The fact that Cain, the representative of this new culture, kills his brother, who represents the weaker nomadic culture, is a sort of allegory for this mass shift towards more advanced agriculture in the ancient Middle East.īut if this is the case, why is Cain condemned to go to the land of Nod and become a nomad? It may be that this represents the fact that the displacement of nomadic peoples was by no means settled at this point, and that the balance of power and influence may have swung between the farming and nomadic cultures, back and forth, as one tribe or group defeated or rivalled another. As with the Great Flood and other origin-stories from the Book of Genesis, the tale of Cain and Abel may have emerged from earlier Sumerian myths about the clashes between the older, nomadic way of life and the new city-focused farming culture that was displacing (and replacing) it. Cain is not just a farmer but a representative of a skilled class of metal-workers, remember: as such, he symbolises the development of more advanced technologies during the Bronze Age (as it gave way to the Iron Age).Ĭuriously, it’s been suggested that Abel’s name might be distantly related to the Babylonian aplu, meaning ‘son’. As Isaac Asimov points out in his endlessly informative Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The Old Testament by Isaac Asimov (September 19,1973), the authors of these early histories were farmers and settled city-men who would doubtless have viewed nomads as a threat to their civilisation: the nomads were potential invaders and raiders. If we put these two names together, we find that Cain represents the farmer and skilled artisan, while Abel represents the herdsman or nomad.

Meanwhile, ‘Abel’ is believed to be derived from Jubal or Jabal, the ancestor of nomadic shepherds. In Genesis 4:22 we learn that ‘Tubal-cain’ was ‘an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron’, which lends credence to this etymology (Tubal was a district in Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey). ‘Cain’ is from a root word meaning ‘forge’ or ‘smith’, and is cognate with the Arabic kain, which means the same thing. But a clue to the origins of the Cain and Abel story may also lie in the symbolic meanings of the brothers’ two names.

Images of cain and abel