(This could be GQ, but most religious stuff winds up here anyway.)
Then Cain kills Abel, etc.
Why, exactly, does God reject Cain’s offering? There seems no explanation. (And I have to say that I can’t make heads or tails of lines 6 and 7. Perhaps the answer is there.)
In any event, it seems that a lot of heartbreak was set in motion by God’s pure whim.
God wanted animals to be sacrificed, so that his sacrificial blood lust would be satisfied.
Cain chose the vegetarian route, which displeased the lord.
I’ve always understood it was because Abel brought the best of the best of what he had while Cain only brought what he didn’t want. This is not really supported in the bible, however other than by the passage:
BUT IANAFundi
Well, the explanation I give my First Grade Sunday School class (questions about God’s “blood lust” aside), is that God gave them all some instructions for what kind of sacrifice would be pleasing to him, i.e. livestock. So all Cain had to do was trade with Abel, fruits and veggies for livestock, but Cain thought he knew better, and was selfish and didn’t want to follow instructions and be a Good Helper (you have to imagine Teacher-type sound effects here, “He didn’t waaaaaant to be a Good Helper…”)
Verse 6 and 7, God is saying, “What’s the matter with you, you’re standing there looking pissed that I didn’t accept your sacrifice. If you do it right, then you won’t have to be so pissed.”
The NIV has a more sensible translation:
P.S. God has always demanded livestock as sacrifices, not fruit and veggies, which is why Sunday School teacher books all assume that somewhere in between the first and third verses of Genesis 4, God must have told Men that He wanted livestock.
Yah thats what I was taught too. I disagreed with my sunday teachers alot and was punished for having my own thoughts about the topics.
Anyway IMHO if Cain had brought the best of his harvest God would have accepted it. I’m pretty sure that God never once instructs them what or how to sacrifice, at least not until the time of Noah.
But once again, IANAF.
In the prior chapter, God had cursed the ground and what it produces:
(Genesis 3:17-19)
Thus, what Cain brought was unclean.
I was under the impression that God did not find Caine’s sacrifice unacceptable. He simply didn’t look upon it with pleasure, nor did Caine try particularly hard to present a superior product.
Abel on the other hand strove for value-added and cared enough to give the very best.
So to put it into perspective, it would be like at Christmas. #1 son gives you some tie he bought at Kmart with minimal thought and effort.
You unwrap the tie and say “oh wow, great. whee.”
#2 son goes out and buys you a large screen TV with DVD and surround sound and you jump for joy, and cry and hug him. You really go overboard.
#1 son than gets all angry that you liked #2s present. He blames you, and he blames #2.
Really the fault is in himself. He recieved credit in proportion to the effort he expended and the sacrifice he made. #2 put out more of an effort and got more in return.
So, there’s a triple moral.
Yes but it’s an assumption. I guess you would have to go back to the original language to figure this one out.
Scylla, I like that even better than my explaination, thanks 
Read chapter 3. The ground from which plants grow was cursed.
So the plants that grow from the cursed ground are eaten by the sheep. Wouldn’t that make them just as cursed?
That doesn’t signify, because the difference is that what God wants as a sacrifice is the blood. That’s the common thread that runs all through the Bible, right up to Jesus on the Cross, the Lamb of God. Veggies don’t have blood.
It doesn’t matter what language you read it in–there’s simply no information there in between Verse 1 and Verse 3.
Verse 1: "Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, “With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man.”
Verse 2: "Later she gave birth to his brother Abel. Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. "
Verse 3: “In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the LORD.”
The instructions are kind of implicit in this.
This presupposes that there must have been some kind of instructions to the effect of “bring me the firstfruits”. So even if God hadn’t actually given them any instructions as to the suitability of animals over veggies, it was pretty clear that the ball was now in Cain’s court. He was supposed to figure out how to please God, and trading veggies for animals was the obvious way to go about it.
But instead he stood there sulking.
No, it wouldn’t. Only man was extended the curse of the ground. I quoted the pertinent portion just above, so all you have to do is read a few lines.
God didn’t curse the ground because he thought dirt was icky. He had nothing against the ground. He was punishing Adam and Eve for not following directions.
He cursed the ground so it would be a pain in the ass to grow shit, and stop the freeloarding from the ingrate humans who are incapable of following mindnumbingly he simple directions.
He said (and this is a direct quote)
“Fine. You don’t want to listen? Go out there and grow your own food.”
This didn’t confront Adam, because he remembered how all the fruits and veggies just basically leaped out of the ground on their own without any work.
So God cursed the ground by withholding the Miracle Gro of his divine favor, so that from thenceforth yea, growing stuff was a bitch, and then he cursed a bunch of other stuff too, just to show he wasn’t kidding and things had verily changed.
Right. In fact, that’s bass-ackwards. The ground was icky because He cursed it.
There is an anthropological theory about this (notably promoted in Daniel Quinn’s Ishamael) that basically interprets the Cain and Abel motif (there are similar stories in other Mesopotamian mythology) as an allegory for the conflict between agricultural and pastoral (or sometimes hunter-gatherer) cultures. The Hebrews were a pastoral culture (i.e. they depended the herding of animals for their livelihood). Quinn says that the Genesis story was designed to show that God favored one way of life over the other, and also served a teleological function in explaining why some tribes had been “cursed” with the backbreaking task of an agricultral livelihood as opposed to the relatively easier life of herding sheep. IIRC, Joseph Campbell also subscribed to this theory.
—In the prior chapter, God had cursed the ground and what it produces:—
That’s not the same thing as cursing what grows from the ground (it’s also not the same thing as cursed FOR you and only you: it’s cursed because of you), especially when the curse seems not to involve adding a taboo, but making life suck for man. I don’t remember kosher taboos holding grains to be unclean.
In fact, if anything, Cain seems to be simply doing what God cursed man to do: work his butt off. Abel just chased around some sheep. The line “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?” still suggests, however, that Cain did do something displeasing to God, and that this wasn’t just an arbitrary way of dealing with people. The Cain-sacrificed-only-his-moldy-produce idea seems the most plausible, considering that the text goes out of its way to mention Abel’s prime offerings.
That more abstract interpretation also seems a little more desirable theologically, instead of having a God who seems afraid of or upset by his own cleanilness taboos (as, notably, Jesus does not seem to be).
The traditional Jewish interpretation of that story is in accord with BioHazard’s answer - Abel brought his best, while Cain didn’t.
Agreeing with BioHazard and cmkeller.
Don’t discount the acceptability of a grain offering, though. It was part of the Law.
Exodus ch 29 lists bread, flour, drink, grain, etc… as part of the sacrifices. See also Leviticus ch 2. It wasn’t all animals. So, Cain could’ve made an acceptable offering to God, if his attitude had been right. At least, that’s what I get from the context of Genesis ch 4.