57 Abel

Abduction/Kidnap, Kidnapping

Abecedary/Alphabet

Abednego/Azariah: Abednego; /Shadrach, Meshach,Abednego

Abeille, Pierre-CésarAbeille was a French composer (1674–after 1733).He composed settings of all the Psalms of David (intwo volumes) for the use of the convent of St Cyr.Especially the later part is complex and subtle, withinstrumental accompaniment in a concertante stylefeaturing expressive declamation.

Bibliography: ■ G. Bourligueux, “Abeille, Pierre-César,”Grove Music Online (www.oxfordmusiconline.com, accessedJuly 3, 2008).

Nils Holger Petersen

AbelI. Hebrew Bible/Old TestamentII. ChristianityIII. LiteratureIV. Visual Arts

I. Hebrew Bible/Old TestamentAbel was the second son of the primeval couple,Adam and Eve (Gen 4 : 2). The first murder victimin the Bible, Abel (a shepherd) was killed by hisolder brother Cain (a farmer) in a jealous rage be-cause God inexplicably favored Abel’s offering offirstborn animals but not Cain’s offering of grain(Gen 4 : 1–16). The name Abel is related to the He-brew word hebel, “breath, nothingness,” signifyingthe transitory character of human life (Isa 57 : 13;Ps 144 : 4).

Dennis T. Olson

II. ChristianityThis entry considers the character Abel himself,and not his relationship to Cain, in ancient and me-dieval Christianity, especially in the West.

1. “Literal” Interpretations. Most of the authorsbase their exegesis on the interpretatio (“transla-tion”) of the name “Abel.” Jerome (Nom. hebr.,CChr.SL 72, 60) proposed several possible mean-ings for the name: “mourning” [Heb. hebel], “van-ity, breath” [Heb. hebel], “miserable”; these termsare in the Aaz apprehendens collection of interpretatio-nes (attributed to Stephen Langton), widely diffusedin the 13th century. Josephus had another interpre-

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tatio, “this is nothing,” repeated, among others, byHugh of St. Cher (Postilla on Gen.).

Certain details in the biblical narrative aboutAbel aroused questions among interpreters. PeterComestor (Hist. Schol., PL 198, 1076–1077) reconsti-tuted the chronology of the lives of Cain and Abel.He surmised that Abel was born at the same timeas his sister Delbora, 15 years later than Cain, andhe concluded that Cain’s murder occurred one hun-dred years after that. A standard question is howCain could know that Abel’s sacrifice was acceptedby God. Jerome’s answer referred to Theodotion,who translated the phrase, And the Lord had regardfor Abel, in this way: “And the Lord burnt uponAbel.” This explanation was frequently repeated;an example is Andrew of St. Victor. The nature ofthe offering was sometimes specified. Quoting Jose-phus, Peter Comestor suggests that the offeringconsisted of milk and first-born lambs. Peter ofJohn Olivi wondered how Abel was a shepherd, ashumans did not yet eat any meat (not until Gen9 : 1–3). Olivi’s conclusion was that Abel raisedsheep only for the wool and the milk and not themeat. Against the Jewish Midrash, several Christianauthors suggested that Abel died as a virgin.

The New Testament grants to Abel the epithet“righteous” (Matt 23 : 35), repeated in the liturgyof the mass. Augustinus Hibernicus, in his De mira-bilibus sacrae Scripturae, describes the triple right-eousness of Abel: virginity, priesthood, and martyr-dom. This trilogy of righteousness associated withAbel appeared frequently in the Middle Ages. Sev-eral medieval authors quoted the Jewish historianJosephus and his assertion of Abel’s righteousness.For instance, William of Alton noted that “accord-ing to Josephus, [Abel] honoured his righteousnessand believed that God was always by him.”

