In the Bible, Adam and Eve do not start out as Adam and Eve. Those names do not occur at all in the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. On the sixth day of creation,
God created man in the image of himself,
in the image of God he created him,
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)
But on the seventh day, when Elohim rests, the couple still have no names.
Much that seemed done in Genesis 1 somehow has to be done over in Genesis 2, but in this second attempt at creation Yahweh moves early to breathe life into a human partner and to involve His partner, His creature, in the task of completing creation. Again, however, He gives him no name. He is simply “the man,” and after all, does he need a name? He is the only one of his kind in existence.
When Yahweh decides that no animal is a suitable companion for “the man,” He creates a suitable companion from the man’s rib. The man then coins a term, not a name, for his companion—namely, “woman.” In Hebrew, the word “woman,” ’iššah, is virtually identical with the phrase “her husband,” ’išah. So the man puns when he says, “She will be called ’iššah because from ’išah she was taken”—referring back, of course, to her creation from his rib. But she, no less than he, still lacks a proper name.1
The man, who at Yahweh’s instigation has named all the animals in Eden, names the woman “Eve” only moments before the two of them are expelled from Eden, so, starting then, he has a name for her, but does she have one for him? Not yet, apparently: when they have their first post-Edenic coupling, he is still nameless: “The man had intercourse with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain.” Soon, she brings forth a second son, Abel.
In this chapter, we want to discuss the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible and in the Qur’an, but just as Adam and Eve do not start out named Adam and Eve in the Bible, so Cain and Abel are nameless in the Qur’an; they are just “Adam’s two sons.” Both accounts are quite brief. Let’s begin with the qur’anic account:
Recite to them the true story of the two sons of Adam, when they offered a sacrifice and it was accepted from one of them but not from the other.
He said: “I shall slay you!”
The other replied: “God only accepts from the devout. Were you to stretch forth your hand to kill me, I shall not stretch forth my hand to kill you, for I fear God, the Lord of the Worlds. I want you to bear my sin and yours, and thus become a denizen of the Fire, for this is the reward of wrongdoers.”
His soul tempted him to kill his brother, so he killed him and ended up among the lost. But God sent a raven clawing out the earth to show him how he might bury the corpse of his brother. He said: “What a wretch I am! Am I incapable of being like this raven and so conceal my brother’s corpse?” And so he ended up remorseful.
It is for this reason that We decreed to the Children of Israel that he who kills a soul neither in revenge for another, nor to prevent corruption on earth, it is as if he killed the whole of mankind; whereas he who saves a soul, it is as if he has saved the whole of mankind. Our messengers came to them bearing clear proofs, but many of them thereafter were disobedient on earth. (5:27–32)
As we have already had occasion to see, the narrator in the Bible is typically an unidentified omniscient narrator who can recount the words and actions of God as well as those of human beings interacting with God as if seeing both from some elevated vantage point encompassing both. Moreover, these words and actions are typically spoken or performed as if on a stage before viewers who are not addressed while the performance is in progress. The invisible “fourth wall” that separates actors on a proscenium stage from the anonymous audience exists for many biblical narratives, including the story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:2-16). Neither the two human characters in the story, nor Yahweh, nor the narrator, ever directly addresses the readers or hearers of the story or even refers to them.
Who is this mysterious narrator? In pious Jewish tradition, he is Moses for Torah, the first five books of the Bible. By pious tradition Moses received them directly, and verbatim, from God. But this tradition only arose centuries after these books were written. Even for those who honor the tradition, the narrator is aesthetically, functionally, a hidden narrator, and the reader or hearer feels that he, too, is hidden, for though he watches the story unfold, the actors in the story never address him, and neither does Yahweh.
How very different all these conventions are in the Qur’an! The story of the two sons just quoted is a kind of public sermon on and against murder, and for the purposes of the sermon the names of the sons, or brothers, are irrelevant. Allah punishes murderers in hell; they become “denizens of the Fire.” That’s the moral of the story, and it is as if “the Abel character,” as we might call him, turns to us in the audience as this didactic point is reached and warns us sternly, “God only accepts from the devout. Were you to stretch forth your hand to kill me, I shall not stretch forth my hand to kill you, for I fear God, the Lord of the Worlds. I want you to bear my sin and yours, and thus become a denizen of the Fire, for this is the reward of wrongdoers.” The moral message of the passage, elaborated in what immediately follows, is clarified and heightened by being broken free from the complications that an enlarged, quasi-novelistic context could introduce.
