Genesis 4:4-16

⁴And Abel brought his present to God too, but Abel brought the best sheep from his mob of sheep. And God was happy with Abel, and with his present.

⁵But God was not happy with Cain, and he was not happy with Cain’s present. Then Cain got very angry. His face changed and he looked very sad.

⁶God said, “Cain. Why are you looking angry and sad?

⁷If you do the right thing, I will be happy with you. But, if you don’t do the right thing, you have to be careful. You’ve got to tell yourself not to do those bad things you want to do. If you keep doing wrong things your life will be full of trouble.”

⁸After that Cain went to his brother, Abel, and said, “Let’s go for a walk.” So Cain and Abel went out bush together. While they were there, Cain got up and hit his brother, and murdered him.

⁹Later, God said to Cain, “Where is your brother? Where is Abel?” Cain said, “I don’t know where my brother is. I can’t look after him all the time. That’s not my job.”

¹⁰God said to Cain, “What did you do? You know you did a really bad thing. I can see your brother’s blood on the ground. It’s like his blood is calling out to me. It is telling me you murdered him.

¹¹From now on, I’m going to curse you. You murdered your brother and his blood is on the ground. So I will make the ground bad for you.

¹²If you try to grow plants in the ground nothing will grow for you. You will go away from me. And you will walk around in lots of places, but you will have no home.”

¹³Cain said to God, “God, you are too hard on me.

¹⁴You will not let me work my land now, and I have to go away from you. I have to walk around everywhere. I can’t sit down anywhere. Anybody might murder me now.”

¹⁵God said, “Cain, that will not happen. If somebody does murder you, then I will punish them 7 times more than I punished you.” So God put a mark on Cain’s head so everybody will know that they can’t murder him.

¹⁶After this, Cain walked away from God and went to live in a place called Nod. That country was on the east side of the garden called Eden.