologically, that is, as foreshadowing the events of the New Testament. Since Abel was a shepherd who was murdered, this immediately suggested that he might be a foreshadowing of Jesus, who is called “the good shepherd” (John 10:11) and who was murdered as well, crucified by the Romans. A tradition thus developed of understanding the whole story as a hint of the crucifixion.
But Cain took God’s commandment [to avoid envy] heedlessly; indeed, as the sin of envy grew overpowering within him, he murdered his brother with malice aforethought. Such was the one who founded the earthly city. However, he also symbolized the Jews, by whom Christ, shepherd of the flocks of men, was killed. [It is Christ] whom Abel, shepherd of the flocks of sheep, prefigures.
Augustine, City of God 15:7
It will be noticed that Augustine substituted the Jews for the Romans as the killers of Jesus. Modern historians know this to be untrue, but it served a useful purpose in Augustine’s time (and was hardly Augustine’s idea alone): after all, once Christians had begun to preach to, and try to convert, Romans to Christianity, it was expedient to shift the blame for the crucifixion away from the Roman governors of Palestine. Instead, Cain became, as Augustine says, a symbol of the Jews, and this biblical story, along with many others, was marshaled to the service of persecuting the Jews—in the Roman Empire and, unfortunately, long afterward.
Notwithstanding this sour note, it is striking to see again how differently our two sets of interpreters understand the Bible. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, in the light of the foregoing, the story of Cain and Abel actually turns out to be two very different stories.
For ancient interpreters, the story is all about crime and punishment, and about good and evil. Cain, as the offspring of Satan, was obviously destined for wickedness, whereas Abel was good. God’s rejection of Cain’s sacrifice was as inevitable as the subsequent shedding of his brother’s innocent blood. Whatever Cain’s sign was, it was some thing that was put on his body or given to him, the mark of a crime that would follow him all his days. Such was, by the Bible’s account, the human race in its second generation. For some early Christians, the whole story was also understood as a foreshadowing of the crucifixion.
For modern biblical scholars this episode was originally an etiological tale intended to explain the nature of the Kenites by relating an incident connected with their putative founder and eponym, Cain. Cain’s murder of his brother accounted for his descendants’ legendary ferocity, as did God’s special decree allowing them sevenfold vengeance. The fact that Cain was said to have been exiled from the settled farmland to live the life of a southern nomad also appears designed to explain a curious circumstance, namely, the connection of Israel’s God to the Kenites’ homeland. In the story’s version of things, the worship of Israel’s God must have traveled south with Cain and taken root in the desert wilderness. As for Cain’s “sign,” there actually was none—the word “sign” really refers to the distinguishing mark of the Kenites, namely, their sevenfold revenge.
If this story had only recently been dug out of the earth by modern-day archaeologists, it would no doubt be considered an interesting relic, an ancient Israelite reflection on the Kenites—but nothing more. As part of the Bible, however, the tale of Cain and Abel has always meant, and still seems to mean, so much more. Must that “so much more” be dismissed now that we know what modern scholars know? Or can we still hold on to the Cain and Abel of postbiblical interpreters, the story of good and evil locked in their eternal conflict?