Compare the opening of the story as told above with the opening in the Book of Genesis:
The man had intercourse with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain. “I have acquired a man with the help of Yahweh,” she said. She gave birth to a second child, Abel, the brother of Cain. Now Abel became a shepherd and kept flocks, while Cain tilled the soil. Time passed and Cain brought some of the produce of the soil as an offering for Yahweh, while Abel for his part brought the first-born of his flock and some of their fat as well. Yahweh looked with favour on Abel and his offering. But he did not look with favour on Cain and his offering, and Cain was very angry and downcast. (4:1–5)
If Yahweh had been a little more gracious with Cain, could He have saved Abel’s life? Does the trouble begin with Yahweh?
In this connection, we might well ask why the two of them are offering sacrifice in the first place. At this early point in the Bible, Yahweh has not commanded that any sacrifices be offered to Him. Where did Abel and Cain get the idea that they should do this sort of thing?
Prior even to that question, we might ask what they know of Yahweh and how they know it. Religiously speaking, how were they brought up? Staying only with what we know from the text, we can only note that they were brought up by a couple for whom and with whom Yahweh created Paradise, a couple who then disobeyed Yahweh just once, and who, having been given no opportunity to repent, were sentenced forthwith to death, they and all their offspring for all time. Eve, the boys’ mother, and all her female offspring were sentenced as well to blighted sexuality. Their father, “the man,” and all his male offspring were sentenced to blighted labor.
This is what Cain and Abel know. Knowing it, surely they might wonder what this Yahweh, this terrifying being, might do next? Would He grow even angrier and take from His four human creatures the little that they had left? Best, perhaps, to try to placate Him in advance—do something, anything, to win His favor, keep on His good side.
Even at this early point in the biblical narrative, the first four human beings have had a rich experience of divine anger, but has Yahweh had any experience of human anger? Moreover, does He realize that when He sentenced the first human couple to mortality, He introduced into His world the very possibility of murder? Does Cain’s anger surprise Him? Will the spectacle of Abel’s slaying, the world’s first murder, surprise Him even more?
These questions carry us ahead in the biblical story, but such novelistic complications hold no interest at all for Allah when He addresses Muhammad (and us) through the unnamed good son in the qur’anic tale. It is, to repeat, the moral of that story that matters to Allah. Anything that distracts from that He elides. He allows no hint of divine responsibility for the human murder to intrude: “it [the sacrifice] was accepted from one of them but not from the other.” That’s all that Muhammad needs to hear to move the story forward. With a deft shift to the passive voice, Allah passes over in silence His possible role in what is about to happen. Allah has no need, either, to point out that these two sons are the first two children ever born to human parents, the first two humans whom He has not created directly. They are, you might say, strangers to Him—other people’s children. Interesting, perhaps, but to what ethical point? Interesting to somebody, perhaps; not interesting to Allah.
Pregnant psychological complications like these, missing in the qur’anic account, continue in the biblical account. Yahweh’s reaction to His first experience of human anger seems, on the one hand, almost puzzled and, on the other, touched with a troubled foreboding: something is about to go wrong, and it is as if even He cannot quite predict what it will be.
Yahweh asked Cain, “Why are you angry and downcast? If you are doing right, surely you ought to hold your head high! But if you are not doing right, Sin is crouching at the door hungry to get you. You can still master him.” (4:6–7)
Instead of taunting Cain with questions—“Why are you angry and downcast? If you are doing right, surely you ought to hold your head high!”—Yahweh could have counseled him: “You are doing right, so hold your head high!” Cain might then have been consoled and reassured by the deity he had sought to placate instead of darkly faulted by Him. The moral of the story as a didactic fable is obscured when Yahweh simultaneously goads Cain toward action and warns him against it. All the same, the plot gains considerable momentum from just this chiaroscuro complication. Aesthetically, a more “appropriate” Yahweh would be a less compelling character.
We the audience in this biblical theater have overheard Yahweh’s ominous comments to Cain, but Abel has not. Abel thus does not sense what we sense when Cain says to him, “Let us go out.” A moment of suspense follows, and then the deed is done: “While they were in the open country [out of Yahweh’s sight], Cain set on his brother Abel and killed him” (4:8).
