Cain and Abel - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

• In the computer video game Command and Conquer, it is strongly belived that the character Kane is infact Caine. Many characters reference him as being this biblical person and in Command and Conquer 4 - Tiberium Twilight, he acends "into heaven" through the Scrin portal after being exciled on earth for killing his brother as punishment by God.
• As the first murderer and first murder victim in the Bible, Cain and Abel have often formed the basis of tragic drama. In the classic poem Beowulf, the monstrous Grendel and his mother are believed to be descended from Cain. Lord Byron rewrote and dramatized the story in the poem "Cain", viewing Cain as symbolic of a sanguinary temperament, provoked by Abel's hypocrisy and sanctimony.
• In Dante's Purgatory Cain is remembered by the souls in Purgatory in Canto XIV (14) on page 153, verse 133 saying "I shall be slain by all who find me!", Cain is facing the punishment that God has visited upon him for the sin of Envy, which is a similar play on the words in Genesis 4:13-14 where he says, "I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me."
• John Steinbeck's novel East of Eden retells the Cain and Abel story in the setting of the late 19th and early 20th century western migration towards California. Also, his novella Of Mice and Men draws elements from the story.
• Baudelaire is more sympathetic to Cain in his poem "Abel et Caïn" in the collection Les Fleurs du mal, where he depicts Cain as representing all the downtrodden people of the world. The poem's last lines exhort, "Race de Caïn, au ciel monte/Et sur la terre jette Dieu!" (In English: "Race of Cain, storm up the sky / And cast God down to Earth!")
• Miguel de Unamuno's Abel Sánchez (1917) is a study on envy. Abel receives everything undeservingly, while his friend Joaquín is despised by God and society and envies him.
• In Thornton Wilder's play The Skin Of Our Teeth (1942), it is stated that Henry Antrobus' real name is Cain and he accidentally killed his brother Abel with a stone.
• Kane and Abel is a modern adaptation, a 1979 novel by British author Jeffrey Archer. In 1985, it was made into a CBS television miniseries titled Kane & Abel, starring Peter Strauss as Rosnovski and Sam Neill as Kane. In A Time for Everything (2004) by Karl Ove Knausgård, the story of Cain and Abel is retold with a focus on Cain - an introvert and troubled man who gets the reader's sympathy. In this version, God's favouring of Abel is simultaneously a curse for sneaking into Eden past the Cherubs guarding the gate. It is suggested that Abel in fact wants Cain to kill him, or at least this is what Cain believes - though he later regrets his act, and takes his punishment willingly.
• Hermann Hesse briefly discussed the story of Cain and Abel from a non-orthodox point of view in his novel Demian where he also referred to the gnostic group called the Cainites. In Ishmael, Daniel Quinn puts forth the idea of the story of Cain and Abel being an allegory describing the conflict between agricultural and pastoral peoples in the Fertile Crescent.
• In the epilogue to Agatha Christie's novel And Then There Were None, the author refers to the Mark of Cain in laying out the clues. There is a Stephen King short story titled Cain Rose Up, in which a college student goes on a killing spree while ruminating on the story of Cain and Abel. In the DC Comics (Vertigo division) universe, Cain and Abel are a pair of fictional characters based on the Biblical Cain and Abel. Cain is constantly killing off his brother, despite the fact they are both immortals.
• In White Wolf Publishing's Vampire: The Masquerade RPG, an altered version of Cain's story, sees Cain(e) visited by three angels on separate occasions while wandering the earth, each of whom ask that he repent for his sins, and each of whom curses him (and all his Progeny) when he refuses. Those curses being: weakness to fire and sunlight, a need to drink of the blood of man, and an inner beast to forever torment him from within, thus making him the Progenitor of all Vampire kind, known among themselves as Cainites.
• Cain was traditionally considered to have red hair; the expression "Cain-coloured beard" is used in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. In addition, Shakespeare also references Cain and Abel in Act III Scene iii of Hamlet when Claudius says, "It hath the primal eldest curse upon't/ A brother's murder!" (Lines 40-41), and in Act V, Scene i when Hamlet and Horatio are standing with the Gravedigger, who digs up a skull and Hamlet says "And yet this knave jowls it to the ground/as if it were Cain's jawbone, that did the first murther!".
