Genesis Bible Study: The Introduction of Cain and Abel

Genesis Chapter 4 introduces us to Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve’s first sons and the originators of the Bible’s first murder. Death has just entered humanity, but not the way anyone would have guessed.

Griffin Ministries invites you on a curated tour of the biblical text that will make the Bible come alive in new and exciting ways for you so that your love and understanding of God grows ever deeper. Experience being transformed in your thinking through the renewal of your mind. (Rom 12).

Encounter God in the Bible with a 10-part video series exploring Genesis 1-3. Explore Our Video Course.

Genesis Bible Study: How to Study Genesis Chapter 4

Study Genesis Chapter 4 from a fresh translation of the Hebrew text supplied with notes that explain what’s going on so you gain a deeper understanding of these first people and foundational first events. Understand the Bible the way an ancient Hebrew would have heard it. Apply these ancient lessons from God’s word to your modern life.

In this study, you’re invited to use the practice of Lectivo Divino as you study Genesis Chapter 4. Lectivo Divino is the practice of incorporating meditation on the text of the Bible to encounter the God of the Bible more profoundly.

What is key to these studies is that you invite the Holy Spirit to be present as you read through a passage aloud several times and then ask for insights into what the passage has to say in general and then specifically to you. What did it mean then, and what does it mean now?

It is also key that you write out your insights and questions and ask the Holy Spirit to give you answers (Luke 11:9 Ask and you will receive).

What Does Genesis Chapter 4 Teach Us?

Genesis Chapter 4 unfolds with what happens after the first “fall.” There are actually three “fall” events in Genesis. This is one of them.

After they’ve been separated from God’s direct presence after they are “kicked out” of the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve — and their families and descendants after them — experience a kind of slow-motion downward spiral of violence, isolation and disintegration, both personal and social.

Yet even though Adam and Eve disobeyed Yahweh, creation still “works.” Adam and Eve are able to have two boys. As Chapter 4 begins Adam and Eve start to work to fulfill God’s purpose for them; they are fruitful (have kids) and multiply. They start to fill the earth with people. But they also begin to fill the earth with the opposite of fruitful life. Their first child murders their second child. Suddenly and unexpectedly death has shown up for the first time and it’s a murder of a brother by a brother. Humanity and the earth take the first step down and away from paradise. It’s a big drop. It’s the first time we “see” death in Adam and Eve’s life and this is “only the beginning.”

Genesis 4:1 - The man had sexual relations with his wife, Eve. She conceived and gave birth to Cain (his name in Hebrew would be “Created”) and said, “I have created a man with Yahweh.”

One flesh makes one more flesh.

The attraction Adam has for Eve is way more than skin and sex deep. It’s a deep God-ordained, built-in attraction beyond biological. It’s what we could call ontological, to the level of, “this is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone.” The desire that Yahweh created in the man for his wife (and presumably also in the woman for the man) is resolved in their becoming, in sexual intercourse, one flesh, one body again.

But the “one flesh” is not just sexual; it is all the dimensions of their relationship wrapped up in what is basically a spiritual unity in which the two are still themselves while sharing who they are as one.

The result of this union is that the couple fulfills Yahweh’s command (Gen. 1:28) to “be fruitful and multiply.” Even when humans disobey, as Adam and Eve did, the Earth, as it plays its role in human lives, still responds faithfully out of what it was created to do.

Adam and Eve are and create Archetypes, and thereby, Human Culture

It is important to remember that the actions of Adam and Eve, as the first human pair, are not simply the total outcome of their actions for just themselves. Who they are and what they do becomes, for good or evil, archetypical.

An archetype is something like an invisible set of ways to behave and think, an invisible intuitively grasped script that, once it is started, becomes the way other humans later find themselves acting and acting out.

Archetypes are powerful because they are mostly invisible, yet they subtly shape the ways people think and act. God sets up the first archetype of “the human” in Genesis 1:27 when he declares that humans are the “image” of God on earth. Being God’s imagers means that just as God brings increasing order to the watery chaos of earth, humans also are given the task of bringing God’s order of the Heavens to the rest of the still non-ordered Earth.

In Genesis 2, we see the first time a human acts as the “imager” of God by giving names and order, to the animals. Without a name, a thing — in the ancient Near Eastern imagination — did not yet exist.

This is God’s archetype for humans, an invisible script that subtly guides and motivates the behavior of humans, a kind of behavioral operating system set up by God’s commands and empowered by living interactively with Him, taking on the tasks of bringing order to earth.

Adam and Eve are depicted as shaping and, therefore, creating a way of life that has both heavenly (invisible) and earthly (physical) dimensions. They are shaping their own present, which then becomes the future for all humans who follow.

This is what we today call culture.

Culture is full of scripts that tell you what to do and what roles to play under what circumstances. Adam and Eve are writing that script for all humans who will follow. But then, in a way, that’s what all of us do. To some degree, we create our own present and, thereby, the future that others will live in.

