The originating text for the story of the first murder in Judeo-Christian history would initially appear to prohibit the development of any aura of mystery around the fratricide. The Genesis text straightforwardly states that "it came to pass when they were in the field that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew him" (4:8). Furthermore, in the very next series of verses the killer is promptly apprehended, interrogated, tried, judged, and condemned to exile (4:9-16). While it is obvious that the biblical version ofAbel's murder does not develop as a whodunit, many readers nevertheless share Elie Wiesel's sense of the story: "No other Biblical situation contains so many questions or arouses so many uncertainties" (40). Among those questions and uncertainties are several traditional concerns of the literary mystery. Even the earliest readers, for example, noted with curiosity that Cain's murder weapon is never identified, nor is the site of the fatal blow incurred by Abel. The crime scene, vaguely yet suggestively described in Scripture as "the field," has also continued to prompt thoughtful inquiry and theorizing. These uncertainties, in addition to weightier concerns about Cain's motive as well as God's role in the murder, were first voiced by the early rabbis quoted in the Midrash Rabbah, but those same enigmatic elements have also compelled consideration in the many subsequent literary treatments of this primal story of crime and punishment.'While something of a literary mystery, then, Cain's slaying of Abel is simultaneouslya theological mystery, as the human drama of brother against brother is entangled with and within the inscrutable ways of God. Karl Rahner begins his discussion of mystery as religious truth by establishing "mystery" as "one of the most important key-words of Christianity and its theology" (1000). Christian truths such as the Trinity, Incarnation, divine foreknowledge, and grace are theological mysteries; they are incomprehensible, that is, to human reason and are available to those of faith only through divine revelation, as St. Paul explained to the Ephesians: "By revelation [God]
