How and Why (Gen 4:8)

You Can’t Go Home Again

⁸ Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. וַיָּ֥קָם קַ֛יִן אֶל־הֶ֥בֶל אָחִ֖יו וַיַּהַרְגֵֽהוּ׃

We’ll spend one more day looking at this remarkable moment before we continue with the story, asking a few more of the questions that the Bible does not answer:

• How did Cain kill Abel?

• Why did Cain kill Abel?

As with so much in the Bible, we’re interested in aspects of the story that the original author does not tell us. People are people through the ages, so I suspect it is not that the writer didn’t think about these same questions — it is that the writer either did not care (in this context) about those specific questions, or that the writer deliberately withheld this information, either to keep things open or to make us think about the questions ourselves. Readers of the Bible through the ages have definitely done so.

If you think about the three aspects of criminal investigation, what you are looking for are:

• motive

• means

• opportunity

Cain’s motive is unclear. Presumably the combination of YHWH paying no attention to his offering and then suggesting Cain was the type of guy who might do the wrong thing provided motive enough, but we will never know for sure.

Cain’s opportunity is quite clear, though how it arose is not. He and Abel somehow found themselves in the countryside, outside the city, where there was no one around to interfere.

Cain’s method is left completely out of the story. As I said, readers of the story have not been shy about suggesting the method. Here is one discussion from Jewish tradition about it: