It is a disquieting story, one that contains no call, no transcending quest; nor does it open gates of hidden sanctuaries. It suggests evil on its lowest, most primitive level. Raw, unembellished instincts dictate the rules of the game; instincts and not divine command. Here, God tested neither the killer nor the victim; their acts were committed freely, stupidly. Without understanding, without even trying to understand.

And yet these two individuals had everything to stir our emotions; both were marked, doomed. Cain: the first assassin and perhaps the first man to view murder as an act of ultimate rebellion. Abel: the first victim, the first man to leave this world in silence, without a word of regret, without a gesture of protest.

Why did Cain choose violence and his brother resignation? Why did neither resist the role assigned to him: Cain that of executioner and Abel that of victim?

We do not understand them, yet in an obscure way we feel involved in their fate. Their adventure is that of the first genocide, foreshadowing more than one war. Their behavior is familiar to us; every one of their impulses prefigures our conduct in stress situations. Ultimately we are confronted by them, or rather by their image, the image of a man with two faces we cannot contemplate without fear. Yes, fear is the name of their tale, bottomless, hopeless fear, unconquerable and precluding any possibility of redemption. Cain and Abel: they were mankind. The choice was limited and absolute: assassin or victim, nothing else. Assassin or victim: without onlooker or witness. God? God is judge. God is participant. Accomplice.

But why is this lugubrious episode told to us? What is it meant to reveal, to prove, to affirm, to refute. No narration is more debasing, no event more destructive. Why should it be remembered today and always? Why should we be compelled to look at these two enemy brothers whenever our gaze probes the horizon or reverts to our beginnings?

No other Biblical situation contains so many questions or arouses so many uncertainties.

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Let us examine the text. The event is presented in a few terse sentences heavy with allusions, with a density rare even in the Bible. The style is sober, spare; the pace is quick and harrowing. Only the essentials are given: names, vocations, conflicts: loveless lives, hateless killings. A few misunderstood impulses, a few wrongly interpreted silences, and the drama is set: the loving comradeship between brothers, the friendship between adolescents degenerate into disaster.

We could read this taut linear narrative as a tragedy in three acts with a cast of three to be played three times and on three different levels. At the first reading, Cain would be the villain. At the second, it would be Abel. At the third, it would be He who manipulated them.

• • •

Let us listen.

Once upon a time there lived a man named Cain who had a brother named Abel. Called upon to share their parents’ haunted kingdom, they quarreled over heavenly favors and finally confronted one another in every role that defines man’s relationship to other men.