In the Qur’an, as noted, Allah elides His role in either accepting or rejecting either offering, and the occasion for any exchange between Him and the son whose offering was not accepted disappears into the elision. There is no suspense—no subtlety, no entrapment—in the murder itself. There is only the rejected son’s bald, cold, but entirely undisguised declaration, “I shall slay you.” In Genesis, Cain’s anger over his rejection may encompass both Yahweh and Abel. In the Qur’an, his rage targets the favored brother and him alone. In Genesis, fraternal deceit—a recurring plot motif in the Bible—moves the action forward. In the Qur’an, no ruse, no deception, is called for.
But at this point we encounter a fork in the two-track road. In the Bible, the murderous action takes place silently. If the action were taking place on a stage, it would be a kind of pantomime or perhaps, in the manner of some Greek drama, an action taking place offstage, signaled only by a cry. Not so in the Qur’an. With the defiance of a martyr, the good son addresses his killer in a short but vivid speech whose last sentence is addressed past the killer to Muhammad and to us:
“God only accepts from the devout. Were you to stretch forth your hand to kill me, I shall not stretch forth my hand to kill you, for I fear God, the Lord of the Worlds. I want you to bear my sin and yours, and thus become a denizen of the Fire, for this is the reward of wrongdoers.” (5:27−29, emphasis added)
Here—in the Qur’an as not in the Bible—Allah addresses the question of why Cain’s offering was rejected. It was because Cain gave his gift without reverence, giving it grudgingly perhaps rather than willingly, or resentfully, without true submission to Allah. In the Qur’an, Allah is forthcoming, again, on another point that the Bible passes over in silence. Did Abel fight back when Cain attacked him? Did he see the attack coming? Allah answers those questions plainly: the reverent son—the one who truly fears “the Lord of the Worlds”—did indeed see the attack coming, and he did not fight back.
Given the worldwide preoccupation now with jihadi terrorism, discussed in the prologue to this book, it is striking for Christians reading this incident to come upon the Muslim scriptural celebration of a man who seems well nigh Christ-like in his nonviolence. A nearer scriptural analogy than Jesus, however, might be the seven Jewish brothers of the Second Book of Maccabees, each tortured to death in turn by a cruel Greek king, each confident of vindication. At the moment of his martyrdom, the fifth defies the king with the words:
“You have power over human beings, mortal as you are, and can act as you please. But do not think that our {people} has been deserted by God. Only wait, and you will see in your turn how his mighty power will torment you and your descendants.” (7:16–17)
Like the fifth Maccabee son, the good son in the Qur’an predicts torment—here, “the Fire”—for his slayer. Violent retribution there will be, but it is Allah—not the wronged human being—who will inflict it.
The puzzling prediction that the bad son is to “bear my sin [the good brother’s] and yours” may mean, to paraphrase, “bear the sin of having killed me plus your other sins,” but in his commentary on the Qur’an, Muhammad Asad offers an alternative explanation in a footnote to this verse. By attested Muslim interpretive tradition, he asserts:
In cases of unprovoked murder, the murderer is burdened—in addition to the sin of murder—with the sins which his innocent victim might have committed in the past and of which he (the victim) is now absolved…
To the extent that this may have become an established understanding of this verse, those hearing it would be provided with yet another disincentive to commit so grave a crime. For his crime, the bad son “ended up among the lost,” the sinner having actively brought his loss upon himself.
To digress for a moment, the Muslim tradition to which Asad alludes reflects a preoccupation common to Christians as well as Muslims with the consequences of unprepared death, death that a man may suffer without having had the opportunity to repent of his sins. For centuries, the Christian response to this worry was belief in Purgatory—a temporary hell where sinners who would indeed have repented had death not come without warning could suffer punishment for a time but then finally be admitted to heaven.
In Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, the ghost of the murdered king, calling on his son to avenge him, speaks to him of his sufferings in Purgatory:
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away. (Act I, sc. v, lines 9−13)
He is suffering thus because by being murdered he was:
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhous’led, disappointed, unanel’d,2
No reckoning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head. (Act I, sc. v, lines 76–79)
By the Muslim tradition to which Asad refers, King Hamlet would have been spared this suffering, as the punishment for the sins the king had not yet repented of would have fallen on the head of Claudius, his brother and his murderer.
But as both scriptures now do, let us consider the corpse of the slain Abel.
In Genesis, Yahweh and Cain gaze together on the first dead body that either has ever seen, and Yahweh’s initial reaction seems more stunned than wrathful:
Yahweh asked Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I do not know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s guardian?” “What have you done?” Yahweh asked. “Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground.” (4:9–10)
Did Cain know that when he “set on his brother Abel,” he would end up killing him? Did he truly intend to strike a mortal blow? Might Cain himself not have wondered where Abel truly was as his dead brother lay before him? Did he fully comprehend what had happened? So often, the spontaneous human reaction to news of the death of a close relative is denial: “No, no, this can’t be!” What had Cain done? Not Cain alone but even Yahweh might wonder.
