Why did Cain kill Abel? How did Cain kill Abel? Methodological reflections on the retelling of the Cain and Abel narrative in Bereshit Rabbah

This article begins with some reflections on the nature of the midrashic enterprise, focusing upon two major points. Any attempt to delineate the character of any biblical figure as he/she is presented in rabbinic literature is mistaken in its basic presuppositions. The Rabbis did not see the narratives they derived from their excavations into the biblical text as having the same level of facticity and historicity as they did the narrative of the Bible itself. An analysis of the “Our father Jacob never died” discussion in Talmud Bavli, Ta’anit 4b follows, and it leads to the conclusion that midrashic narrative is explicitly demarcated from the historical-literal reconstruction of past events. The remainder of the paper deals with the retelling of the Cain killing Abel history, or rather with the three different reconstructions of that story, in Bereshit Rabbah, and with the detailing of the method by which Cain killed Abel. One is presented as midrashic exegesis and the other as maximalist antiquarian exegesis, and the argument is made that these modes should be radically demarcated from each other

Conflicts and dialectics in tales of Yavneh's scholars as a model of a literary phenomenon with ideological and historiosophical meaning.

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Book reviews

Niddah. Lorsque les juifs conceptualisent la menstration (Evyatar Marienberg, 2003) is reviewed by Svante Lundgren.Jødedommen: religiøse tekster gennem 1000 år, Bind 1-2 (Børge Rod-Salomonsen & Judith Winther, 2001) is reviewed by Marianne Schleicher.Historien om kristiansundsjødene (Ove Boröchstein, 2000) and Jødene i Rogaland og utryddelsen (Finn E. Våga & Ole Askeland, 2001) are reviewed by Dagfinn Rian.Portrait of a Villain (Karin Hedner Zetterholm, 2001) is reviewed by Chaim Milikowsky.Oplysning i kirke og synagoge. Forholdet mellem kristne og jøder i den danske Oplysningstid (1760-1814) (Martin Schwarz Lausten, 2002) is reviewed by Lars Hagensen