Jewish thoughts on Cain and Abel are far more extensive than you’d think, given how short the story is. Thanks to Midrash, creative ways the ancient Rabbis explained, understood, and expanded on various biblical themes, we can see stories like Cain and Abel through new eyes and discover a lot of different morals that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen. Cain v. Abel is a fantastic book on this subject written by Rabbi Dan Ornstein and it combines many Midrashic views with his own modern Midrashic spin as well. It’s worth noting that the story he presents is not meant to be taken literally. Jews tend to read the Bible both through surface level reading and by finding the hidden meanings and morals of the stories. As far as midrashic works go, accuracy is far less relevant than the moral teachings underlying them. Another great source for understanding Cain and Abel is the book Messengers of God by Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who wrote extensively about Judaism.
The Story of Cain and Abel as a Refresher:
Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have gained a male child with the help of the Lord.” She then bore his brother Abel. Abel became a keeper of sheep, and Cain became a tiller of the soil.
In the course of time, Cain brought an offering to God from the fruit of the soil, and Abel, for his part, brought the choicest of the firstlings of his flock. God paid heed to Abel and his offering, but to Cain and his offering God paid no heed. Cain was much distressed and his face fell. And God said to Cain,
“Why are you distressed,
And why is your face fallen?
Surely, if you do right,
There is uplift.
But if you do not do right
Sin couches at the door.
Its urge is toward you,
Yet you can be its master.Cain said to his brother Abel…. and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him. God said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” And he said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Then He said, “What have you done? Hark, your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground! Therefore, you shall be more cursed than the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth.”
Cain said to God, “My punishment is too great to bear! Since You have banished me this day from the soil, and I must avoid Your presence and become a restless wanderer on earth – anyone who meets me may kill me!” God said to him, “I promise, if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him. ” And God put a mark on Cain, lest anyone who met him should kill him. Cain left the presence of God and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.”
Genesis 4:1-16
What Role Did Adam and Eve Play In All This?
So at this point in the story, Adam and Eve have already gotten the boot from the Garden of Eden. In Eden, there was perfect harmony between not only Adam and Eve, but also between every living thing. Then, as Rabbi Ornstein explains, having gained almost limitless amounts of knowledge by disobeying a command from God not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, God kicks them out of Eden to prevent them from eating from the Tree of Eternal Life, which, with all that knowledge, would make them direct (and perhaps corruptible and dangerous) competitors to God. It’s also worth noting that Adam and Eve’s gaining of knowledge seems to have stemmed from disobedience and perhaps also greed for “more.”
Jumping to the story of Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve are flat out absent through the whole ordeal. When Cain is upset after God favors Abel’s offering, Adam and Eve take no part in trying to cool his temper, leaving God alone to the task. But isn’t that the job of the parents? Why were they so absent? And what role did they play in the events that unfold? The midrashic theories are extremely thought provoking.
One line of logic follows that after Eve chats with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and learns the power of this forbidden fruit, she caves to the temptation out of her own free will. Adam, following suit, also eats the fruit out of his own free will. They have been explicitly warned not to do this, and they disobey freely instead of following divine instruction. So perhaps Cain, whose sole examples in life are his two parents, was never taught impulse control, which makes sense considering his parents seem to be lacking in this area. So when Cain is filled with hot rage and God warns him not to give into sin, he freely disobeys. His impulse control, thanks to either inheritance or the lack of proper parenting, is nonexistent. God seems to be telling Cain in his warning that he doesn’t have to follow in his family’s sinful footsteps, but Cain, for his part, chooses their same old beaten path.
Another theory that explains the absence of Adam and Eve in this story is that Cain’s act was so heinous that the biblical story refused to put anyone around Cain to possibly provide him cover. Cain had to be alone to show that it was solely his choice to commit this crime. He had the freewill to commit murder or to find peace and he chose murder. Nobody else prompted him to do this, this was his choice and his alone. Adam and Eve may well have been active participants in trying to settle the dispute, but to write them in could have minimized Cain’s culpability. By this point in his life, he surely knew the mistakes of his parents’ past, and he refused to learn from them.
Yet another theory on the absence of Adam and Eve is that they were flat out busy and had little time for their children. After being tossed out of Eden, God gave each of them a curse. For Adam the curse was:
Cursed is the ground because of you; By toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life: Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you. But your food shall be the grasses of the field. By the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground – for from it you were taken.”
Gen 3:17-19
The parents were flat out busy working the land during this whole ordeal. They worked and worked for enough food to stay alive, and received nothing but a bunch of thorns and thistles. They didn’t have time to be active and engaged in their sons’ lives and they didn’t have time to provide them with the infinite amounts of love that children crave from their parents. With this lack of love, resentment and hostility abounded leading to anger, resentment, and violence. The parents were overworked and other midrashic accounts tell us that perhaps their marriage was rocky on top of this, adding to their overall stress. This is something that we should stop and consider in our modern lives. We often work ourselves to the bone for a little extra money and leave our kids to be cared for by others. Sometimes we don’t have a lot of options to do differently, such as Adam and Eve’s circumstances in this story. But other times we get greedy. We grasp for more and leave our kids behind. We aren’t active or engaged in our kids’ lives and we expect others to instill morals into our children for us. We don’t have time to show them enough love, and in its place we bring many different stresses home with us. Kids need love and morals far more than they need extra material possessions. This is a good time to pause and reflect on the potential pitfalls of this kind of modern parenting.
