Cain and Abel Offering Their Sacrifices
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Genesis 4:3
The passage
And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.
Genesis 4:3
About this plate
Two fires, two brothers. Abel kneels in the middle distance beside a low altar, small and half-hidden by the slope. Cain sits on the rock in the right foreground, bare-shouldered and heavy, one hand up at his face, watching.
The whole plate is in the smoke. Abel's goes up in a single thin line, straight, all the way into the sky. Cain's does not rise at all. It rolls off the bottom left corner in great soft banks and lies along the ground where he sits.
Now the verse. It says only that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD. Not a word about smoke. Not a word yet about whose was accepted either. That does not come until two verses later.
Doré has decided early. He puts the answer in the air before the text gives it, and then he sits Cain where he cannot help but see it.
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