Soon there were many people on the earth. Other sons and daughters of Adam and Eve got married, and they also had children. In time Cain and his wife began to have children. When Cain went away to live in another part of the earth, he took with him one of his sisters, and she became his wife. So after Cain killed his brother, God punished him by sending him far away from the rest of his family. Won’t it be fine to get to know persons like Abel?īut God is not pleased with persons like Cain. He will be able to live here on earth forever. At that time Abel will never have to die. So one day Jehovah God will bring Abel back to life. In a final plot twist, Abel finds out that Kane was the anonymous backer of his hotel business. They acknowledge each other from afar, but Kane dies before he meets Florentyna and William, his grandson. Abel was good, and Jehovah never forgets a person like that. In the 1960s, Kane and Abel both attend Florentyna and Richard’s opening of a boutique business.
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Wasn’t that a terrible thing for Cain to do?Įven though Abel died, God still remembers him. So Cain says to Abel, ‘Let us go over into the field.’ There, when they are all alone, Cain hits his brother Abel. When it was time to offer sacrifices to God, Cain brought fruit from the. The next son was Abel who was a shepherd. However, he was dissatisfied with Cain’s offerings. The Lord was pleased with Abel’s offerings. Over time, Cain and Abel began presenting offerings to God. Abel was a sheep herder Cain was a farmer. Cain and Abel were twins born of Adam and Eve. Cain then murdered Abel out of jealousy, whereupon God punished Cain by condemning him to a life of wandering. Chapter 4 depicts the tragic story of the brothers, Cain and Abel. The brothers made sacrifices to God, but God favored Abel's sacrifice instead of Cain's. He is very angry because God liked Abel better. The first son was Cain and he was a farmer. Cain, the firstborn, was a farmer, and his brother Abel was a shepherd. Another theory is that the tale is a kind of ‘Just So’ story explaining how, after Adam was reduced to tilling the land (after enjoying paradise in the Garden of Eden), his son Cain – and, subsequently, all mankind at that time – was further reduced from tilling the land to a rootless nomadic existence.īut it seems more likely that these early stories from Genesis, both of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel, are less about the beginnings of mankind than about the development of civilisation during the age of agriculture.So God tells Cain that he should change his ways. The fact that Cain, the representative of this new culture, kills his brother, who represents the weaker nomadic culture, is a sort of allegory for this mass shift towards more advanced agriculture in the ancient Middle East.īut if this is the case, why is Cain condemned to go to the land of Nod and become a nomad? It may be that this represents the fact that the displacement of nomadic peoples was by no means settled at this point, and that the balance of power and influence may have swung between the farming and nomadic cultures, back and forth, as one tribe or group defeated or rivalled another. As with the Great Flood and other origin-stories from the Book of Genesis, the tale of Cain and Abel may have emerged from earlier Sumerian myths about the clashes between the older, nomadic way of life and the new city-focused farming culture that was displacing (and replacing) it. Cain is not just a farmer but a representative of a skilled class of metal-workers, remember: as such, he symbolises the development of more advanced technologies during the Bronze Age (as it gave way to the Iron Age).Ĭuriously, it’s been suggested that Abel’s name might be distantly related to the Babylonian aplu, meaning ‘son’. As Isaac Asimov points out in his endlessly informative Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament by Isaac Asimov (September 19,1973), the authors of these early histories were farmers and settled city-men who would doubtless have viewed nomads as a threat to their civilisation: the nomads were potential invaders and raiders. If we put these two names together, we find that Cain represents the farmer and skilled artisan, while Abel represents the herdsman or nomad. And Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived and gave birth to Cain and she said, I have gained a man with the help of the. In Gen 4:1 we find the first ever account of sexual relations between humans with the end result being the first pregnancy. Meanwhile, ‘Abel’ is believed to be derived from Jubal or Jabal, the ancestor of nomadic shepherds. Who was Cain’s father As we noted in the introduction, Cain and Abel is a story of firsts. In Genesis 4:22 we learn that ‘Tubal-cain’ was ‘an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron’, which lends credence to this etymology (Tubal was a district in Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey). ‘Cain’ is from a root word meaning ‘forge’ or ‘smith’, and is cognate with the Arabic kain, which means the same thing. But a clue to the origins of the Cain and Abel story may also lie in the symbolic meanings of the brothers’ two names.