Abel's name means breath, a hint at how briefly he would live
In Genesis, Cain is the first human ever born and his younger brother Abel the first to die. The names carry clues. Abel comes from hebel, meaning breath or vapour, the same word Ecclesiastes uses for vanity, and several scholars link it to his short life. Cain may mean smith.
The story in Genesis 4 is brief. Cain farms and Abel keeps sheep; both make offerings, and God favours Abel's firstlings over Cain's produce without explanation. Cain lures his brother into a field and kills him, then answers God's question with the famous deflection about whether he is his brother's keeper. God curses him to wander, yet also places a mark on him so no one will kill him, threatening sevenfold vengeance. Cain settles in the land of Nod, meaning wandering, east of Eden, and founds a city named after his son Enoch.
Eve's words at Cain's birth pun on a Hebrew verb meaning to acquire. Robert Alter and Victor Hamilton think the name itself means smith, as in Aramaic and Arabic, fitting his descendant Tubal-cain, the first metalworker. Many scholars read the tale symbolically, as a memory of tension between herders and farmers in the age of agriculture. A Mesopotamian parallel, Enlil Chooses the Farmer-God, has a shepherd god and a farmer god argue before the chief deity, who sides with the farmer, the reverse of the biblical verdict. Joseph Blenkinsopp notes that, like most figures in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the brothers appear nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, and dates proposed for this material range from the ninth century BCE to the Hellenistic era.
Later traditions fill the gaps. The Epistle to the Hebrews says Abel's gift was accepted because it was offered in faith. The Quran names the brothers Qabil and Habil and adds a raven, sent by God, which scratches the ground to show the killer how to bury his brother, prompting his remorse. Some Muslim commentators said the quarrel was over marrying a sister named Aclima, and one early scholar, Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib, argued the two sons were actually later Israelites. In the Gnostic Apocryphon of John, Cain and Abel become Archons, sons of the lesser creator Yaldabaoth.
The pair became Western culture's archetype of fratricide, painted by Titian, Rubens and William Blake and echoed from medieval drama to modern fiction.
Source: Cain and Abel