Cain and Abel were the first fully human humans on this earth. They had human parents, not divine. Cain and Abel came directly from Adam and Eve, not from God, and thus they were Adam and Eve’s responsibility. Had Adam and Eve played a more active role in their children’s lives, who knows how differently this story may have played out.
Was Cain Unloved? What about Abel?
In the ancient world, the name of something or someone determined their destinies. So what do Cain and Abel mean? Cain, who we can assume was Eve’s favorite child since she expresses her happiness in creating him with the help of God, means “to acquire” or “to create.” Eve was happy to have created Cain with God’s help and her expectations of him seem to be sky-high. Abel’s biblical birth announcement is pretty pathetic. All that is said about Abel is, “She then bore his brother Abel” (Gen 4:2). That’s it. Abel seems like a sort of afterthought. What does his name mean? It means “vapor” or “meaninglessness.” Eve seems to name at least Cain herself and possibly Abel, and Adam seems completely absent from this naming event, which is peculiar given that he named all the animals, and even his wife, just a bit earlier. Why is this?
One rather spicy, and not widely accepted, explanation for this is that perhaps Cain is not Adam’s son. This theory states that Adam was traumatized when the couple was kicked out of Eden, and between the trauma and his conviction that his wife was responsible for their expulsion and he was tricked into the situation, he would not have sex with her. Eve was determined to continue the human race and decided to do what it took to make this happen. She decided to mate with the angel Samuel, a celestial officer, who was Cain’s real father. This concept wasn’t anything overly wild in ancient times, as there are multiple accounts of human females mating with angels, but this does mean that Cain was partly divine and perhaps explains Eve’s sky-high expectations of him. So why did she only mention Abel as an afterthought? Well the theory goes on to say that Adam, after Eve gave birth to Cain, sexually overpowered Eve and had sex with her by force, thus giving her Abel. Eve had a hard time looking at Abel without thinking of that harsh sexual encounter, and thus Abel was harder for her to genuinely love. So to sum things up, Adam couldn’t love Cain since he was the product of infidelity, and Eve couldn’t fully love Abel since he was the product of an unwanted and forceful sexual encounter. Thus both boys grew up feeling unloved by a parent, which is something no child should endure. And perhaps, whether you think highly of this theory or not, this is the moral. Children deserve nothing but love.The story above shows some of the most difficult and extreme circumstances in which a child can come into the world, but if they successfully make it into the world, they deserve love. Anything less than receiving total love produces irreparable harm. If parents are unable to give their children their whole hearts, they should reflect on the moral of this story. Anything short of a parent’s whole heart, no matter the situation, results in potentially deadly trauma. A parent’s responsibility is extremely great and it is not to be taken lightly.
Why Did God Prefer Abel’s Offering
A very common explanation for God’s preference of Abel’s offering over Cain’s is that Abel simply offered better stuff. It seems that Abel offered the best of what he had while Cain simply just offered what was there. There is a potential flaw in this conclusion though if we remember that Cain worked the cursed land just as Adam did, while Abel was a shepherd. Perhaps Cain’s offerings were poor not because he didn’t care, but because the land he farmed was cursed to yield poor crops. Again, maybe of the poor crops he was able to produce, he didn’t give God the best of his meager yield, which would bring us to the conclusion that Abel’s offering was of much better quality.
An explanation that I want to believe is true, though I obviously don’t know, is that Cain couldn’t slow down. Cain always had to be doing something, he was a bit troubled, and he talked nonstop. He seemed to be very much in his own head. Abel, on the other hand, meditated often and liked to listen. Perhaps given this difference, Abel naturally had more of a connection with God and his offering came from the heart, whereas Cain’s offering was more obligatory and was purely action with no meaning behind it. There was no connection between the offering and God, it was robotic. God can see through such things.
The fact of the matter is we will never really know why God preferred Abel’s offering. Sometimes God is simply mysterious. Perhaps God was rooting for the underdog since Abel’s existence seemed to be half written off from the start, and throughout the Bible we see God stick up for the weak. Was Abel’s sacrifice preferred because it was a blood sacrifice? Who knows. What we should remember, however, is that even when we feel we are being treated unjustly, when life just won’t hand us a break, it does not give us an excuse to act violently or with anger. I don’t know of many people who think of Cain as the hero in this story, and that’s because he is a murderer. Violence and anger, even if we are seduced into believing it is “righteous anger,” leads us down a path that can wreck humanity. We must act with love and righteousness no matter what hand we have been dealt. It’s the only path forward.
