Modern scholars typically view the stories of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel to be about the development of civilization during the age of agriculture not the beginnings of man, but when people first learned agriculture, replacing the ways of the hunter-gatherer. Some scholars suggest the pericope may have been based on a Sumerian story representing the conflict between nomadic shepherds and settled farmers. Abel, the first murder victim, is sometimes seen as the first martyr while Cain, the first murderer, is sometimes seen as an ancestor of evil.
Cain and Abel also appear in a number of other texts, and the story is the subject of various interpretations. The oldest known copy of the biblical narrative is from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and dates to the first century BCE. This theory would make the names descriptive of their roles, where Abel works with livestock, and Cain with agriculture-and would parallel the names Adam ( אדם, ‘dm, 'man') and Eve ( חוה, ḥwh, 'life-giver'). Cain ( qyn) is thought to be cognate to the mid-1st millennium BCE South Arabian word qyn, meaning ' metalsmith'. Abel ( hbl) is thought to derive from a reconstructed word meaning 'herdsman', with the modern Arabic cognate ibil now specifically referring only to 'camels'.
It has been proposed that the etymology of their names may be a direct pun on the roles they take in the Genesis narrative.