The Quarterly Journal of St. Philaret’s Institute

Like other narratives in the Book of Genesis, the story of Cain and Abel (Gen 4:1–16) has been studied and commented upon for more than two millennia. However, recent scholarship has introduced significant revisions to traditional interpretations. Over the past five years, several monumental commentaries on Genesis 1–11 have been published, offering new — and sometimes mutually conflicting — interpretations of these familiar texts: the commentary by David Carr (International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament, IECOT, 2021), that of Jan Gertz (Historical Commentary on the Old Testament, HCOT, 2023), and, finally, the commentary by Ronald Hendel (2024), which replaced the classic but now partly outdated commentary by Ephraim Speiser (1964) in the Anchor Bible Commentary (ABC) series. In Russian, modern commentaries on Genesis are virtually nonexistent. The present work, offered to the reader’s attention, is part of a large-scale project to prepare a commented translation of Genesis 1–11, carried out by the faculty, students, and alumni of the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, Faculty of Humanities, HSE University, under the general supervision of M. G. Seleznev. 
The existence of numerous recent commentaries and studies that propose divergent interpretations of key aspects of Genesis 4:1–16 makes the task of producing a contemporary Russian commentary particularly challenging: at almost every step, the authors must choose among conflicting perspectives, hypotheses, and methodological approaches represented in modern scholarship. Particular attention in this study is given to inner-biblical parallels — above all, between Genesis 4:1–16 and the story of the Fall (Genesis 3) — as well as to possible connections with Mesopotamian concepts and to the significance of these connections for understanding the Sitz im Leben of the pericope under discussion.