hashomer achi anochi?
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
The Hebrew word order places a square emphasis on the word ‘I’. The sense then is, “Is my brother’s keeper supposed to be me?”—with the possible additional implication that God should have prevented the murder of Abel, since He knows everything. It can’t be stressed enough that the use of questions by God in the early chapters of Genesis should not be understood in a ‘folk’ sense of an anthropomorphized ‘god’ who doesn’t know what is happening and so needs to inquire. Rather, these question need to be seen as a pedagogical tool that God is using to educate the first human beings.
Cain’s counter-accusation suggests a kind of bitterness. It is as if Cain were saying, “Abel is Your favorite, after all. You accepted his sacrifice and not mine. If You cared about him so much, why didn’t You find a way to protect him from me?”
Indeed, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai makes just this observation: “When God asked Cain, ‘Where is your brother Abel?’ Cain answered “Am I my brother’s keeper? You are God. You have created man. It is Your task to watch him, not mine. If I ought not to have done what I did, You could have prevented me from doing it.” This reads like the victim mentality so prevalent in our world today.