A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

For the historian of religions, every manifestation of the sacred is important: every rite, every myth, every belief or divine figure reflects the experience of the sacred and hence implies the notions of being, of meaning, and of truth.

As I observed on another occasion, “it is difficult to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world; and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could appear without conferring a meaning on man’s impulses and experiences. Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred.

In short, the “sacred” is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness.

Every manifestation of the sacred is important to the historian of religions; but it is no less obvious that the structure of the god Anu, for example, or the theogony and cosmogony handed down in the Enuma elish, or the saga of Gilgamesh, reveal the religious creativity and originality of the Mesopotamians more effectively than, let us say, the apotropaic rites against Lamashtu or the mythology of the god Nusku. Sometimes the importance of a religious creation is revealed by its later valorizations. Very little is known about the Eleusinian Mysteries and the earliest manifestations of Orphism; yet the fascination that they have exercised over the best minds of Europe for more than twenty centuries constitutes a religious fact that is highly significant and whose consequences have not yet been properly understood. Certainly, the Eleusinian initiation and the secret Orphic rites, extolled by certain late authors, reflect mythologizing Gnosticism and Greco-Oriental syncretism.

Consciousness of this unity of the spiritual history of humanity is a recent discovery, which has not yet been sufficiently assimilated. Its importance for the future of our discipline will become manifest in the last chapter of the third volume. It is also in this final chapter, in the course of a discussion of the crises brought on by the masters of reductionism—from Marx and Nietzsche to Freud—and of the contributions made by anthropology, the history of religions, phenomenology, and the new hermeneutics, that the reader will be able to judge the sole, but important, religious creation of the modern Western world. I refer to the ultimate stage of desacralization. The process is of considerable interest to the historian of religions, for it illustrates the complete camouflage of the “sacred”—more precisely, its identification with the “profane.”

“every innovation brought with it the danger of collective death” (André Varagnac).

The domestication of fire—that is, the possibility of producing, preserving, and transporting it—marks, we might say, the definitive separation of the Paleanthropians from their zoological predecessors. The most ancient “document” for the use of fire dates from Choukoutien (about 600,000 B.C.), but its domestication probably took place much earlier and in several places.

These few well-known facts needed to be repeated so that the reader of the following analyses will bear in mind that prehistoric man already behaved in the manner of a being endowed with intelligence and imagination. As for the activity of the unconscious—dreams, fantasies, visions, fabulization, and so on—it is presumed not to have differed in intensity and scope from what is found among our contemporaries. But the terms “intensity” and “scope” must be understood in their strongest and most dramatic sense. For man is the final product of a decision made “at the beginnings of Time”: the decision to kill in order to live. In short, the hominians succeeded in outstripping their ancestors by becoming flesh-eaters. For some two million years, the Paleanthropians lived by hunting; fruits, roots, mollusks, and so on, gathered by the women and children, did not suffice to insure the survival of the species. Hunting determined the division of labor in accordance with sex, thus reinforcing “hominization”; for among the carnivora, and in the entire animal world, no such difference exists.

In certain cases (burials, works of art) and within the limits that we shall examine, there is at least the certainty of a religious intention, but the majority of the documents from before the Aurignacian (30,000 B.C.)—that is, tools—reveal nothing beyond their utilitarian value.

The semantic opaqueness of these prehistoric documents is not peculiar to them. Every document, even of our own time, is spiritually opaque as long as it has not been successfully deciphered by being integrated into a system of meanings.

A tool, be it prehistoric or contemporary, can reveal only its technological intention; all that its producer or its owners thought, felt, dreamed, hoped in relation to it escapes us. But we must at least try to imagine the nonmaterial values of prehistoric tools. Otherwise, this semantic opaqueness may well force us to entertain a completely erroneous conception of the history of culture. We are in danger, for example, of confusing the appearance of a belief with the date at which it is clearly documented for the first time.4 When, in the age of metals, certain traditions refer to craft secrets in respect to mining, metallurgy, and the making of weapons, it would be rash to believe that we are in the presence of an unprecedented invention, for these traditions continue, at least in part, an inheritance from the Stone Age. For some two million years, the Paleanthropians lived chiefly by hunting, fishing, and gathering. But the first archeological indications in respect to the religious universe of the Paleolithic hunter go back only to Franco-Cantabrian rock art (30,000 B.C.).

