The crime of fratricide (killing a brother), was seen as particularly unnatural. The story of Cain and Abel was so well known that Shakespeare could readily assume a knowledge of it in his audience when he wrote Hamlet (especially since the introduction, shortly before Shakespeare's birth, of the Protestant faith in England, which allowed church-goers to listen to the Bible in English instead of Latin.) His contemporaries would have been well aware that it is the crime of Cain which Claudius is referring to when he says of the murder of his brother, ‘O my offence is rank it smells to heaven It hath the primal eldest curse upon't – a brother's murder!' Cain and Abel in literature Shakespeare's Hamlet Abel is also cited as an example of someone who trusted in God in Hebrews 11:4, while Cain became a symbol of brotherly rivalry, anger and violence. Some Christian commentators have seen Abel, a shepherd who was an innocent victim, as foreshadowing Jesus Christ, a ‘type' of Jesus, who is described in the New Testament as the Good Shepherd and also as the Lamb of God (see Big ideas: Sheep, shepherd, lamb), who offers himself as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. To show that Cain was not to be killed in revenge, God put a mark upon him. When God challenged Cain, he pretended not to know what had happened to Abel, asking, ‘Am I my brother's keeper?' This phrase is frequently quoted today to imply that this attitude is wrong and that, on the contrary, we do have a duty to look after one another.Īs punishment for the crime, God sent Cain into exile, but decreed that no-one else should exact vengeance. God warned Cain to avoid sin but, in a jealous rage, Cain killed his brother. Cain's offering of ‘the fruit of the ground' was rejected by God while Abel's offering of the best meat from the first of his flock was accepted (possibly because it was more costly). Cain was a farmer of arable crops, while Abel tended sheep. Adam and Eve had been banished from the Garden of Eden (see Big ideas: Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, ‘Second Adam') for disobeying God, and their children shared in their exile and tendency to sin.
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