But now Yahweh does just what Cain may most have feared. He takes away from him the little that he has left after his parents’ expulsion from Eden. Cain’s sacrifice was of the sort that in religious studies is called propitiatory. A propitiatory sacrifice is a preemptive sacrifice. Once, as a teenager, I suffered a little on-the-job accident, and my employer surprised me by thrusting upon me three or four twenty-dollar bills—a tidy bonus in 1958. I was puzzled, but that night my father explained: the boss was afraid that I might sue. To avert that, to render his young employee propitious, he made an eighty-dollar propitiatory sacrifice. This is what Cain did when he sacrificed some of the produce from his field to Yahweh. He gave Yahweh part of the crop in the hope that Yahweh would not commandeer the whole crop, or deny Cain access to the field itself. But now, in the aftermath of Abel’s slaying, Yahweh does just what Cain most feared He would do. He takes from him the very possibility of agriculture in the following words:
“Now be cursed and banned from the ground that has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood at your hands. When you till the ground it will no longer yield up its strength to you. A restless wanderer will you be on earth.” (4:11–12)
In effect, is Yahweh not sentencing Cain to death? Will the killer not starve if he cannot farm? Cain seems to think so, and would we really have been surprised if Yahweh had struck Cain dead as punishment for his crime?
Cain then said to Yahweh, “My punishment is greater than I can bear. Look, today you drive me from the surface of the earth. I must hide from you, and be a restless wanderer on the earth. Why, whoever comes across me will kill me!” (4:13–14)
Why does Yahweh not reply with righteous indignation, “So be it!”? Perhaps because at this point in the story, no human being is around to kill Cain except Adam, Cain’s father. Were Adam to kill his remaining and only son, would Cain’s blood not cry out as loudly to Yahweh as Abel’s does? For whatever reason, in the final lines of the episode, Yahweh chooses to deprive Cain of his livelihood and yet forbid his murder:
“Very well, then,” Yahweh replied, “whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” So Yahweh put a mark on Cain, so that no one coming across him would kill him. Cain left Yahweh’s presence and settled in the Land of Nod, east of Eden. (4:15–16)
Yahweh’s opposition to murder is clear. His administration of justice is much less clear and, in any case, includes no reference to any punishing “Fire” in an afterlife. Whatever punishment Cain is to suffer, even if it amounts to slow capital punishment, must be imposed during his earthly lifetime.
Meanwhile, may we not ask: Was rehabilitation entirely out of the question? Under what circumstances if any might Cain have been permitted to remain “on the earth” and cultivate it as before? Could he have repented of his sin, and could Yahweh have forgiven him?
As it happens, this very question carries us back again to the corpse and to the qur’anic telling of this tale as it concludes:
But God sent a raven clawing out the earth to show him how he might bury the corpse of his brother. He said: “What a wretch I am! Am I incapable of being like this raven and so conceal my brother’s corpse?” And so he ended up remorseful.
It is for this reason that We decreed to the Children of Israel that he who kills a soul neither in revenge for another, nor to prevent corruption on earth, it is as if he killed the whole of mankind; whereas he who saves a soul, it is as if he has saved the whole of mankind. Our messengers came to them bearing clear proofs, but many of them thereafter were disobedient on earth. (5:31−32)
Allah sends the guilty son a raven for two reasons, it would seem. First, so that the innocent son’s body may be buried. Second, so that the guilty son may be induced to express grief and remorse—“What a wretch I am!”—and end up remorseful. The innocent son was not mistaken in predicting the “Fire” that awaited “wrongdoers,” including potentially his brother. Yet Allah, although He never tires of repeating in the Qur’an that He will punish those who deserve punishment, is equally tireless in repeating that He is merciful with the repentant. In this passage, we are led to believe that the killer may not suffer the worst after all, for he has repented and done the right thing for his dead brother.
The phrase “my brother’s corpse” is literally, in the Arabic, “my brother’s nakedness,” but the phrase does not mean that Abel died without clothing. It means that an unburied corpse is indecent, in the sense that it needs what we ourselves, speaking English, call a “decent burial.” The qur’anic text does not state but strongly implies that the surviving brother buried the dead brother. It is as if the raven, sent by Allah, has conveyed the very idea that the decent and proper place for a corpse is buried underground.
