The Cain and Abel story is set in the Ancient Near East about 6,000 years ago. Many modern scholars believe the biblical account derived from earlier stories of conflict between the traditional nomadic way of life of the Israelites and the agricultural way of life which was developing in the Fertile Crescent.
Abel is here thought to derive from a word meaning "herdsman", with the modern Arabic cognate ibil, which now more specifically means "camels." Cain (qayin / qyn), on the other hand, is thought to be cognate to the mid-first millennium B.C.E. South Arabian word qyn, meaning "metal smith."[1] Hence their names are merely descriptions of the roles they take in the story—Abel as a pastoral farmer, and Cain as an agriculturist.
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