How many of these beliefs and ceremonies can be identified in the archeological documents in our possession? At most, the offerings of skulls and long bones. The richness and complexity of the religious ideology of hunting peoples must never be underestimated—and likewise the almost complete impossibility of proving or denying its existence among the Paleanthropians. As has often been said: beliefs and ideas cannot be fossilized. Hence certain scholars have preferred to say nothing about the ideas and beliefs of the Paleanthropians, instead of reconstructing them by the help of comparisons with the hunting civilizations. This radical methodological position is not without its dangers.

To leave an immense part of the history of the human mind a blank runs the risk of encouraging the idea that during all those millennia the activity of the mind was confined to the preservation and transmission of technology. Such an opinion is not only erroneous, it is fatal to a knowledge of man. Homo faber was at the same time Homo ludens, sapiens, and religiosus. Since we cannot reconstruct his religious beliefs and practices, we must at least point out certain analogies that can illuminate them, if only indirectly.

The earliest and most numerous “documents” are, obviously, bones. From the Mousterian (70,000–50,000 B.C.), we can speak with certainty of burials. But skulls and lower mandibles have been found at much earlier sites, for example at Choukoutien (at a level datable at 400,000–300,000 B.C.), and their presence has raised problems. Since there is no question of burials here, the preservation of these skulls could be explained as due to religious reasons.

On the one hand, shamanism still dominates the religious ideology of hunters and pastoralists in our day. On the other hand, the ecstatic experience as such, as an original phenomenon, is a constitutive element of the human condition; it is impossible to imagine a period in which man did not have dreams and waking reveries and did not enter into “trance”—a loss of consciousness that was interpreted as the soul’s traveling into the beyond. What was modified and changed with the different forms of culture and religion was the interpretation and evaluation of the ecstatic experience. Since the spiritual universe of the Paleolithics was dominated by the mystical relations between man and animal, it is not difficult to divine the functions of a specialist in ecstasy.

The so-called X-ray drawings, that is, drawings showing the skeleton and internal organs of the animal, have also been referred to shamanism. These drawings, documented in France during the Magdalenian (13,000–6000 B.C.) and in Norway between 6000 and 2000 B.C., are also found in eastern Siberia, among the Eskimos, in America (among the Ojibways, the Pueblos, and others), but also in India, Malaysia, New Guinea, and northwestern Australia.27 It is an art specifically characteristic of hunting cultures, but the religious ideology with which it is saturated is shamanic.

Whatever may be thought of Marshak’s general theory concerning the development of civilization, the fact remains that the lunar cycle was analyzed, memorized, and used for practical purposes some 15,000 years before the discovery of agriculture. This makes more comprehensible the considerable role of the moon in archaic mythologies, and especially the fact that lunar symbolism was integrated into a single system comprising such different realities as woman, the waters, vegetation, the serpent, fertility, death, “rebirth,” etc.33 From analyzing the meanders engraved on objects or painted on the walls of caves, Marshak concludes that these designs constitute a system because they present a succession and express an intentionality. This structure is already documented in the designs engraved on a bone excavated at Pech de l’Azé (Dordogne) and belonging to the Acheulian level (ca. 135,000 B.C.), that is, at least 100,000 years before the meanders of the Upper Paleolithic.

On the other hand, blood sacrifices, which were practiced by both cultivators and pastoralists, in the last analysis repeat the killing of game by the hunter. A type of behavior that, for one or two million years, had been inseparable from the human (or at least the masculine) mode is not easily abolished.

Since 1960 it has been known that villages preceded the discovery of agriculture. What Gordon Childe called the “Neolithic Revolution” took place gradually between 9000 and 7000 B.C. It is also known that, contrary to what was thought until quite recently, the cultivation of Graminaceae and the domestication of animals preceded the making of pottery. Agriculture properly speaking—that is, the cultivation of cereals—developed in Southwest Asia and Central America. “Vegeculture,” which depends upon the vegetative reproduction of tubers, roots, or rhizomes, seems to have originated in the humid tropical plains of America and Southeast Asia.

