CAIN & ABLE

Genesis Chapter 4

Adam's name means "The man"

Eve probably means "living"

Cain sounds like the Hebrew for "brought forth" or "acquired"

Adam & Eve have two sons, Cain & Abel.  Actually they have more sons and daughters, we are not sure how many but we only hear a story about Cain & Abel.

Cain is older than Abel.  Cain became a farmer and Abel became a shepherd.  (Notice that they no longer have everything provided for them.  They now have to work in order to provide for themselves).  They both bring an offering to The Lord.  God wasn't pleased with Cains offering.  We are not sure why but reading in verses 3 & 4 it does say that Cain brought God "some of the fruits"  from his garden to God while Abel brought "fat portions from...the firstborn of his flock".  As if Cain just gave God what he felt he had to while Abel joyfully gave God the best he had.  

Cain becomes upset that God favors Abel's gift over his and God actually tries to talk to Cain about doing the right thing and He tries to warn Cain about mastering sin in his life.  Cain obviously doesn't head God's warning and ends up killing Abel.  This is the first murder ever committed.  (Interesting how, now that "good & evil" have been introduced into their lives that evil has a way of growing & spreading).  When God questions Cain, he gets sassy with Him and says "Am I my brothers keeper?".  God punishes Cain by making it so that the ground will no longer produce for Cain.  Quite a hardship for him since that's what he does to provide for himself.  

Cain is concerned that other people, (maybe other family members?) would be mad at him & try to kill him so God puts a mark on Cain and says that if anyone kills him he will be punished more than Cain was.

Cain had to leave the area  and went to live in Nod.  Nod means "wandering".  We are told that Nod lies east of Eden so judging from the map this would put him probably in what is modern day Iran because Adam & Eve are in Iraq.

Cain has a wife and has children with her.  The question is always asked about where all these other people came from?  One explanation may be that the human race was still genetically pure and so they married relatives.  Also, we've only been told about Adam & Eve, I've always wondered if God didn't place other people here as well.  I think there are theories that angels lived among people in the beginning and were involved with humans.  To me, it's not really important.  However God chose to do it is fine with me.  There's lots of things we don't know about that we'll learn about later.  I mean heck, we used to think the earth was flat!  When we learned it was round it was interesting and good to know but didn't change anything.

So, Cain has a baby and names him Enoch.  Cain is building a city and names the city after his son.  Here we start going into a list of ancestries.  i like to start keeping track of them even though some of the names are never heard again but it does make an interesting story when you see where they lead to.  So here is the table I started:

The interesting thing I noticed about this list is that you can see that under Cain who was the first recorded murderer in the bible, is a relative, Lamech, who also killed a man.  And under Seth, who evidently stayed in good graces with the family, is Enoch who "walked with God" and later, Noah who, as we know was the man God used to build the Ark and save from the flood.  A "righteous" man.  Interesting how evil begets evil and good begets good.