The biblical narrative underlying this painting is the narrative concerning Cain and Abel in Genesis 4.⁶³ Adam and Eve had two sons, first Cain and then Abel. Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. Cain brought an offering of the fruit of the earth to the Lord, while Abel brought of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions. For an unstated reason, the Lord approved of Abel and his offering, but disapproved of Cain and his offering. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. The Lord asked Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen?,’ and then said, ‘If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.’ Cain’s reaction to this message, which implied he had not done well, was emphatically negative:

Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him (Gen 4:8)

So the Lord asked Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ and Cain replied with a lie, ‘I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?’ This response elicited the following response from God:

‘What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength; you shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth’ (Gen 4:10-12; RSV).

Cain replied to God that, as a fugitive and wanderer upon the earth, anyone who found him could slay him. But God rejected this: ‘Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! If any one slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who came upon him should kill him’ (4:15). Cain did indeed survive, married and fathered a son and this was the beginning of Cain’s numerous descendants (4:16-24). At some point he must have died, but Genesis does not say when or how. Meanwhile, Adam and Eve had another son, Seth, and enjoyed a numerous lineage through him, of which one was Enoch, in the sixth generation after Adam.

1 Enoch contains a succinct reference to this narrative of Cain and Abel (22:5-7). At this point in Enoch’s wandering through the cosmos his guides are the archangel Raphael and other holy angels. They travel to a place where the angels show Enoch a high mountain in the west. It contains four hollow places, three of which are dark and one illuminated. Raphael explains to Enoch that these hollows were created for the souls of the dead to be kept in until the day of the great judgment (22:1-4). This picture of the souls in pits on a mountain is sharply differentiated from the usual Israelite understanding of the dead being in Sheol below the earth (see 1 Samuel 28). At this point Enoch observes as follows:

There I saw the spirit of a dead man making suit, and his lamentation went up to heaven and cried and made suit. Then I asked Raphael, the Watcher and the holy one who was with me, and said to him, ‘This spirit that makes suit—whose is it—that thus his lamentation goes up and makes suit unto heaven?’ And he answered me and said, ‘This is the spirit that went forth from Abel, whom Cain his brother murdered. And Abel makes accusation against him until his posterity perishes from the face of the earth, and his posterity is obliterated from the posterity of human beings’ (22:5-7).⁶⁴

While the connection with Gen 4:10 is apparent, in Genesis it is Abel’s blood (animate and personified) that calls to God from the ground, whereas in 1 Enoch 22:5 Abel’s spirit does so. The difference probably represents changing Israelite views on the nature of the human person from the earlier time when Genesis was written to the Hellenistic period of origin of 1 Enoch 1-36. That the spirit of Abel is making suit to heaven connects this incident with other examples of petitions that are directed to heaven: such as that by the earth in response to the violence of the Giants (7:6; 9:2), by human beings in consequence of the knowledge taught by the Watchers (8:4) and by the rebellious Watchers seeking mercy from God (13:6-7). The language of petition comes from the administrative practices of ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic monarchies where subjects of the king wrote to the king or his courtiers requesting that they help them with their problems. The very language of the numerous petitions in Greek that have survived in the sands of Egypt is found in the extant Greek text of 1 Enoch 1-36.⁶⁵ This language is part of the evidence that heaven in the text is modelled on the ancient royal court and its courtiers, not on the Jerusalem Temple and its priests.

The implications of the accusation by Abel’s spirit are intriguing. Certainly the fact that Abel’s spirit makes the accusation imputes to him knowledge that Cain did, indeed, have descendants (as noted above). Yet is Abel asking (God in) heaven to hurry along the death of Cain’s posterity, or is he simply complaining about Cain until such time, presumably the End-time, when his descendants will have been obliterated from the earth? Most probably the former is intended. Abel’s spirit is directing a petition to heaven and that means asking God to do something, which here can only be to wipe out Cain’s descendants. Given that Genesis shows God to be surprisingly solicitous in preserving Cain’s life, it is rather surprising to find Abel asking for the opposite fate to be inflicted on his descendants. But that is what the text implies. Whether this constitutes a request for vengeance or justice is, however, a more difficult question. Neither word, ‘justice,’ nor ‘vengeance’ appears in the passage. One’s initial reaction might be that it is grossly disproportionate to call for the death of all Cain’s descendants when only Abel himself was killed. But Abel’s implied concern is that Cain’s murdering him deprived him of the posterity that Cain had himself enjoyed and that it would therefore be just for Cain’s posterity to be removed from the earth as well. For this would put them both in a roughly equal position. So perhaps Abel’s spirit is calling for justice rather than vengeance (even though there may be times when they are hard to distinguish). Therefore, we have here a highly imaginative literary and theological interpretation of the circumstance that Cain had descendants, refracted through the sense of grievance felt by Abel’s spirit.

Finally, and most importantly, this comparatively brief reworking of the story of Cain and Abel in 1 Enoch 22 serves to alert us to something of fundamental importance for how the Enochic scribes understood evil.⁶⁶ This is that the root of evil in the world is violence. To appreciate this we need to recognise how 1 Enoch 1-36 distinguishes between ‘narrative time,’ meaning the broad sweep of time implied in the text (beginning with the creation in Genesis and proceeding to the End), and ‘dramatic time’, which is the more specific period within narrative time within which the major events of the plot take place.⁶⁷ Whereas within dramatic time evil begins with the defection of the Watchers to earth and the mischief they wreak there (1 Enoch 6-7), the text makes clear that, within the more encompassing framework of narrative time, evil, epitomised by violence, began on earth much earlier with Cain’s violent murder of his brother and was entirely human in origin (even though this homicide is not mentioned till 1 Enoch 22:5-7).

The importance of the story of Cain and Abel to the Enochic scribes in relation to the question of evil emerges when we consider how they dealt with the Genesis account of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. Later in his wanderings Enoch arrives at a place in the east where the paradise of righteousness is located, which contains many beautiful trees (1 Enoch 28:1-33:4). One of them, ‘the tree of wisdom, whose fruit the holy ones eat and learn great wisdom’, is particularly beautiful and Enoch asks his angel guide about it. Then Raphael, the holy angel who was with him, replies as follows:

‘This is the tree of wisdom from which your father of old and your mother of old, who were before you, ate and learned wisdom. And their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they were driven from the garden’ (32:6).

There is nothing here about the disobedience of Adam and Eve, nor about their being punished for it by dying or becoming mortal. The text imputes a measure of incongruity in what they had done—eating food that was not meant for them and thus meriting their expulsion from the garden—but they are not described as having sinned. Accordingly, as far as the author or authors were concerned, the first human sin was Cain’s murder of Abel, an act of violence. This is the major point here, the first instance of evil on the earth, a theme that will be taken up repeatedly and developed across the entirety of 1 Enoch. Other explanations, such as that Abel is the prototype of the righteous martyr,⁶⁸ miss the role of this incident within the larger narrative presupposed in the text. Throughout 1 Enoch violence figures as the primary sin and this is where it begins.⁶⁹ Yet this is also the first instance of anyone dying in the larger narrative presupposed in the text, and this raises the admittedly daring question of whether the Enochic scribes regarded this incident as the cause of humans losing their initial immortality.