Some authors praise Abel’s faith. The most re-markable text is one by Rupert of Deutz (Comm. inGen), which refers to Heb 11 : 4, “By faith Abel of-fered unto God a more excellent sacrifice thanCain.” Rupert inferred that Abel had offered firsthis heart and then his goods, his heartfelt faiththereby making his sacrifice greater and more wor-thy. Abel believed that one (Christ) would comewho would bruise the head of the ancient serpentand remove the flaming sword (weaponry) whichkeeps the way of the tree of life (Gen 3 : 14–15, 24).

On the basis of these literal interpretations, au-thors of the patristic era and Middle Ages providedadditional spiritual interpretations, tropologies orallegories.

2. “Spiritual” Interpretations. The allegorical in-terpretations are the most frequent ones. Abel is afigure of the Christ and of the Church. His sacrificeannounces the Eucharist. An interesting precisioncan be noted in Rupert of Deutz: everything that isrelated to Abel is a parable or a figure of the Christ.If the figure (figura, typus) denotes an almost auto-

59 Abel

matic application, the parable implies a hermeneu-tical effort. Both aspects are found in the Fathersand in medieval exegetes.

Almost all the authors make use of the typologyof Abel as a figure of Christ. The typology is builton a series of analogies which are summarized, forexample, by Richard of St. Victor. Abel wasrighteous and innocent in a manner similar toChrist who committed no sin and whose mouth ut-tered no meanness. Abel was the first righteous hu-man, chronologically speaking and foreshadowedChrist’s supreme righteousness and holiness. Abeloffered to God the flesh of a sheep, pointing toChrist who offered his own flesh as the Lamb ofGod. God had regard for the offering of the right-eous Abel, a precursor to God’s regard for the pas-sion and sacrifice of Christ.

Additional analogies between Abel and Christappear in other texts. Abel the shepherd portendsthe coming of the Good Shepherd (John 10 : 11).Abel was killed by his brother, as Christ was killedby his carnal brothers (the Jews). For Gregory theGreat (Moral. xxix.31.69), rather than a figure ofChrist, Abel is the announcement of the coming ofGod’s Lamb, foreshadowing the role of John theBaptist who testified to the coming of Christ (John1 : 29). As Isaiah predicted the coming of Jesus (Isa53 : 7), so Abel foretold it by his offering. Thetheme of the Good Shepherd appears also in Isidoreof Seville.

Several texts of Saint Augustine expound theidea that the Church began with Abel (Ecclesia abAbel). This theme is linked to the two cities (Augus-tine, Civ. xv). The conflict between Abel and Cainforeshadowed the opposition between the Synago-gue and the Church and the opposition betweengood and evil. Another form of the theme Ecclesiaab Abel can be found in Gregory the Great: he as-serts that the “limbs of our Redeemer,” i.e., therighteous saints throughout history, have existedsince the beginning. Abel is one of them, not onlybecause his sacrifice had been accepted by God, butalso because he died without uttering a word(Moral. iii.17.32). For Rupert of Deutz, Abel repre-sented all the righteous saints, but he is also thetype for those who perished in internal or civilwars. Rupert suggests another curious allegory,equating Abel with the saint Hippolyte, who waskilled by Decius. Rupert called Hippolyte the “Abelof the Nations” (De sancto Spiritu vi.19).

A link was often seen between the story of Abeland the sacrifice of the Mass or Eucharist. However,there is an ambiguity in some texts, because Abel’soffering as well as his own martyrdom were oftenconsidered as a lesser prefiguring of the eucharisticsacrifice. Abel’s martyrdom announced Christ’s fu-ture Passion which was the highest of sacrifices,and the Eucharist was the reiteration of Christ’ssacrifice which exceeded all previous sacrifices, in-

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cluding Abel’s sacrifice. There is a mention of Abelthe Righteous in the Canon of the Mass, and also ofAbraham and Melchizedek, whose sacrifices wereaccepted by God. Rupert of Deutz notes that thetime of day when Abel gave his offering, the even-ing, corresponds to the time when the ritual of theancient Jewish Passover was observed.

