The originating text for story of first murder in Judeo-Christian history would initially appear to prohibit development of any aura of around fratricide. The Genesis text straightforwardly states that came to pass when they were in field that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and slew (4:8). Furthermore, in very next series of verses killer is promptly apprehended, interrogated, tried, judged, and condemned to exile (4:9-16). While it is obvious that biblical version of Abel's murder does not develop as a whodunit, many readers nevertheless share Elie Wiesel's sense of story: No other Biblical situation contains so many questions or arouses so many (40). Among those questions and uncertainties are several traditional concerns of literary mystery. Even earliest readers, for example, noted with curiosity that Cain's murder weapon is never identified, nor is site of fatal blow incurred by Abel. The crime scene, vaguely yet suggestively described in Scripture as the field, has also continued to prompt thoughtful inquiry and theorizing. These uncertainties, in addition to weightier concerns about Cain's motive as well as God's role in murder, were first voiced by early rabbis quoted in Midrash Rabbah, but those same enigmatic elements have also compelled consideration in many subsequent literary treatments of this primal story of crime and punishment. (1) While something of a literary mystery, then, Cain's slaying of Abel is simultaneously a theological mystery, as human drama of brother against brother is entangled with and within inscrutable ways of God. Karl Rahner begins his discussion of as religious truth by establishing as of most important key-words of Christianity and its theology (1000). Christian truths such as Trinity, Incarnation, divine foreknowledge, and grace are theological mysteries; they are incomprehensible, that is, to human reason and are available to those of faith only through divine revelation, as St. Paul explained to Ephesians: By revelation [God] made known unto me mystery (Eph. 3:3). Within story of fratricide in Genesis 4, however, theological mysteries must somehow be made to engage with human drama so as to shape presentation of God who is, after all, major character in this murder mystery. As literary Abel's murder necessarily poses a series of narrative problems that challenge creative insights of all story's redactors; as Christian mystery, however, Abel's murder poses theological problems that most seriously challenge those writers who acknowledge the incomprehensible God who comes to us as mystery (Rahner 1000). In tableau that begins Adam's vision of future before his expulsion from Garden, John Milton achieves in Book 11 of Paradise Lost one of most profoundly integrated of all literary attempts to present that is death of Abel. When Adam witnesses history's first ritual of worship sink into violent death and implores, Is Piety thus and pure Devotion paid? (11.452), he pronounces a question to which only can truly respond (cf. Quinones 17-19). To simpler question of what Cain used as a murder weapon, authorized rabbinical answer is either a staff or a stone, although several rabbis also contend that Cain strangled Abel (Midrash 188), as does Rogier Van Aerde in 1941 Dutch novel titled Cain (109). The apocryphal Books of Adam and Eve record that Cain first beat Abel with a staff and then hit him with a stone until his brains oozed out (58). In Beowulf Cain, who is Grendel's ancestor, is reported to have ingan briber, / faederen-maege (felled his own / brother with a sword [89]). In Genesis section of early-thirteenth-century Histoire Ancienne, Cain wields a baston or truncheon as he kills Abel (Joslin 88). The weapon of choice in several medieval English miracle plays presenting Abel's murder rather curiously becomes a jawbone. …