The Great Secret: Understanding the Hidden Story of Cain and Abel (Understanding Scripture Book 2)

We grow up with Bible ‘stories’. They have become an indelible part of Western culture and lore, even a culture that has become supposedly secular. Such ‘stories’ have entered into the Western mind and consciousness. One of the most profound, because it deals with two things that strike so profoundly at the heart of our sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is the story of ‘Cain and Abel’. This is the primordial story of murder and jealousy, but then that of fratricide, the murder of brother by brother. The ‘curse of Cain’ and the ‘mark of Cain’ are phrases that stand on their own as self-explanatory and widely understood, and even have their own Wikipedia entry.
Such archetypal stories carry profound meaning for Western man in his drive to understand himself and the world he inhabits. All the more reason that we should continually seek to better understand their full meaning, to raise them up into our own mind and consciousness so that in turn they can serve to raise us up. The previous studies in this series of the stories of the ‘betrayal’ of Judas and the ‘beguiliing’ of Adam by ‘Eve’, have shown the degree to which the deeper meaning of these stories, and their implications for guiding us in understanding our world, are hidden within the symbolic nature of Biblical Hebrew.


The story of ‘Cain and Abel’ is one of the foundational stories of the Old Testament and perhaps it’s most dramatic, if not infamous. At the most commonly understood level it is the original ‘murder mystery’, complete with jealousy and sibling rivalry, a murder ‘most foul’ (Shakespeare), denied by the killer himself, provoking divine punishment followed by remorse and clemency. As a cautionary and satisfying morality, it is one that has been the source and inspiration for many a book and movie plot.

As in the case of the story of ‘Adam and Eve’, there lies a deeper meaning, a more profound reason for this story of deadly sibling rivalry to have become such an indelible part of the Western cultural fabric. This deeper meaning has become veiled and then hidden behind the increasing materialization of the mind, consciousness and language, which has seen ‘fig leaves’ and ‘ribs’ in place of symbols expressing dynamic phenomena (powers, forces and energies). Not surprisingly, there is a similar ‘cover up’ that has acted to veil and obscure the deeper meaning of the story of ‘Cain and Abel’.