Woman and vegetation. Sacred space and periodical renewal of the world The first, and perhaps the most important, consequence of the discovery of agriculture precipitates a crisis in the values of the Paleolithic hunters: religious relations with the animal world are supplanted by what may be called the mystical solidarity between man and vegetation. If the bone and the blood until then represented the essence and the sacrality of life, from then on it is the sperm and the blood that incarnate them. In addition, woman and feminine sacrality are raised to the first rank. Since women played a decisive part in the domestication of plants, they become the owners of the cultivated fields, which raises their social position and creates characteristic institutions, such as, for example, matrilocation, the husband being obliged to live in his wife’s house. The fertility of the earth is bound up with feminine fecundity; hence women become responsible for the abundance of harvests, for they know the “mystery” of creation. It is a religious mystery, for it governs the origin of life, the food supply, and death.

The soil is assimilated to woman. Later, after the discovery of the plow, agricultural work is assimilated to the sexual act.23 But for millennia Mother Earth gave birth by herself, through parthenogenesis.

The memory of this “mystery” still survived in the Olympian mythology (Hera conceives alone and gives birth to Hephaestus and Ares) and can be read in numerous myths and popular beliefs concerning the birth of men from the Earth, giving birth on the ground, depositing the newborn infant on the ground, etc.24 Born of the Earth, man, when he dies, returns to his mother. “Crawl toward the earth, thy mother,” the Vedic poet exclaims (Rig Veda 10. 18. 10). To be sure, feminine and maternal sacrality was not unknown in the Paleolithic (§ 6), but the discovery of agriculture markedly increases its power. The sacrality of sexual life, and first of all of feminine sexuality, becomes inseparable from the miraculous enigma of creation. Parthenogenesis, the hieros gamos, and the ritual orgy express, on different planes, the religious character of...

The agrarian cultures develop what may be called a cosmic religion, since religious activity is concentrated around the central mystery: the periodical renewal of the world.

Like human existence, the cosmic rhythms are expressed in terms drawn from vegetable life. The mystery of cosmic sacrality is symbolized in the World Tree. The universe is conceived as an organism that must be renewed periodically—in other words, each year. “Absolute reality,” rejuvenation, immortality, are accessible to certain privileged persons through the power residing in a certain fruit or in a spring near a tree.25 The Cosmic Tree is held to be at the center of the world, and it unites the three cosmic regions, for it sends its roots down into the underworld, and its top touches the sky.26

Since the world must be renewed periodically, the cosmogony will be ritually reiterated at each New Year. This mythico-ritual scenario is documented in ...

The cult of skulls is also found at Tell Ramad (in Syria, near Damascus), where excavations have brought to light craniums with the forehead painted red and the face filled out with modeled clay.35 Still from Syria (Tell Ramad and Byblos), more precisely from levels dated to the fifth millennium, come some anthropomorphic figurines in clay. The one found at Byblos is bisexual.36 Other feminine statuettes, found in Palestine and dated about 4500 B.C., show the Mother Goddess in a terrifying and demonic aspect.37 The fertility cult and the cult of the dead seem, then, to be bound together. Indeed, the cultures of Hacilar and of Çatal Hüyük (7000 B.C.) in Anatolia, which preceded—and probably influenced—the preceramic culture of Jericho, indicate the existence of similar beliefs. The cult of skulls is well documented at Hacilar. At Çatal Hüyük the skeletons were buried under the floors of houses, accompanied by funeral gifts: jewels, semiprecious stones, weapons, textiles, wooden vessels, etc.

The Halafian culture was destroyed or disappeared about 4400–4300 B.C., while the culture of Obeid, which originated in southern Iraq, was being disseminated throughout Mesopotamia. It is already documented at Warka (Sumerian Uruk, Semitic Erech) about 4325 B.C. No other prehistoric culture exercised a comparable influence. Progress in metalworking is considerable (copper axes, various objects of gold). Wealth accumulates through the progress of agriculture and through commerce. An almost life-size head of a man and animal heads in marble certainly have a religious meaning. Some seals of the Gawra type represent various cult scenes (persons around an altar decorated with bucrania; ritual dances; emblematic animals, etc.). The human figures are strongly schematized. In fact, a non-figurative tendency characterizes the entire Obeid culture. The sanctuaries depicted on amulets are not copies of particular edifices but represent a sort of paradigmatic image of the temple.

