In the biblical Book of Genesis, Cain and Abel are the first two sons of Adam and Eve. 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 for Cain's. Cain killed Abel and God judged it murder, cursing Cain and sentencing him to a life of transience. Cain then dwelt in the land of Nod (), where he built a city and fathered the line of descendants beginning with Enoch. Thus, Cain was the first person born, and Abel the first to die.
The New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews interprets Abel's sacrifice as more acceptable than Cain's because it was offered in faith, earning Abel the approval of God. In the Qur'an, Cain and Abel are known as Qābīl () and Hābīl (), respectively. In Islamic tradition, the story of Cain and Abel portrays Cain as the first murderer driven by jealousy and lust, guided by the devil, and punished with guilt and disgrace, with some scholars debating the identity and motives of the brothers.
The story of Cain and Abel is widely interpreted in academic biblical scholarship as a symbolic tale reflecting early agricultural society's tensions—such as those between nomadic herders and settled farmers—and may draw from the older Mesopotamian myth Enlil Chooses the Farmer-God. Cain and Abel have become enduring cultural symbols of fratricide and sibling conflict, referenced and reinterpreted across art, literature, theater, music, and film from medieval times to modern popular culture.
Genesis narrative
The story of Cain's murder of Abel and its consequences is told in Genesis 4:1–18:Alter, Robert, trans. 2008. "Genesis 4." In The Five Books of Moses. p. 29.
Translation notes
Origins
Etymology
"Cain" and "Abel" are English renderings of the Hebrew names. Eve's words at Cain's birth () pun on the verb (, "to acquire" or "to get") and the name (, "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, the described as the first metalworker in . 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. () 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).
Interpretation The offerings
Both brothers bring a (, "offering" or "tribute"), which is the word later used for the grain offering of . 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); 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 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"
Robert Alter says that the opening clause as 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 () comes from the Akkadian , which is a demon believed to lurk at the entrances of buildings. Walton mentions that alternatively, in earlier Akkadian texts the 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 .
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 . 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?"
The fraternal relationship between Cain and Abel is emphasized in the text. Waltke notes the word "brother" is used seven times in , 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", (, "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?" (). 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 is the one used elsewhere of the cry of the oppressed, such as the Israelites in Egypt.
Punishment, the mark and Nod In , Cain's punishment is to be (, "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 (“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".
Christian Interpretation
Hebrews 11:4, makes a brief reference to the Cain and Abel story:
It is also referred to in 1 John 3:12:
Jewish interpretation In Jewish tradition, has Cain become the archetypal sinner, the first murderer, and "their instructor in wicked practices", both greedy and violent (Josephus), and archetypal egoist and a leader of others into sin (Philo). In the Testament of Benjamin Cain suffers a plague every hundred years, and those who are like him in hatred of a brother are promised the same judgment. Ancient interpreters interpreted the narrative as a conflict between good and evil: Abel was a righteous martyr, and Cain became a symbol of evil. Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer makes him the ancestor of all the generations of the wicked.