Genesis 4:2 - Exposition

And she again bare (literally, added to bear , a Hebraism adopted in the New Testament; vide Luke 20:11 ) his brother Abel. Habel (vanity), supposed to hint either that a mother's eager hopes had already begun to be disappointed in her eider son, or that, having in her first child's name given expression to her faith, in this she desired to preserve a monument of the miseries of human life, of which, perhaps, she had been forcibly reminded by her own maternal sorrows. Perhaps also, though unconsciously, a melancholy prophecy of his premature re-moral by the hand of fratricidal rage, to which it has been thought there is an outlook by the historian In the frequent (seven times repeated) and almost pathetic mention of the fact that Abel was Cain's brother. The absence of the usual expression וַתַּהַר , as well as the peculiar phraseology et addidit parere has suggested that Abel was Cain's twin brother (Calvin, Kimchi, Candlish), though this is not necessarily implied in the text. And Abel was a keeper of sheep ( ποιμη Ì ν προβα ì των , LXX .; the latter term includes goats—Le Genesis 1:10 ), but Cain was a tiller of the ground . These occupations, indirectly suggested by God in the command to till the ground and the gift of the clothes of skin (Keil), were doubtless both practiced by the first man, who would teach them to his sons. It is neither justifiable nor necessary to trace a difference of moral character in the different callings which the young men selected, though probably their choices were determined by their talents and their tastes. Ainsworth sees in Abel a figure of Christ "in shepherd as in sacrificing and martyrdom."