Eve Dreamed of Abel's Blood Before Cain Ever Struck

Eve woke before dawn with the taste of iron in her throat. She had dreamed of blood. In the vision she had just left, it ran out of one son and into the mouth of the other, and the drinker swallowed it down like a man at a well, greedily, without stopping. She reached for Adam in the dark and shook him awake.

She told him what she had seen. Abel's blood, flowing. Cain's mouth, open and drinking.

Adam sat up. He had named every animal in the garden and he had buried no one yet, but he knew the shape of a warning when one was laid in front of him. "O that this may not portend the death of Abel at the hand of Cain," he said. He did not say it as a question. He said it the way a man names a thing he has decided to fight.

The First Parents Try to Outrun the Vision

So they pulled the brothers apart. Adam gave each son his own dwelling and his own labor, far enough that one could not easily reach the other in anger. Cain took the soil. He tilled the ground, bent over the furrows, coaxing grain out of earth that had been cursed on his father's account. Abel took the flocks. He walked the hills with his sheep and slept under open sky.

It looked like wisdom. Keep the hands busy and far apart, and maybe the dream would stay a dream. But a vision that has shown you the end is patient. It does not need the brothers in one room. It only needs them to be who they are.

Two Offerings and One Fire

The day came when both sons brought gifts to God. It was the fourteenth of Nisan, the very day, their father said, when their descendants in Israel would one day bring offerings to please their Maker, on the ground where the altar of the Temple would later stand.

Abel chose the best of his flock, the firstlings, the fat. Cain ate his own meal first and then gathered up what was left, a handful of flax seed scraped off cursed ground, and laid it down as if that were enough.

Fire came down from heaven and ate Abel's offering whole. Cain's it would not touch. He stood over his rejected pile, and his face went dark as smoke, black with a shame that curdled fast into something worse.

The Warning at the Door of His Heart

God did not leave him there without a word. "If thou wilt amend thy ways, thy guilt will be forgiven thee," God told him. "If not, thou wilt be delivered into the power of the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. It coucheth at the door of thy heart, yet it depends upon thee whether thou shalt be master over it, or it shall be master over thee."

The door was his to hold or open. Cain heard the offer and turned it inside out into a grievance. "I believed the world was created through goodness," he said, "but I see that good deeds bear no fruit. God rules the world with arbitrary power. Else why had He respect unto thy offering, and not unto mine also?"

Abel answered him plainly. God rewards the one who does right. His own gift was accepted because his deeds were clean, and Cain's were not. It was the truth, and it was the worst possible thing to say to a man already burning.

The Quarrel in the Field

More than the fire stood between them. A sister had been born twinned with each son, and Abel's twin was the more beautiful, and Cain wanted her. Jealousy, resentment, and hunger for the girl. The dream had laid down every thread, and now they pulled tight.

The last thing was small. One of Abel's sheep wandered onto Cain's tilled field. "What right hast thou to live upon my land and let thy sheep pasture yonder," Cain demanded. Abel shot back. "What right hast thou to use the products of my sheep, to make garments for thyself from their wool? If thou wilt take off the wool wherein thou art arrayed, and pay me for the flesh of the flocks thou hast eaten, then I will quit thy land, and fly into the air, if I can do it."

Then Cain said the thing that had been waiting in him since the smoke darkened his face. "And if I were to kill thee, who is there to demand thy blood of me?"

Abel did not flinch. "God, who brought us into the world, will avenge me. He will require my blood at thine hand. God is the Judge, who will visit their wicked deeds upon the wicked. Shouldst thou slay me, God will know thy secret, and He will deal out punishment unto thee."

The Mercy That Killed Him

The words lit Cain like dry grass. He threw himself at his brother. But Abel was the stronger, and the fight turned, and it was Cain who ended up pinned and begging beneath him.

And here Abel made the one mistake the dream had been counting on. He felt pity. He loosened his grip and let his brother up. Do no kindness to the evil, the old saying runs, lest the evil fall upon you. The instant Cain was free he turned on Abel and struck him down, and the blood Eve had watched in her sleep ran out at last onto the cursed ground their father had tried so hard to keep between them.

A mother had already seen this in her sleep. She had warned the only man who would listen, and he had done everything a father could do, and none of it moved the field an inch.