Abel (Gen 4:2)

You Can’t Go Home Again

² She went on to give birth to his brother Abel. וַתֹּ֣סֶף לָלֶ֔דֶת אֶת־אָחִ֖יו אֶת־הָ֑בֶל

We saw last time that what we’re reading is not a story about two brothers. Instead, it is a story about Cain. As soon as Abel is born, he is identified as “his [Cain’s] brother.” These boys might possibly be fraternal twins, but there’s nothing fraternal about the story.

Another somewhat literary clue that this is a story about Cain requires a bit of explanation. As I’ve discussed elsewhere (and it’s by no means my own discovery), the characters in the book of Ruth all have what I used to call “Pilgrim’s Progress names.” Their names illustrate their role in the story — except for Ruth’s own name. Though there have been many suggestions as to what the name רוּת might mean, none of them “clicks” so obviously into the story as the names of all the other characters do. To me, the simplest explanation is that Ruth really was the name of King David’s great-grandmother.

The other names, though, seem to have been invented for that particular telling of the story. Genesis 2–4 combine my stories “Into and Out of the Garden” and “You Can’t Go Home Again,” so they’re not as tightly woven together as the four chapters of Ruth are. Nonetheless, two of the three names we know so far from the book of Genesis also have a certain resonance with the plot:

• Adam (which he may already have been called, and certainly will soon be) was made of adama. The text makes the allusion clear — but not until Version 2, even though the word adam occurs already in Version 1 as the name of the human species.

• Ḥavvah was explicitly given that name because she was “the mother of all life [ḥay].”

• Cain is called that because … well, we really don’t know. Since he is the “star” of this story — perhaps I should say he is its antihero — this may be the “real” name of that character, the putative ancestor of the Kenites.

All of which brings me to the main point here. No parents in their right mind would name their newborn son Abel. A look at the Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament shows us why:

I הֶבֶל (70 x, 35 x Qoh):

—1. (transitory) breath;

—2. vanity;

—3. הֶבֶל, ‏הֲבָלִים‎ idols, things that do not really exist‎.

II ‏הֶבֶל‎, הָֽבֶל: Abel, Gn 4₂.₄._8f.₂₅. †

If physics had been a little bit more developed in ancient Israel, הבל would have been the word for gas (alongside liquid and solid). It refers to air, to breath, to “things that do not really exist,” things that one cannot see or grasp hold of. That’s the meaning of “vanity” that applies to הבל, not the “You’re So Vain” variety of vanity, but the King James translation of the word in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Yes, hével is the (repeated) word in Kohelet’s famous phrase, familiar to us from the KJV as “vanity of vanities.” Instead of turning this post into the beginning of a completely different extended series on that remarkable book, I will simply point you to a brilliant, short essay on the phrase by Lisa Wolfe on the Bible Odyssey website. For our purposes today, her short comment on Hével the character in Genesis 4 says it all: