carrioncrone replied to your post “So if Kane killing Abel was the first murder, how could Kane have...”
because he'd killed and eaten animals before, probably. they lived on a farm didn't they
The story only tells us that Kane grew crops and Abel was a shepherd, but whether they ate any of Abel’s sheep is unknown, or if they ever ate wild game or other livestock.
That brings up something interesting though because, if they did, it would have been Abel who understood the nature of the consequences of killing something. Like, the story seems to define the two by their professions, with the whole conflict arising from Adam accepting Abel’s gift of young lambs (for food, for wool???) but rejecting Kane’s offering of crops, and Kane doesn’t understand the full consequence of his actions until he is told that his brother’s blood has “poisoned/cursed the earth.”
I guess I just wonder whether, even if they did kill and eat animals, if Kane would have participated in a way that would provide him the knowledge of killing, and even then, would he know that a man could die the way a beast does? Like, when Adam and Eve were cursed, they had to be instructed in how to disobey G-d, but Kane acted purely from anger, and I just question whether he could have predicted the consequences of his actions.
And like, yeah, once he did it, he tried to lie to G-d about it, which is pretty much solid grounds for getting yourself cursed, especially at that point, but like, that’s not treated as the takeaway from the story, and I think that treats as a foregone conclusion the motives of someone who murdered when murder was, at most, a theoretical concept.