It is especially in the religious domain that these differences are perceptible. From the most remote antiquity, the characteristic emblem of divine beings was a horned tiara. At Sumer, then, as everywhere in the Near East, the religious symbolism of the bull, documented from the Neolithic, had been handed down uninterruptedly. In other words, the divine modality was defined by the power and the “transcendence” of space, i.e., the stormy sky in which thunder sounds (for thunder was assimilated to the bellowing of bulls). The “transcendent,” celestial structure of divine beings is confirmed by the determinative sign that precedes their ideograms and that originally represented a star. According to the vocabularies, the proper meaning of this determinative is “sky.” Hence every divinity was imagined as a celestial being; this is why the gods and goddesses radiated a very bright light.

One of the kings of the same period composed a treatise for his son Meri-ka-Re. He humbly admits his sins: “Egypt fights even in the necropolis … I did the same!” The misfortunes of the country “happened through what I had done, and I knew of it only after I had done it!” He recommends to his son “to do justice (maat) whilst thou endurest upon earth.” “Do not trust in length of years, for the judges (who will judge thee after death) regard a lifetime as (but) an hour.” Only a man’s acts remain with him. Hence, “do not evil.” Instead of erecting a monument of stone, “make thy memorial to last through the love of thee.” “Love all men!” For the gods esteem justice more than offerings. “Quiet the weeper; do not oppress the widow; supplant no man in the property of his father…. Be on thy guard against punishing unjustly. Do not slaughter!”43

One kind of vandalism had particularly horrified the Egyptians: men destroyed the ancestral tombs, threw out the bodies, and carried off the stones for their own tombs. As Ipu-wer said: “Many dead are buried in the river. The stream is a tomb.” And the king advised his son Meri-ka-Re: “Harm not the tomb of another…. Build not thy tomb from ruins!” The Song of the Harper describes the pillage and destruction of tombs, but for entirely different reasons. “The gods who lived formerly (i.e., the kings) rest in their pyramids, the beatified dead (i.e., the nobles) also, buried in their pyramids—their places are not. See what has been made of them! … Their walls are broken apart, and their places are not—as though they had never been!” For the author of the poem, however, these iniquities only confirm once more the impenetrable mystery of death. “There is none who comes back from (over) there, that he may tell their state, that he may tell their needs, that he may still our hearts until we too (may) travel to the place where they have gone.” And so the Harper concludes: “Make holiday, and weary not therein!”

The most moving text is certainly the Dispute of a Man Weary of Life. It is a dialogue between a man overwhelmed by despair and his soul (ba). The man tries to convince his soul of the expedience of suicide. “To whom can I speak today? One’s fellows are evil; the friends of today do not love…. Hearts are rapacious: every man seizes his fellow’s goods…. There are no righteous; the land is left to those who do wrong…. The sin which treads the earth, it has no end.” Called to mind amid these evils, death seems to him more than desirable: it fills him with forgotten or seldom-known blessings. “Death is in my sight today (like) the recovery of a sick man … like the odor of myrrh … like the odor of lotus blossoms … like the scent (of fields) after rain … like the longing of a man to see his house again after he has spent many years held in captivity.” His soul (ba) reminds him that suicide will forbid him burial and funeral services; it then tries to persuade him to forget his troubles by seeking for sensual pleasures.

Finally the soul assures him that it will remain with him even if he decides to kill himself.45 The literary compositions of the Intermediate Period continued to be read and copied long after the restoration of political unity under the pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom (2040–1730 B.C.). These texts represented not only incomparable testimonies to the great crisis; they also illustrated a tendency of the Egyptian religious spirit that did not cease to increase from that time on. It is a current of thought that it is difficult to describe briefly, but whose chief characteristic is the importance accorded to the human person as a virtual replica of the paradigmatic model, the person of the pharaoh.