Viceroys, not Victims

The writer of Genesis articulates in this narrative of origins a vision of human beings as the ones responsible for shaping their lives within the commands and limits Yahweh has given them.

Unlike the other polytheistic nations around them, these two imagers are not the slaves of the gods who cower and absorb the results of fickle divine decisions; rather, Adam and Eve are the agents of Yahweh. They are not cosmic victims but cosmic viceroys appointed to rule.

Christians are tempted to understand the concept of bringing heaven to earth as something that only believers carry out, but Genesis shows that all humans have this capacity. The human role as Yahweh’s imagers on earth is irrevocable. All humans carry out this calling one way or another, for good or for evil. This insight is one of the main reasons a good God could create a good and beautiful creation, and it could still, as it did, go bad.

The good news is, however, that God’s plan for creation did not stop there.

So far, so good. At this point, in Genesis 4:1, there is no apparent uptake of the threat of impending death set loose in Adam and Eve’s disobedience (Gen 3). Instead, the shared life of Adam and Eve has become the occasion of a new life, a son.

Eve names her son in a way that reflects what she sees to have happened, namely, that she “created” a male (a man) “with God.” For the first time in the unfolding narrative of Genesis, Eve expresses in words the cooperative nature of the imager of Yahweh. Eve creates with God, not apart from him. So, we see that Adam and Eve’s first act of creation is a fulfillment of the call to multiply.

Genesis 4:2 - His wife (continued and) gave birth to Abel. Abel was a shepherd of flocks and Cain was a farmer, a worker of the land.

Abel comes on the scene as the second son. The text gives no mention of the time between Cain’s birth and Abel’s birth. Nor do we hear any description of the meaning of his name. But Abel’s name is still significant. It means breath, vapor, or vanity (pointless), or even idol (something that does not really exist). Ironically, Abel, like a breath or vapor, will not last long. His life is something like a breath or vapor in meaning and length.

Names in Hebrew do not determine a character’s behavior, instead, the naming sets the listener up to start to look for how the name will play a role in the way a character behaves.

Two Sons: Two Ways of Life

Abel and Cain represent, respectively, the two major ways of life in an agrarian society: the wandering herder of animals and the tiller of the soil. The order of the names and respective occupations ends with the word Adamah. Adamah, it is important to remember, is the earth/land that will not produce for Adam because of his disobedience. Its mention here would signal to the perceptive ancient listener a connection to the devastating consequences set in motion by and for Adam and, thereby, also for his descendants.

The Adamah, as we shall see, functions as a Leitworter (a leading repetitive word or recurring theme) of symbolic ruined space in the next several verses. Adam’s original disobedience works its way through the narrative in an unfolding tragedy of disorder leading to more and more disorder, like the way a rock dislodged high up on a mountain gathers speed and sets loose a cascade of boulders that become an avalanche below.

Everything counts

Every deed committed outside of Yahweh’s wisdom has unforeseen, seemingly unavoidable, and devastating consequences.

It is easy for us, as listeners who live in a world dominated by a materialist perspective, to overlook the symbolic connections that the ancient audience would perceive. But if we pay attention to the repetitions of Leitworter, we can grasp the way these stories are linked to each other and build out the theme of gradual and increasing disorder in the rest of Genesis 1-11, which is first described in Genesis 3.

Not a battlefield but a playing field

Why are these narratives of origin here at the “beginning” of the Hebrew Bible?

What is God’s intent in these stories?

Yahweh wants his people to understand that the reality they inhabit is not a battlefield of the gods where humans are pawns and slaves who must dodge the random attacks of divine misfortune; rather, the earth is the playing field where men and women act out and live their lives in an unavoidable agency whose consequences are inevitable but, from a human perspective, unpredictable.

In other words, humans shape the earth from heaven and then live in what they have brought to earth.

But that basic modus operandi plays out the tragedy of the sorcerer’s apprentice story. Small deeds done outside God’s wisdom grow into unpredictable major disasters whose consequences expand like the ripples created when a rock is dropped in a still pond or a tsunami released by the sudden movements of undersea tectonic plates.

Genesis Chapter 4, verses 1 and 2, are the calm before the storm that is about to come that you don’t want to miss. The following verses will bring the birth of envy and pit brother against brother in a conflict with deadly stakes and unpredictable but highly impactful consequences.

Before heading on to the rest of Chapter 4, use these questions to reflect on the insights you obtained in verses 1 and 2.

• What did these verses mean for ancient Hebrews?
• What insights and application of these insights do you see in your own life?
• Do you see how your behavior and motives have affected not only you but those around you?
• Is this a good thing or not?
• Is it avoidable?
• How do you understand how your actions and thoughts are acting out God’s archetypes and how do the other “scripts” that our culture presents to us tempt you to act?

Get more out of your Bible study. Join the Griffin Ministries mailing list and experience the Bible with fresh insights and enthusiasm.