7 myths
Myths, legends, and mystical writings about Murder from across Jewish tradition.
7 myths on JewishMythology.com retell how Jewish tradition imagines murder, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, Midrash, Talmud, Kabbalah, and later Jewish literature. Each story below synthesizes primary sources into a single narrative; follow any myth to read it, and from there into the source passages behind it.
Cain killed his brother with stones because no one had ever died before. Then he stood before God and said the punishment was more than God could carry.
Cain killed his brother and then, the rabbis say, invented repentance. Adam heard about it and struck his own face. He had not figured it out yet.
Two brothers stand in an open field arguing over a sister, a strip of land, and whether God judges anyone. One of them picks up a stone.
Before Levi died, he told his children what Enoch taught him about blood. The rabbis who read Genesis 9 found the same teaching pressed into God's first law.
Cain stands too soon, reaches for straw, kills his brother, and dies beneath the stones of the house he thought would hold him.
Cain built cities and survived the mark, but the count ran to seven generations. His blind descendant Lamech shot him in the dark, mistaking him for an animal.
Before Cain raises his hand, he and Abel argue whether the world is governed justly at all. The post-flood law on murder closes the argument centuries later.
