The Myth of Cain and Abel

A parable of technological revolution and its consequences

Ivory bas-relief synopsizing the Cain and Abel story (ca. 1084)

Cain was the first plowman. He abandoned sheepherding for technology.
–Marshall McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business (1970)

If you’ve read anything by McLuhan, you’ll notice how often he brings up the Greek myth of the Phoenician hero Cadmus, who sowed a dragon’s teeth and harvested armed soldiers, founded Thebes, and invented the phonetic alphabet. McLuhan believes that the Cadmus narrative, like all orally formulated and transmitted mythology, represents (in his words) “a succinct statement of a complex social process that had occurred over a period of centuries.” While he somewhat overgeneralizes the matter, it makes sense: before the keeping and archiving of written records, mythology and symbolism were the only tools with which a people could preserve the memory of epochal social transformations in the distant past.

An obvious and fairly literal example is found in the ancient Mesopotamian story of the Flood, which the Israelites picked up (probably during the Babylonian captivity of the sixth century BCE) and adapted into their own sacred history. A popular and plausible theory is that it comprises the dim cultural memory of rapid sea-level rise, mass migrations, and perhaps an actual catastrophic deluge at the end of the last ice age. The myth of Cadmus is more symbolic and multidimensional, at least according to McLuhan’s interpretation: it has to do with the integral role written language played in the administration and expansion of empire, such as those that ruled the Eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. A more conservative reading would be that it commemorates the cultural benefits of the post-Mycenaean Greeks’ contact with the Phoenicians, with particular attention given to their alphabet (which the Greeks perfected with the addition of vowels).

McLuhan submits his interpretation of the Cain and Abel myth more as more of a quip than an exercise in hermeneutics. This is par for the course: the purpose of his probes and provocations (of which Culture Is Our Business entirely consists) was ever the same as Wittgenstein’s stated hopes for his ruminative paragraphs in the Philosophical Investigations—to “stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.” I say we take Marshall up on his challenge and have some reckless amateur exegesis for ourselves.

The Cain and Abel episode occupies only the fourth book of Genesis and runs a meager twenty-six verses from start to finish. I think it’s short enough that we can paste the most eventful chunk of it here so as to refresh our memories. We’ll be using the old (and not always perfectly accurate) King James translation because I’m sentimental like that.

And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.

And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.

And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering:

But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?

If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?

And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

A few notes:

1.) The story of Cain and Abel, like much of Genesis, almost certainly has its roots in an oral tradition, and was probably influenced by the older Mesopotamian myth of Dumuzi and Enkimdu and their wooing of Inanna.

2.) In the Hebraic tradition, the brothers are understood to be twins. Cain came out of the womb first.

3.) The Hebrew root of Abel’s name relates to emptiness or a lack of substance, while Cain’s pertains to acquisition or possession (see here). This one’s important; bear it in mind later on.

Two brothers. One tills the soil, one tends sheep. While Abel is the younger sibling, his vocation slightly antedates Cain’s: the peoples of the fertile crescent (specifically those of modern-day Iran) domesticated sheep and goats roughly around 10,500 BCE. The first domesticated plants and horticultural practices in the region date back to about 10,000 BCE, give or take a few centuries. While the methodical raising of crops and livestock were concurrent developments, agriculture was by far the more transformative of the two in the long run, spurring such inventions as the irrigation canal, the shaduf, the plow, the hoe, the pitchfork, the sieve, etc., and producing the food surpluses which enabled the existence of permanent settlements with large, dense populations.

We can read the brothers as avatars of the interrelated movements which defined the Neolithic Revolution, but it was Cain’s contribution that made possible the urban revolution. Domesticated animals are moveable goods; a people that could sustain itself through an established nomadic pastoral lifestyle would have tended to remain in motion. Moreover, as any ecologically-minded vegan will tell you, an acre of land used to grow plants for human consumption yields more food than an acre used for the “growing” of meat. The systematic large-scale farming of staple crops could feed a massive population year-round, making it convenient (and later necessary) to stay in one place. From sedentism followed the development of architecture, metallurgy, literacy, labor specialization, and practices pertaining to property ownership.

The celebrated Anatolian city of Çatalhöyük, inhabited from the eighth millennium BCE to the early sixth millennium BCE, housed a culture that might be viewed as representing an intermediary phase between epochs. The settlement’s population appears to have never exceeded 10,000—a far cry from the 80,000 which the first great Mesopotamian city of Uruk is estimated to have reached at its peak in the early third millennium BCE. Its people grew crops, but continued to forage and hunt. They had no writing system and apparently waged no wars. Archeological indicators suggest little in the way of class distinctions or specialization. Arable land seems to have been held and worked in common, and its yield distributed among the population. Some private property was held in the form of food stores and tools—and historians believe that rising inequality, household independence, and the formation of a social hierarchy occurred shortly before Çatalhöyük was abandoned (and were perhaps the cause of its dissolution).

