Cain Killed Abel With a Fallen Angel Standing Over His Shoulder

The shortest description of a murder in the Hebrew Bible is four Hebrew words. And Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him (Genesis 4:8). The Torah does not give the weapon. It does not give the wound. It does not even report what the brothers said to each other in the field, though the Masoretic text famously contains an awkward break right where a speech is supposed to go. For a book that gave us the binding of Isaac in excruciating detail, Genesis is oddly curt about the first death on earth. Early Jewish tradition could not let it stand.

Abraham is still standing in the vision. He has just watched a twelve-winged figure hand grapes to the first man and woman in Eden. He has just asked God the question about why evil was allowed to desire its way into human hearts. God does not answer in words. God widens the picture, and tells Abraham to keep looking. The twenty-fourth chapter of the Apocalypse of Abraham, a Jewish apocalyptic work composed in Hebrew or Aramaic in the late first or early second century CE, preserves what Abraham saw next.

He saw Adam. He saw Eve. He saw, still with them, the cunning Adversary, whom the text has already named as Azazel. And standing near them, already tall enough to cast a shadow, he saw Cain, the firstborn of the human race, moving through the picture with a weight that did not feel like his own.

The Apocalypse of Abraham does not describe Cain killing Abel the way Genesis describes it, as an act that rises up unbidden in a single verse. It gives us a line that turns the whole crime inside out. Cain, who acted lawlessly through the Adversary's influence. The firstborn murder was not fratricide alone. It was fratricide guided by the same twelve-winged figure who had handed the grapes down in Eden. The Adversary had moved from behind the tree to behind the brother. The picture has not yet stopped showing Abraham his own descent.

This is a radical claim. Genesis itself does not blame the Adversary for Cain's act. In Genesis 4, God warns Cain directly. Sin is crouching at the door, and its desire is for you, but you must rule over it (Genesis 4:7). The grammar of that verse gives Cain the agency. He can rule. He fails. The Apocalypse of Abraham is not contradicting Genesis. It is reading underneath it. If Cain fails, the Apocalypse says, it is because there is already a being standing at the door that Cain did not put there. Somebody was waiting for him. Somebody who had been waiting since the night his mother took a bite of fruit.

Then the picture shifts and Abraham sees Abel. The slaughtered Abel. The destruction brought upon him through the lawless one. This is where the Apocalypse of Abraham breaks one of the oldest taboos in the Hebrew Bible, which is to show the first dead human body. The Torah carries Abel's corpse offstage. His blood cries up from the ground to God (Genesis 4:10), but the body itself is left in the field. The Apocalypse of Abraham puts the body inside the vision.

Abraham does not weep. He is not allowed to. The picture keeps moving, and it becomes a catalogue of everything the first murder set loose.

Impurity appears, personified, with its followers and their jealousy, and the fire of their corruption burning in the lowest parts of the earth. Theft appears with its own followers, and the arrangement of their retribution at the Great Judgment. Desire appears as a figure holding the head of every kind of lawlessness in her hand, her scorn and waste assigned to destruction. The Apocalypse of Abraham is not inventing these figures from thin air. The personification of sins as shadowy beings who acquire followers is a common feature of second temple Jewish apocalyptic writing, and you can find variants of it in the Book of the Watchers, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and several of the Dead Sea Scrolls unearthed at Qumran in the 1940s and 1950s. Every one of these figures, in the Apocalypse of Abraham, traces its genealogy back to one moment. The afternoon in the garden when Azazel handed down the grapes.

Bereshit Rabbah, the great midrashic commentary on Genesis compiled in fifth-century Palestine, argues about what exactly was going through Cain's head in the moments before he raised his hand. Some rabbis say the brothers were quarreling over land. Some say they were quarreling over the first woman born after Eve. Some say they were arguing about where the Temple would eventually be built, since the ground between them, the future site of Jerusalem, was already claimed by both offerings. Bereshit Rabbah catalogues all three possibilities and does not pick between them. The Apocalypse of Abraham sidesteps the whole question by saying that the quarrel was a surface. Underneath the quarrel was the Adversary, and underneath the Adversary was a door that had been left open in the garden.

There is one more line in the Apocalypse of Abraham's version of the scene that is easy to miss. God tells Abraham that he is seeing these crimes laid out because of Abraham's descendants, because the nations will be angered at them for generations to come, and Abraham deserves to know what kind of spiritual weather his grandchildren will be walking through. The first murder is not only a story about Cain and Abel. It is a weather report. The Apocalypse of Abraham is telling its own Jewish readers, living under Roman occupation after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, that the violence they are suffering has a lineage. Their ancestors saw it coming from the first field outside of Eden.

Abraham keeps looking. The twelve-winged figure keeps standing over the shoulder of every generation. And somewhere in the background, the ground where Abel fell still has not finished drinking his blood.