What Cain Said to Abel in the Field Before the Murder

The strangest sentence in the Torah is in (Genesis 4:8). "And Cain spoke to Abel his brother, and it came to pass when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him." Read it twice. The Hebrew says Cain spoke to Abel. Then nothing. The sentence stops. Cain has opened his mouth and the Torah has turned off the microphone. For two thousand years, the rabbis argued about what he said.

The answers are astonishing.

The Targum Jonathan, an Aramaic paraphrase of the Torah compiled in Palestine in the early centuries of the common era and preserved in medieval manuscripts, fills the silence with a full theological debate. Cain opens by arguing that the world has a Creator but no Judge. The world was made in goodness, he says, but is not governed by justice. God plays favorites. Your sacrifice was accepted because God liked your face better than mine. There is no reason for it. There is no fairness in the system.

Abel argues the opposite creed. The world is governed according to good works. Your sacrifice was not accepted because your deeds were not accepted. The universe is fair. Cain escalates. There is neither judgment nor Judge, nor another world. No reward for the righteous, no punishment for the wicked. Abel replies with the line that gets him killed. There is a judgment. There is a Judge. There is another world. Because of those words, the Targum says, Cain drove a stone into his brother's forehead and killed him.

Abel is history's first martyr, and what he dies for is theodicy.

The same Targum opens the chapter with an even more disturbing tradition. Eve, at the birth of Cain, does not say "I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord." She says "I have acquired a man, the angel of the Lord." The Targum reads this as a claim about paternity. Cain's real father, in this ancient stream, was not Adam. It was Samael, the angelic figure who had approached Eve in the garden. Abel, born soon after, was Adam's son. The first murder, in this reading, is not exactly fratricide. It is half-brothers, one human and one partly angelic, and the angelic half murders the human half. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, an eighth-century Palestinian midrash, preserves the same paternity tradition and draws a line from Samael's visit to every murder that follows in the Hebrew Bible.

Bereshit Rabbah, redacted in fifth-century Palestine, supplies a second theory about the fight, and this one is about marriage. The rabbis of the midrash read the Torah's demographic problem and solved it with twin sisters. Cain, they said, was born with a twin sister. Abel was born with two. Cain married Abel's twin. Abel married Cain's twin. The arithmetic left one extra sister. The brothers fought over her. Sefer HaYashar, the medieval Hebrew compilation, gives the sisters names: Kalmana for Cain's wife, Balbira for Abel's. The rabbis of the Bereshit Rabbah school preserved this version precisely because it made the first murder into the oldest story in the world, two men fighting over a woman, not a quarrel over theology but a quarrel over a sister.

A third tradition, also preserved in Bereshit Rabbah, says the fight was about real estate. They were dividing the world. One brother took the land. The other took the movable property. Then one of them said, the land you are standing on is mine, take off your shoes. The other said, the clothes you are wearing are mine, take them off. The fight escalated. By the end of the argument, the only property worth arguing about was the body.

A fourth tradition says they were fighting about the location of the Temple. Each brother wanted the Temple Mount to stand on his half of the world. Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish philosopher writing in Greek, recorded a version in which the fight was about whose theology of God would prevail. Philo treats Cain as the philosophy of self-love and Abel as the philosophy of God-love, and the first murder is what happens when self-love gets the upper hand.

The rabbis could not agree on any of these. They argued about which version was right for fifteen hundred years. What they could agree on was what happened next. Cain denied the crime. Josephus, writing his Antiquities of the Jews in Rome around 93 CE, records that Cain's lie was the second half of his sin. It was not enough to kill his brother. He had to try to hide the body and pretend the question did not exist. "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Genesis 4:9). God answered with the only line in the chapter that gets repeated in every Jewish tradition that followed. "The voice of your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground."

The Hebrew word for blood there is plural. Demei. The voice of your brother's bloods. The rabbis of Bereshit Rabbah read the plural as a warning. It was not just Abel's blood on the ground. It was the blood of every descendant he would never have. Every child, every grandchild, every future generation that would not exist because of one stone to the forehead in a field nobody can find on a map.

Then came the mark. The Torah says God set a mark on Cain so that whoever found him would not kill him. (Genesis 4:15). The Targum Jonathan says the mark was the divine Name itself, carved into the forehead of a murderer. The rabbis in the Book of Jubilees, a second-century BCE rewriting of Genesis, say the mark was not a punishment. It was a protection. The first murderer in history was also the first man God decided to keep alive despite his worst act. The mark meant, this one is mine now. Do not touch him.

Cain went out from the presence of the Lord and built the first city. The sentence he had started in the field was never finished. It still is not.