The concatenation of agriculture, sedentism, and private ownership practices reinforced each of its constituent elements. None could develop but for the incentives and pressures exerted by the other two—but the original catalyst was the domestication of crops.

The city-states of Bronze Age Mesopotamia were much more recognizably modern. They were fed by large-scale agriculture. They were socially organized in terms of a pyramidical class structure and the specialization of labor. Despite ample documentation that the central temples were the primary landowners, there is growing evidence of private land ownership. The foundation of these great cites lay in the surplus produced by the agricultural revolution’s consummate innovation, the ox-drawn plow—which a 2019 paper published in the journal Antiquity identifies as the primordial root of social inequality as we know it.

A synopsis published by the University of Oxford runs:

Before around 4,000 BC, societies across the Middle East and Europe cultivated a patchwork of small garden plots, which Bogaard likens to present-day “allotments” in the UK. Families would have grown a variety cereal grains, as well as lentils, peas, and other pulse crops that needed to be harvested by hand. Notably, they would have tilled the soil by hand using hoes, in some cases also with the help of unspecialised cattle (such as ageing milk cows) to pull plows, and carefully monitored their gardens during the growing season to protect them from wild animals…

Then something changed. Farmers who were well resourced enough to raise and maintain specialised plow oxen saw new opportunities in farming additional land. A single farmer with an ox team could cultivate ten times or more land than a hoe farmer, and would begin to acquire more and more land to cultivate. Those who owned land and ox teams also began to opt for more stress-tolerant crops, like barley or certain kinds of wheat, that didn’t require much labour.

By the second millennium BC in many farming landscapes fields stretched to the horizon, and societies were deeply divided between wealthy landowners, who passed their holdings on to their children, and land-poor or landless families…

 “So long as labour was the key input for production, inequality was limited because families did not differ much in how much labour they could deploy to produce crops, ” Fochesato explains. “But when the most important input became land, differences between families widened because land and other material forms of wealth could be accumulated and transmitted over generations. By chance, or force, or hard work, some families came to have a lot more than others. Then radical inequality arose.”

It’s no coincidence that the cities of Mesopotamia were the world’s earliest slave societies. While Akkad and Sumer added to their slave populations through military conquest, they made their earliest slaves of their own people.¹ A debtor who couldn’t pay back his creditors typically sold himself or his children into slavery to settle accounts. The history of agriculture is inseparable from the history of slavery and of large-scale inegalitarianism in general.

In my insignificant opinion, this is the historical narrative encoded in the story of Cain and Abel: the agricultural revolution and its inexorable social consequences. The imprint of the older story of Dumuzi and Enkimdu on which it was based (or otherwise absorbed into itself) still bespeaks the ancient conflict between nomadic pastoral and sedentary farming societies, with the avatar of the herder receiving divine favor—but the Hebrew adaptation identifies the world historical victor.

More importantly, while the account in Genesis casts the horticulturist Cain as the first murderer, the more critical point is that he committed fratricide. Tribal warfare, the violence that two strictly delineated groups of human beings inflict upon one another, is older than recorded history. It’s something we’ve always done, if the occurrence of similar behavior in our closest animal relative is any indication. But it wasn’t until the agricultural revolution that human groups embarked upon the systematic subjection and degradation of their own members vis-à-vis proprietarian legality and hierarchy.

Cain’s rejoinder to God is precisely the refrain of the eighteenth-century landowner who enclosed the old commons, the nineteenth-century industrialist who imposed brutal fifteen-hour workdays in his factories, the private equity firm that works to make neighborhood rents unaffordable to longtime residents, the corporate shareholder who rewards and incentivizes layoffs, the porn studio that abuses and coerces its contracted “actors,” the pharmaceutical firm that sells patented lifesaving medicine at a premium, the tech company whose wanton disruption of an established industry grows the ranks of the precariat, the opportunistic landlord, and every other effectuator and enabler of the exploitation of human life and labor: am I my brother’s keeper?

1. I’m admittedly unsure if subsequent research bears it out as a common phenomenon across the world (or even among North American Indians in general), but Engels wrote about the differences in how a so-called “primitive” society made use of war captives as opposed to a developed one:

To the barbarian of the lower stage, a slave was valueless. Hence the treatment of defeated enemies by the American Indians was quite different from that at a higher stage. The men were killed or adopted as brothers into the tribe of the victors; the women were taken as wives or otherwise adopted with their surviving children. At this stage human labor-power still does not produce any considerable surplus over and above its maintenance costs. That was no longer the case after the introduction of cattle-breeding, metalworking, weaving and, lastly, agriculture.