Monday, June 6, 2022

"Early Traditions About the Blood of Abel"

Early Traditions About the Blood of Abel

 

According to the Armenian History of Abel and Cain the Sons of Adam 53-55, the blood of Abel never dried.[1] A medieval Gaelic (Irish) text says “We are told by the experts, those men of melodious learning, that from ancient times the stones did not grow, once the blood of Abel had touched them” (Adam and His Descendants 12).[2] A similar tale was recounted by the eighth century AD Muslim writer Muhammad ’ibn 'Abd Allah ’al-Kisā’ī, who wrote that “the earth was drenched with Abel’s blood, and the trees and flowers of the surrounding area had withered.”[3] Three centuries later, his fellow Muslim, Abu Ishaq Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Ibrahim al-Thaclabi al-Nisaburi (died 1036), wrote:

 

When the son of Adam killed his brother the entire earth shook for seven days. Thereupon the earth drank his blood like the drinking of water . . . God prohibited the earth from that day to drink any blood forevermore. Al-Dahhak, who had it on the authority of Ibn Abbas, said: When Cain killed Abel while Adam was in Mecca, the trees became thorny and the foods changed. The fruits became sour, the water became bitter, and the earth became dusty.[4]

 

These later Christian and Muslim traditions may have derived from an early veneration of Abel’s blood. Three earlier Christian texts, the Conflict of Adam and Eve, the Book of the Rolls, and the Cave of Treasures, declare that the antediluvian patriarchs of the line of Abel’s brother Seth, when placing their posterity under covenant, made them swear “by the blood of Abel the just.”[5] This information was also reported by the tenth-century patriarch of Alexandria, Sa’id ibn Batriq (also known as Eutychius) in his Nazm al-Jawhar.[6]

 

Footnotes for the Above:

 

[1] W. Lowndes Lipscomb, the Armenian Apocryphal Adam Literature (University of Pennsylvania Armenian Texts and Studies 8, 1990), 169-170, 275.

 

[2] Máire Herbert and Martin McNamara, eds., Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected Texts in Translation (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1989), 18.

 

[3] W. M. Thackston, Jr., transl., The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa’i (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 2:78.

 

[4] Al-Thaclabi, Qisas al-’Anbiya’ (“stories of the prophets”), unpublished translation by Brian Hauglid.

 

[5] See Conflict of Adam and Eve II, 11:7, 12:10, 14:2, 15:2, 20:25, 27; Cave of Treasures 9b.2, 10a.1, 10b.1, 11a.1, 11b.1, 13a.1, 13a.2; Book of the Rolls 103a-b, 104a, 105b.

 

[6] For English translations of the relevant passages, see notes 15, 20, and 23 in S. C. Malan, The Book of Adam and Eve, also called The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan (London: Williams and Norgate, 1882), 227, 229, and 230.

 

Source: John A. Tvedtnes, "Chapter 19: The Blood of Abel," in Joseph Smith and the Ancient World (unpublished)

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