God hadn’t said anything about not killing anyone yet, but after Cain killed Abel, God said to Cain, “What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”
Sounds like he was guilty of murder.
Well, because he killed his brother. Maybe God hadn’t said that murder was wrong, yet, but I think it should be pretty obvious that it is!
Cain knew it was wrong, because he hid what he had done: “I’m not my brother’s keeper.”
I like Robert Hunter’s version:
It only seems obvious because you’ve grown up with murder=wrong hammered into your head.
I don’t see how it would have been obvious to the “first family”.
Perhaps a little apple told them?
Besides, they weren’t any of them going to die until Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit. So now they were going to die; all Cain did was effect the first death.
Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, and thus they (and their descendants – the Bible is quite Lamarckian) knew what was right and what was wrong.
Trinopus (stayed awake in Sunday School…)
Ah but they knew about death. Remember God liked Abel’s sacrafice of animals better than Cain’s veggies (or grain or whatever). This later appears that God likes the spilling of blood. Remember it is the blood Jesus shed on the cross that redeemed mankind.
So they knew about death. And killing of animals was OK. So why was not the killing of his brother?
No, the whole burning sacrifices at the altar thing happened after the fall (and knowledge of right and wrong).
Well the god of the Israelites gets angry when the Older Brother agricultural societies (Egypt, Summaria) beat up on the Younger Shepard brother (nomadic Canaanites). It makes for a vivid yet concise socio-political allegory.
Sorry if this is out of the literal biblical context of the OP but I really liked my sociology classes.
Considering God favoured Abel over Cain for the fact Abel murdered animals in God’s name (while Cain only had boring old vegetables), I can see why Cain might get confused at where the line blurs.
For the really weird answer:
There are several ancient legends in Judaism concerning Cain that didn’t make Genesis/Bereshith. One is that Cain was not the son of Adam but of Sammael, a fallen angel (and, traditionally, the one who appeared as a serpent in the Garden of Eden- in this version he gave Eve more than fruit salad recipes). He was loathed by God already because of his paternity, which was why his sacrifice was not accepted.
(This version, incidentally, inspired EAST OF EDEN, in which Cal Trask is the son of his “uncle” Charles rather than of his “father” Adam.)
The same ancient legends tell of the “real” reason for Cain & Abel’s hatred. If you’re interested, google the words
CAIN ABEL JUMELLA ACLIMA
Fascinating variants on the familiar legends.
No one claimed it happened before the fall.
Also Sampiro there is another legend in which sexual jealousy is the primary cause of the murder. Cain and Abel were both born with twin sisters. Cain was supposed to marry his own twin, and Abel his own. However Cain fell in love with Abel’s twin (whose name escapes me at the moment, but translates to something like “beautiful one”) and in a fit of jealousy offed Abel.
Damn. Sampiro. Your google suggestion refers to the legend I’m talking about. Those were the names I forgot.
But this was already well-hammered into the heads of whoever originally wrote down the oral traditions!
The whole OT is full of such anachronisms, where the touch of a “contemporary” story-teller often allows researchers to date various texts within it to a certain century.
Dan Abarbanel
Jewish tradition states that G-d had already given six basic commandments to Adam: prohibitions against idolatry, cursing G-d, murder, sexual immorality, and theft; and the requirement to establish courts of justice. (With the addition of a seventh commandment, given to Noah - a prohibition against eating a limb from a living animal - these constitute the “Seven Noahide Laws” that, according to Judaism, are binding on all of humanity.)
According to this, then, Cain knew perfectly well that he had committed a crime (and, as bup notes, that would explain why he felt it necessary to try and hide his actions).
Shade and Trinopus have already answered the question. When Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge, they learned all the rules of morality. That’s why they suddenly became ashamed of their nakedness – the knowledge of sexual mores was magically imprinted on them where it had not been before. The knowledge of the immorality of murder was similarly imprinted.
If you argue that mere eating of a fruit couldn’t have possibly enscribed a unitary morality on Adam, Eve, and their future descendants, then you’re arguing about the verity of the legend. I think you and I might be on the same side of that argument, but this isn’t the forum for it. The question you asked was a question within the context of the story, and within the story, there’s a simple answer – the fruit.
–Cliffy
An interesting take on this from Cain’s point of view (from a Vampire book I seem to remember). Cain saw that God prefered Abel’s sacrifice and believed it was because Abel killed the animals that he loved and cared for. Cain loved and cared for Abel more than anything else, and so to please God he sacrificed Abel.
The first act of Murder was commited by God, when he took away Adam and Eve’s immortality, if you define murder as willfully causing another to die.