Cain and Abel

Adam and Eve were, according to "Genesis" the first people. Eve ate from the tree of "Knowledge of good and evil." They were immortal and perfectly good and happy. However, the only choice they actually had was to eat from this tree. Everything else was permitted. They had no other opportunities to offend God. Eve, with feminine curiousit,did eat of the tree. The serpent told Eve that she would be equal to God if she ate that fruit. When she ate it, she became equal to God in that she now had knowledge of evil. She had one single opportunity to know sin, one single choice, one act of free will available to her, and she took it. She then introduced Adam to this fruit, and he exercised free choice, ate of the fruit, and knew evil. All moral choice involves the potential for evil, and God tried to spare us this knowledge and leave us immortal and happy in His favor, but the first people exercised the only choice they had and knew defiance of God and evil. God gave humans free choice and curiousity. We can exercise our free choice to fulfill God's will for us, or we can choose to defy God and exercise our human desire to know. Thus evil entered the world. The Greek gods tied the god who gave man fire to a rock to have his liver eternally eaten by birds, and grown back. Taming fire was probably man's first great scientific achievement, and it infuriated the gods because God desires perfect happiness, and humans cannot just leave it alone. We have to see how it works, why it's forbidden, how we can use it. As a result of this sin, Eve was condemned to bear children in pain. Adam is condemned to earn his food by "the sweat of his brow."
The story of Cain and Abel has always puzzled me. Cain is the older brother and a shepherd. Able, the younger, a farmer. Each sacrifices his first fruit to God. God rejects Cain's offering and accepts Able's. Cain then kills Able with a rock, and God expels him to wander the earth with a mark on his forehead to protect him from attack from the people he wanders among. In the first place, if Cain and Able are the sons of the first people, where did the people Cain wandered among come from? Why did God reject Cain's offering of desirable meat and accept Able's offering of less desirable crops? If Adam and Eve are the first humans, and one son killed the other and is exiled and the other son is dead, who are our ancestors? Clearly Eve bore other children in suffering.
Some cultures refer to themselves as "the people" and all other people have some other name or names. I suspect that Adam and Eve were the ancestors of the Jewish people who created the story. This is clearly a creation myth. There are other people, but we don't mix with them. Cain was forced to find a home and a spouse outside the community. But why would God reject the more desirable offering of the older son? There is no suggestion that Cain was evil or not performing the sacrifice correctly. I think this story may be as old as agriculture. Animals were domesticated long before we thought of clearing land and planting land. However, when a culture that relies on herding begins agriculture there is usually a land war. The shepherds need the land for grazing, and the farmers need it to grow things. The two occupations are incompatible. The herders are usually forced to take land farther from the settlement. Also, animals can move with the tribe, but farmers are land bound. When a culture starts farming, they settle down, and the grazers lose the opportunity for new grazing areas as the tribe moves. They are forced to move with their herds away from the village and live alone with their animals. I think this story is as old a human agriculture and is about the beginnings of agriculture. The Jews sacrificed animals to God for another 5,000 years, but they also sacrificed bread. Able had the less desirable occupation of farmer, and Cain, being the older brother was the herdsman. God threw his favor to agriculture in a conflict that may have torn the culture apart.
Human beings invented agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Prior to the domestication of plants, women hunted and gathered plant food from the areas surrounding temporary settlements. The people moved with the animal migrations, plant seasons, and the weather. Men hunted. Some women noticed that some plants returned the same time every year in particular places and circumstances and experimented with planting and harvesting them themselves. Women farmed for prehistory and still do in some cultures today, and men hunted meat and cared for domesticated animals like sheep and pigs. Meat could not be stored, so when an animal was killed, offerings were made to the gods, and the meat was shared among members of the tribe. It was a fairly rare treat. Animals were sacrificed for important occasions, offered to God and shared among the people. Vegetables and plants were the daily staples of cultures. When plants became domesticated, humans formed settlements and moved the animals away from the village. I think this story is as old a civilization and is about human conflict. God decided that humans would have settled villages, crops, and animals. It seems from the story of Cain and Able that this was a serious and life threatening conflict that God himself settled in the minds of the people.