When storytellers first evolved the Cain and Abel story, they were grappling with a world undergoing the disruptive change that came with the evolution of settled agriculture. The new lifestyles, economy, and worldview that went with the settled agriculture way of living tore families and communities apart. Humans, during their previous nearly 200,000 years, had never before lived according to those ways, nor the ideas that went with them. The nomadic herders, hunters, and gatherers who declined the new agricultural ways were chagrined by how agriculture was changing the landscape as well as the people involved. Stories such as Cain and Abel grew up among them to express their feelings and describe what they saw happening. Multi Earthism was being born.
It was not until after 587 B.C., the year Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, that Cain and Abel became part of Genesis. At that point, the destructive effects of city-states and empires was added to the character of Cain along with the effects of settled agriculture that he already represented. Genesis, the book or origins, was compiled during that time while Jews were refugees exiled in Babylon and needed stories that countered the ones they heard the Babylonians telling about how their empire was established by the gods and governed by divine right.
This, of course, didn’t sit well with the Jews who’d been forcibly moved from Jerusalem and their homeland to the city of Babylon. Genesis was their answer. And with Cain and Abel they saw Babylon as Cain. Dominating centers of power like Babylon were the cities that grew out of settled agriculture as they saw it. So in Cain, the farmer who became the city-builder, they folded into one cultural myth what they had come to regard as two major negative developments in the human story. The story also served as a goad to the Hebrews to deepen their repentance of their own Cain-like behaviors that they’d been living during their national monarchies up until the Babylonians whipped them.
The greatness of the myth of Cain and Abel to speak to many cultures across the millennia becomes apparent not only in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, but also in how eloquently they embody the Multi Earth and One Earth ways today.