All these innovations were justified by the religious value that Akh-en-Aton accorded to “truth” (maat), hence to all that was “natural,” in conformity with the rhythms of life. For this sickly and almost deformed pharaoh, who was to die very young, had discovered the religious significance of the “joy of life,” the bliss of enjoying Aton’s inexhaustible creation, first of all, divine light. To impose his “reform,” Akh-en-Aton ousted Amon and all the other gods52 in favor of Aton, the Supreme God, identified with the solar disk, universal source of life: he was represented with his rays ending in hands, bringing his worshipers the symbol of life (the ankh). The essence of Akh-en-Aton’s theology is found in two hymns addressed to Aton, the only ones that have been preserved. Beyond any doubt they represent one of the noblest Egyptian religious expressions. The Sun “is the beginning of life,” his rays “embrace all lands.”

“Though thou art very far away, thy rays are on the earth; even though thou art on the faces of men, thy traces are invisible.”53 Aton is “the creator of the seed in woman,” and it is he who gives life to the embryo and guards the birth and growth of the child—even as he also gives breath to the chick in the egg and later protects it. “How diverse are thy works! They are hidden before men, O! only God, beyond whom there is no another.”

It is Aton who created all the lands, and men and women, and put each created thing in its proper place, supplying its needs. “The world subsists by thee!” “Each has his food.” This hymn has rightly been compared to Psalm 104. There has even been discussion of the “monotheistic” character of Akh-en-Aton’s reform. The originality and importance of this “first individual in history,” as Breasted called him, are still disputed, but there can be no doubt of his religious fervor. The prayer found in his coffin contained these lines: “I go to breathe the sweet breath of thy mouth. Every day, I shall behold thy beauty…. Give me thy hands, laden with thy spirit, so that I may r...

To use a brilliant formula of Rundle Clark (Myth and Symbol, p. 158), Re as transcendent and Osiris as emergent are the complementary forms of deity. In the last analysis, both represent the same “mystery,” and especially the multiplicity of forms emanated by the one God.62 According to the theogony and cosmogony accomplished by Atum (§ 26), the divinity is at the same time one and multiple; the creation consists in the multiplication of his names and forms.

I have not committed evil against men…. I have not blasphemed a god. I have not done violence to a poor man…. I have not killed…. I have not caused anyone suffering. I have not cut down on the food(-income) in the temples,… I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. The deceased addresses the forty-two gods who make up the tribunal: “Hail to you, ye gods who are here! I know you, I know your names. I shall not fall under your blows. You will not report that I am wicked to the god whose suite you form…. You will say that maat is my due, in the presence of the Universal Master; for I have practiced maat in Egypt.” He utters his own eulogy: “I have satisfied God by that which he loves (to see done). I have given bread to him who was hungry, water to him who was thirsty, clothing to him who was naked, a boat to him who had none…. Save me then, protect me then!

Make no report against me in the presence of the great god!” Finally he turns to Osiris: “O god who art high on thy support … mayest thou protect me from these messengers who sow evil and raise up troubles … for I have practiced maat for the sake of the Master of maat. I am pure.”68 The deceased must also undergo an interrogation of the initiatory type. He must prove that he knows the secret names of the different parts of the door and the threshold, or the gatekeeper of the hall, and of the gods.69

The twilight of Egyptian civilization will be dominated by magical beliefs and practices.70 But it is only right to remember that, in the “Memphite Theology” (cf. § 26), Ptah had created the gods and the world by the power of the Word.

In the last analysis, a stone “substitute” was a body built for eternity.

Similar explanations of the megalithic complex have been proposed by other eminent prehistorians.19 However, these explanations were invalidated by the discovery of dating by the radioactivity of carbon and by dendrochronology.20 It has been possible to show that the megalithic sepulchers (“chamber tombs”) of Brittany were built before 4000 B.C. and that in England and Denmark stone tombs were being built before 3000 B.C.21 As for the gigantic complex of Stonehenge, it was thought to be contemporary with the Wessex culture, which was linked with the Mycenaean civilization. But analyses based on the recent methods prove that Stonehenge was finished before Mycenae; its last rebuilding (Stonehenge III) dates from 2100–1900 B.C.22 So too on Malta, the period represented by the Tarxien temples and the necropolis of Hal Saflieni had ended before 2000 B.C.; hence certain of its characteristic features cannot be explained by an influence from the Minoan Bronze Age.23 So the conclusion is inescapable that the European megalithic complex precedes the Aegean contribution.