• Their names are often used in works of fiction simply as a reference, also. In Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, the character of Estragon tries to guess the names of two other characters. He guesses Abel and Cain. One of Jason Bourne's many names in The Bourne Identity and its sequels was Cain, an operative name in the Treadstone 71 program.
• In Masami Kurumada's comic book Saint Seiya Next Dimension, characters inspired in the biblical story have been recently introduced: The Gemini Gold Saints in the 18th century are named Cain and Abel, both representing good and evil, respectively.
• In 2009, Portuguese writer José Saramago wrote a novel entitled Cain, which tells an alternative version of the murder of Abel and the life of Cain afterwards.
• Echo, a self-published comic-book series by Terry Moore following the Phi-project, features as an early antagonist a character who claims to be the original, biblical Cain. He spends much of his time speaking to God and frequently screams biblical and religious-themed quotations in his interactions with other characters. After his death, the character Ivy Raven had one of his fingers sent to a laboratory for carbon dating which revealed that he was approximately 25,000 years old, offering the first substantive proof to support the character's claims. Ivy later performs further research on the history of the story of Cain and Abel, and at one point visits Wikipedia; this portion of the comic includes verbatim quotations from this page.
• Fantasy author Karl Edward Wagner wrote a series of novels and stories about an immortal red-bearded warrior named Kane, who is clearly modeled on the biblical Cain. In Wagner's story there is a moral inversion where God is an evil ancient astronaut performing genetic experiments on early humans. Kane's brother accepts God's authority, but Kane rises up in heroic defiance, murders his brother, and rejects God. He is cursed with blue eyes that seem to literally glow with hatred and insanity. The Kane stories mostly take place in a fantasy age of Earth's past and are made distinctive by the presence of both magic and alien technology. Wagner wrote several stories that bring the immortal character into the 20th century and which imply that at some point he succeeded in his quest to kill God.
• The character Kwai Chang Caine in the television series Kung Fu, is modeled after the character Cain. After killing, Caine is forced to wander the Earth, remorse torn but unrepentant because of his sense of social justice.
• In the 2011 comic mini-series The Strange Talent of Luther Strode, the biblical Cain is an immortal who wrote a book that would be later called the Hercules Method. The book only truly works for a select few, who through its use become inhumanly strong, durable and able to see humans as just musculature; but at the price that it also causes aggressive and violent traits to become dominate. Passing down this book in many forms, Cain has gained a cult following of people who could access the hidden abilities, including Jack the Ripper. Luther Strode, the title character, is one person to receive this book and truly use it, he obtains it from a mail order Charles Atlas parody. Because of this, he is sought out to be recruited by Cain, who sends a man known as the Librarian in his place. Cain only makes an appearance twice during the series, once in the beginning when he's bound to a wall, then in a detailed flashback of his journey from killing his brother, becoming the king of Nod, to writing the book.
• The Oasis song "Guess God Thinks I'm Abel" from their 2005 album Don't Believe The Truth.
• The song on Marilyn Manson's 2012 album Born Villain titled "Children of Cain", references the biblical character.
• In the game Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor the main character and his cousin, who considers himself the main character's older brother, are supposed to be the reincarnation of Abel and Cain respectively.
• The science fiction/horror writing site The SCP Foundation has many articles referencing Cain and Abel, most notably SCP-073 and SCP-076, which very closely resemble the biblical characters and even share names with them.
• In the 2009 movie Year One, the two main characters, Zed and Oh, meet Cain and Abel shortly after leaving their home forest, and witness Cain kill Abel. Cain then tells them that they have to escape with him or else risk being blamed for Abel's death, and then sells them into slavery. Zed and Oh meet Cain again later in the movie in Sodom, where Cain is a guard and apologizes for selling them into slavery, also convincing them to join the guard as well. Cain eventually is present at Zed and Oh's trial, where he reads the charges against them (slipping in the murder of Abel), and fights with the king in the final battle.
• Heavy Metal band Avenged Sevenfold gained their name from Genesis 4:24 and tell the story of Cain and Abel through the track "Chapter Four"