On this reading, Allah implies when He says, “It is for this reason,
that We decreed to the Children of Israel that he who kills a soul neither in revenge for another, nor to prevent corruption on earth, it is as if he killed the whole of mankind; whereas he who saves a soul, it is as if he has saved the whole of mankind. (5:32)
In an earlier era, in other words, He had told the story of the two sons to the “Children of Israel,” the Jews, in the same way that it is told here to Muhammad—namely, as a moral fable against the taking, and for the saving, of human life. Read in one way, the words just quoted can be understood to acknowledge the fact that this respect for human life has been and still is a part of Jewish tradition. It appears in the Talmud (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5), though it is not in the Bible. But Michael Lodahl in his book Claiming Abraham: Reading the Bible and the Qur’an Side by Side, citing the Talmud and discussing a contemporary Muslim commentator on Qur’an 5:32, writes: “His assumption, like that of virtually all traditional Muslim exegesis, is that this compelling principle—‘whoever saves a life is like one who saves the lives of all mankind’—likely was in the original scriptures of the Jews but subsequently suppressed or removed.”3
A more grievous charge comes in the final verse of the excerpt we are considering: “Our messengers came to them bearing clear proofs, but many of them thereafter were disobedient on earth” (5:32). Disobedient in what regard? The context seems clearly to indicate: disobedient in the taking of human life. Previous prophets—perhaps including Jesus—“came to them,” Jews and perhaps Christians as well, “bearing clear proofs.” The moral fable of the two sons is just such a “proof”—namely, a proof that murder is evil in Allah’s eyes. And yet Allah reminds Muhammad in this verse that murder remains frequent among Jews and the Christians, as indeed it does, even if contemporary Jews or Christians might easily counter, Is it any less frequent among Muslims?
Allah’s prohibition of murder is not absolute. The qualification “in revenge for another” reserves the right not just of self-defense but also of retaliation. As for the much broader qualification “to prevent corruption on earth,” its ramifications are explored in the verses that follow. But as these seem generally to leave the story of the two sons behind, I have chosen not to extend the target excerpt past Qur’an 5:32.
As we compare the presentations of God in these two tellings of a single story, what differences and similarities come into view?
First of all, God clearly exercises the authority of an attentive judge in both accounts. Confronted with human crime, He does not look on with detached indifference, as if this need be none of His business. Yahweh’s emotional involvement with the death of Abel seems greater in the biblical account than does Allah’s in the qur’anic. Nothing in Qur’an 5 quite corresponds, in other words, to the agitation of “Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground” in Genesis 4. But if Allah’s manner is less impulsive and more aloof or contained in the Qur’an, His solicitude, His care, seems distinctly greater there. As if demonstrating or applying to Himself the dictum that “he who saves a soul, it is as if he has saved the whole of mankind,” Allah reaches out in Qur’an 5 to save the soul of even history’s first murderer. He is, in a word, more merciful in Qur’an 5 than is Yahweh in Genesis 4.
In Genesis 4, Yahweh appears more compromised by his involvement with His human creatures than Allah does in Qur’an 5. What drove Cain to kill Abel? Was it Yahweh’s rejection of his sacrifice? Genesis 4 does not rule that out. Qur’an 5:30 does rule it out: “His soul tempted him to kill his brother, so he killed him and ended up among the lost.” The murderer perpetrates his crime entirely on his own; it is a crime of his passion and his alone. Allah—quite above the fray of human relations in Qur’an 5—had nothing to do with it.
Most striking of all, however, Yahweh in Genesis 4 directs his attention narrowly and exclusively to the human beings then in the world. Moreover, His only interlocutor is Cain. He does not look past the lifetimes of Cain and Abel, as Allah does in the Qur’an, or speak of the whole sweep of human history through time and beyond it into the afterlife. As Allah does that, He characterizes Himself as the Lord who addresses not only Muhammad nor only Muhammad’s Muslim followers but also Jews, Christians, and humankind at large. Such is Allah’s self-understanding in the Qur’an: He is always talking to everybody at once, and this makes Him seem more decisive, more certain in advance of the universal and permanent significance of all that He says and does. In Genesis, Yahweh seems to some extent a work of self-creation still in progress. In the Qur’an, by contrast, Allah seems a work already accomplished turning to the correction of a creation also accomplished but in need of the final revision that only He can provide.