Etymology

Cain and Abel are traditional English renderings of the Hebrew names. It has been proposed that the etymology of their names may be a direct pun on the roles they take in the Genesis narrative. Abel (hbl) is thought to derive from a reconstructed word meaning 'herdsman', with the modern Arabic cognate ibil now specifically referring only to 'camels'. Cain (qyn) is thought to be cognate to the mid-1st millennium BCE South Arabian word qyn, meaning 'metalsmith'. This theory would make the names descriptive of their roles, where Abel works with livestock, and Cain with agriculture—and would parallel the names Adam (אדם‎, ‘dm, 'man') and Eve (חוה‎, ḥwh, 'life-giver').[citation needed]

Original appearance

The oldest known copy of the biblical narrative is from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and dates to the first century BCE. Cain and Abel also appear in a number of other texts, and the story is the subject of various interpretations. Abel, the first murder victim, is sometimes seen as the first martyr; while Cain, the first murderer, is sometimes seen as an ancestor of evil. Some scholars suggest the pericope may have been based on a Sumerian story representing the conflict between nomadic shepherds and settled farmers. Modern scholars typically view the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel to be about the development of civilization during the age of agriculture; not the beginnings of man, but when people first learned agriculture, replacing the ways of the hunter-gatherer.

Academic theologian Joseph Blenkinsopp holds that Cain and Abel are symbolic rather than real. Like almost all of the persons, places and stories in the Primeval history (the first eleven chapters of Genesis), they are mentioned nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, a fact that suggests that the History is a late composition attached to Genesis to serve as an introduction. Just how late is a matter for dispute: the history may be as late as the Hellenistic period (first decades of the 4th century BCE), but the high level of Babylonian myth behind its stories has led others to date it to the Babylonian exile (6th century BCE). A prominent Mesopotamian parallel to Cain and Abel is the Sumerian myth of the Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzid, in which the shepherd Dumuzid and the farmer Enkimdu compete for the affection of the goddess Inanna, with Dumuzid (the shepherd) winning out. Another parallel is Enlil Chooses the Farmer-God, in which the shepherd-god Emesh and the farmer-god Enten bring their dispute over which of them is better to the chief god Enlil, who rules in favor of Enten (the farmer).