Recent researches into the prehistory of Indian civilization have opened perspectives that were unforeseeable a few decades ago. They also raised problems that have not yet received satisfactory solutions. The excavation of the two cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, brought to light a quite advanced urban civilization, at once mercantile and theocratic. The chronology is still in dispute, but it appears certain that the Indus civilization was fully developed about 2500 B.C. What most struck the directors of the earliest excavations was the uniformity and stagnation of the Harappan civilization. No change, no innovation, could be discerned in the thousand years of its history. The two towns were probably the capitals of the “empire.” This uniformity and continuity can be explained only by supposing a regime based on some kind of religious authority.27

Today this culture is known to have extended far beyond the Indus Valley, and it everywhere presented the same uniformity. Gordon Childe considered Harappan technology to be equal to those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. However, the majority of its products lack imagination, “suggesting that the people of Harappa had their eyes on things not of this world.”28 As for the origin of this earliest urban civilization to develop in India, scholars are agreed in looking for it in Baluchistan. According to Fairservis, the ancestors of the Harappans were descended from the pre-Āryan agriculturalists of Iran. Certain phases of the pre-Harappan culture are beginning to be better known as a result of the excavations made in southern Baluchistan. It is noteworthy that the earliest important agglomerations were built near structures that had a ceremonial function. In the important archeological complex excavated in the region of the Porali River and known as the “Edith Shahr Complex,” a mound 7 to 12 meters high has been brought to light, together with a number of structures surrounded by walls. At its summit the mound rose in the form of a ziggurat; several stairways led to the platform.

The deciphering of Linear B has proved that, about 1400 B.C., Greek was spoken and written at Cnossus. It follows, therefore, that the Mycenaean invaders played a decisive part not only in the destruction of the Minoan civilization but also in its final period; in other words, during its last phase Cretan civilization also included continental Greece. If we consider the fact that, before the invasion by the Mycenaeans, influences from Egypt and Asia Minor58 had resulted in an Asianic-Mediterranean synthesis, we can gauge the antiquity and complexity of the Greek cultural phenomenon.

Hellenism sends its roots into Egypt and Asia; but it is the contribution of the Mycenaean conquerors that will produce the “Greek miracle.”

Genesis opens with a famous passage: “In the beginning God (Elohim) created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God’s spirit hovered over the water” (1:1–2). The image of the primordial ocean, over which there hovers a creator god, is extremely archaic.2 However, the theme of the god flying over the watery abyss is not documented in the Mesopotamian cosmogony, though the myth narrated in the Enuma elish was probably familiar to the author of the biblical text. (And in fact the primordial ocean is called in Hebrew tehôm, a word etymologically closely connected with the Babylonian tiāmat). The creation properly speaking, that is, the organization of “chaos” (tôhû wâ bôhû), is effected by the power of the word of God. He said: “Let there be light,” and there was light (1:3). The successive stages of the creation are all accomplished by the divine word. The aquatic chaos is not personified (cf. Tiamat) and hence is not “conquered” in a cosmogonic combat.

This biblical account presents a specific structure: (1) creation by the Word;3 (2) of a world that is “good”; and (3) of life (animal and vegetable) that is “good” and that God blesses (1:10, 21, 31); (4) finally, the cosmogonic work is crowned by the creation of man.

Finally, after putting him to sleep, God took one of Adam’s ribs and formed a woman, who received the name of Eve (Heb. hawwâh, a word etymologically closely connected with the term meaning “life”).

In the middle of the garden stood the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (2:9). Yahweh gave man this commandment: “You may eat indeed of all the trees in the garden. Nevertheless the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you are not to eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall most surely die” (2:16–17). An idea that is unknown elsewhere emerges from this prohibition: the existential value of knowledge. In other words, knowing can radically alter the structure of human existence.

According to the redactors of chapters 4–7 of Genesis, this first sin not only brought about the loss of paradise and the transformation of the human condition; it became in some sense the source of all the evils that burdened humanity. Eve gave birth to Cain, who “tilled the soil,” and Abel, a “shepherd.” When the brothers made their thank offering—Cain of the products of the soil, and Abel of the firstborn of his flock—Yahweh accepted the latter’s offering, but not Cain’s. Angry, Cain “set on his brother Abel and killed him” (4:8).