God’s Warning About Sin
Why are you distressed,
Gen 4:6-7
And why is your face fallen?
Surely, if you do right
There is uplift.
But if you do not do right
Sin couches at the door;
Its urge is toward you,
Yet you can be its master.”
God’s warning here seems to be dire but also very positive. God seems to be saying that, yes, sin will try to seduce you by any means necessary, but humans indeed have the power to master it. Sin is a formidable foe, but we humans can be stronger. It is a choice. So in the relationship between Cain and Abel, sin seems to dupe Cain into believing that hurting Abel would be purely self-defense. This logic, coupled with what we believe to be Cain’s poor impulse control, seems to be enough to tip him over the edge. God warned him to essentially rise up and beat down Sin, or prepare for the consequences. Though God does not explicitly tell him not to kill Abel, the warning seems clear and Cain’s defiance seems equally clear. God also told him that if he did good, there would be uplift, but Cain couldn’t see past his rage. Sin was, as always, a formidable foe, and Cain didn’t have the will to fight it off.
As we did with Cain and Abel, let’s look at what the name “sin” means. The translation from Hebrew means something like, “wrongdoing” or “missing the bull’s eye” with how a person acts. We see that God describes sin as crouching, or “couching at the door.” Part of the explanation for this imagery is that sin acts like a legendary demon who crouches at the doors of people’s homes or near buildings and would pounce if anyone got too close. This horrifying image would have been very intense for a people who probably believed that these demonic forces were literally real. This is a powerful way to show the dangers of envy and rage. When strong emotions take hold of a person, sin finds that weakness and pounces. It is said though that it is possible to transform strong emotions such as lust, greed, ego, anger, etc. into a positive fuel. It is akin to channeling potentially deadly energy and putting it into a safe but very powerful battery. This is one way to beat down sin.
One interesting theory that the book Cain v. Abel throws out there about why Cain was so easily seduced by sin is that perhaps Cain viewed God’s warning as a lecture, not as a beacon of light. His offering to God had just been rejected and with his hurt pride, he couldn’t process God’s words as anything more than salt in the wound. Though God’s intentions were good, Cain with his human ears and human logic was not at all comforted, but was in fact more enraged. We see this very often in everyday life, so this logic also seems very sound. People who have “terrible strings of luck” in their lives often begin to doubt whether or not God actually loves them. They doubt God’s goodness and often think God is out to get them. Perhaps God is simply trying to get them out of one situation to plant them into another, or perhaps this person would benefit from gaining empathy or humility, but our human logic typically doesn’t understand these things. We believe that God needs to play by our rules of what is good and bad, not the cosmic, larger good that God sees fit. We are very easily offended and have trouble finding the potential good in a hard situation. So if this line of logic holds that God was doing his best but Cain didn’t understand God’s “language” so to speak, this reinforces the importance of human parents doing their absolute best to raise their children with sound morals and judgment. God can do God’s best at every turn, but if we don’t understand God, it raises concern. We need our parents (or any parental figure) who “speaks our language” to be actively involved in our lives. We need their love, and we need their undying support. With that foundation of love and trust, we may then be primed to understand the language of God.
Am I My Brother’s Keeper?
First of all let’s think about Abel’s blood. Abel’s blood literally cries out to God from the ground. The literal translation of this section from the Hebrew is actually “your brother’s bloods…” “Bloods” shows us that Cain not only killed Abel, but he also killed each of Abel’s descendants who were never given the opportunity to live. That murder wasn’t limited to Abel but it continues to kill Abel’s descendants to this day. Cain and Abel also share the same blood, which means that Cain’s act of murder has the effect of destroying a bit of himself. Since the family of four in this story represents the entire world, the murder of one person in the world affects the whole of humanity, just as the murder of Abel affected this whole family. We see that even today if we are part of the oppression or murder of any person on earth, we in effect destroy or oppress parts of ourselves. We are all intimately connected. Every murder, as Elie Wiesel says, is a suicide. We can never be truly free until each and every one of our human brothers and sisters are free. Whether we like it or not, yes, we are all our brothers’ keepers, and to deny this responsibility not only hurts our fellow man, but it hurts us individually as well.
The story of Cain and Abel does not need to be taken literally, though the option is there for the taking. Cain and Abel are meant to show us what drives people to hate. When we see how hatred can fester in a family setting, it’s easy to see how a similar lack of empathy among strangers can lead to war. We see that allowing hatred into our hearts is a sin, and we see that acting on that hatred is a sin. We have been forewarned, and yet look around you. Listen to current politicians. Many of them actively promote hate and even violence. They are the embodiment of sin crouching around the corner, justifying both hate and violence. We must not act on their words. We must conquer them, and the only way to conquer hate and violence is with love. This is attested to throughout the Bible. It is our responsibility to make this our reality. You are your brother’s keeper, even if you don’t like your brother.
SOURCES:
Cain v Abel: Rabbi Dan Ornstein (The bedrock of this entire post)
Messengers of God: Elie Wiesel
JPS Tanakh
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