The tropological or moral interpretation ofAbel was less common, but some examples ap-peared already in the patristic period (Ambrose).Abel represented those of humble or righteouscharacter. Guibert of Nogent saw in him the virtueof the inner human, Adam of Dryburgh viewedAbel as the man who mourns the exile of presentlife. Master Eckhart, in a series of oppositions inrelation to Cain, understood Abel as the rationalside of humanity and the human’s inner life.

Bibliography: ■ D. Cerbelaud/G. Dahan (eds.), Caïn et Abel(CEv Supplément 105; Paris 1998). ■ Y. Congar, “Ecclesiaab Abel”, in Abhandlungen über Theologie und Kirche, FS KarlAdam (Düsseldorf 1952) 79–108. ■ G. Dahan, “L’exégèsede l’histoire de Caïn et Abel du XIIe au XIVe s. en Occi-dent”, RThAM 49 (1982) 21–89; 50 (1983) 5–68.

Gilbert Dahan

III. LiteratureIn western literature Abel, the first murder victim,is separately a vehicle of Christian typology and thecounter to whatever Cain represents.

Within medieval drama, the Anglo-NormanMystère d’Adam most fully draws out the signifi-cance of Abel as a type of Christ, here offering him-self as a willing sacrifice. The Ludus Coventriae wassingular in making Abel’s lamb the image of theChrist destined to suffer on the Cross. The RouenShepherd’s Play has an excursus on great shepherdswhich refers to Abel alongside Moses, Jacob andDavid.

Typifying the Romantic revolt, Gérard deNerval’s Tale of the Queen of Morning and Solomon, thePrince of Genii (1844) portrays Abel as a lazy shep-herd, neglecting his flock. But he is part of theGod-transcending future vision in Leconte deLisle’s Quain (1869). In the more conventionallymoral world of Dickens the descendants of Abelprevail persistently over those of Cain.

Jewish poetry of the 20th century focuses moreon the intrinsic qualities of Abel, as in Else Lasker-Schüler’s Abel, part of Hebräische Balladen (1913).Holocaust poetry took this further. In one of UrielBirnbaum’s sonnets Cain visits Abel’s grave anddiscovers that his brother had a much happier life,dying young.

In Christopher Fry’s play A Sleep of Prisoners(1951), Private Peter Able is a Christ-figure, resist-ing his brother’s violent outlook. In Sergeant Mus-grave’s Dance (1960) by John Arden, the skeleton ofBilly Hicks plays the role of Abel’s blood, cryingout for justice. More recently the poetry of Hans

61 Abel, Felix-Marie (Louis Felix)

Magnus Enzensberger and of Walter Helmut Fritzhas revived the question of Abel.

Bibliography: ■ S. Liptzin, Biblical Themes in World Literature(Hoboken, N.J. 1985). ■ H. Matthews, The Primal Curse(London 1967). ■ L. R. Muir, The Biblical Drama of MedievalEurope (Cambridge 1995). ■ A. Welsh, The City of Dickens(Oxford 1971).

Anthony Swindell

IV. Visual ArtsThe majority of artistic images of Abel focus on hismurder at the hand of his brother Cain. Thus Hu-bert van Eyck, for instance, on the upper roundedcorner of the 1432 Ghent altarpiece painted asplendid grisaille piece appearing as if it were reliefsculpture and shaped it to fit the awkward space towhich it was consigned. Cain leans over his pros-trate brother with a sickle-like weapon – which heno doubt had used to harvest his fields. AlbrechtDürer’s 1511 woodcut presents the back of acurved, horizontal Abel to the viewer and an angu-lar, vertical, frontal Cain with an axe-like weaponraised above his head. Tintoretto’s ca. 1550 imagepresents a splayed Abel, his limbs together withCain’s creating the dynamic pinwheel configura-tion for which the artist is famous, and contrastiveflesh tones underscoring the difference in personasbetween the two brothers. That sort of difference issimplified and emphasized in the contemporaryink drawing by Henri Lindegaard, whose “TheFirst Murder” reduces the two figures to a stylizedexplosion of perpetrator anger and victim anguish.

Less frequently Abel is shown with his brotherin the act of making their offerings to God (see/plate 2). Hubert Van Eyck balances the previ-ously-noted murder scene with such an image onthe opposite corner of that altarpiece, in which analready-angry, bearded Cain looks up from hissheave toward his benignly preoccupied and beard-less brother. Rembrandt van Rijn’s ca. 1650 draw-ing presents the scene in a low-lying landscape, inwhich the billowing smoke of Abel’s offering to theleft contrasts with the empty skies to the right anda subtle progression of line descends from Abel’supstretched praying body to Cain’s unkindled of-fering to the crouching figure of Cain to the hori-zon line.

Still more unusual is the scene of Adam andEve discovering and mourning over the body ofAbel – for which there is no actual biblical discus-sion. William Blake’s ca. 1826 small pen and inkand tempera image presents Eve hunched over herrigid son, her arms encircling his head, her hairflooding over his chest, as Adam looks up in dis-may, his eyes following the figure of Cain fleeingfrom the grave into which Abel will soon be placed.William-Adolphe Bouguerau’s 1888 “The FirstMourning” presents a pinwheel of Abel’s splayedarms and legs as his corpse lays across Adam’s

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knees, who clutches his heart with one arm whilecomforting a distraught Eve with the other. A dec-ade later, sculptor Louis-Ernest Barrias representedAdam and Eve carrying the body of their fallen sonin a similarly academic style that emphasizes bodyweight and textural surface contrasts between hairand flesh and between male musculature and fe-male softness.

Bibliography: ■ W. Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings ofWilliam Blake (New Haven, Conn. 1981). ■ C. D. Cutter,Northern Painting (New York 1968) ■ G. Doré, The Doré BibleIllustrations (Mineloa, N.Y. 1974).

Ori Z. SoltesSee also /Cain (Person); /Cain and Abel, Story of

Abel, Felix-Marie (Louis Felix)Born at St-Uze, France, on 29 December 1878, Fe-lix-Marie Abel came to Jerusalem as a novice in theDominican Order in 1900. After his ordination asa Roman Catholic priest in 1905 he joined the fac-ulty of the École Biblique et Archéologique Fran-çaise as professor of Greek, history, and geography.He remained at the school until his death on 24March 1953.

Although he made significant contributions inother domains, Abel is certainly remembered as thegeographer of the Holy Land. In addition to nu-merous travel reports in the ‘Chronique’ of the Re-vue Biblique, he published systematic studies on theDead Sea, the Jordan valley, the Mediterraneancoastline, central Samaria, and Transjordan. Thesewere supplemented by articles on such diverse top-ics as the sacred geography of Cyril of Alexandria,the list of places in the Zenon papyrus, the topogra-phy of the Maccabean campaigns, the distance fromJerusalem to Emmaus, the geology of Palestine,Gaza in the 6th century, the boundaries of Ptole-maic Palestine and Egypt, the topography of theRoman siege of Jerusalem, and the location of thecity of Ara. These he eventually synthesized in hisepoch-making Géographie de la Palestine, which dealsin exemplary detail with all issues of physical, his-torical, and political geography from earliest timesto the Byzantine period. The ten maps have servedas the prime, but often unacknowledged, source ofmuch subsequent topographical identification.

It was his interest in geography that drew Abelto write a major commentary on 1 and 2 Maccabees(1949), which still retains its authority because ofthe quality of its erudition, and this in turn in-spired him to fill out the historical context by pub-lishing his Histoire de la Palestine depuis la conquêted’Alexandre jusqu’à l’invasion arabe.

Subsequent research into the Greek sources forthe history and geography of Palestine has onlyserved to emphasize Abel’s uncanny ability to iden-tify the key issues in the documents and to confirmthe vast majority of his proposed solutions. A by-