The Raven, and the Weight of a Single Life

The Qur'an tells the episode as a warning recited to a later audience, introducing it as the true account of the two sons of Adam and naming neither. The offerings are accepted from one and not the other; the threat to kill is spoken aloud; and the reply is the element that has no counterpart in Genesis, that if you stretch out your hand to kill me I will not stretch out mine to kill you, for I fear God. After the killing the murderer is left standing over a body he does not know what to do with, and God sends a raven that scratches the ground to show him how to hide the shame of his brother, at which he cries out that he cannot even do what a raven does.

The passage then draws the conclusion for which it is best known: that whoever kills a soul, other than for a soul or for corruption in the land, it is as if he had killed all humanity, and whoever saves one, it is as if he had saved all humanity. The same formulation appears earlier in rabbinic literature, in the charge given to witnesses in a capital case in the Mishnah, which reasons from the single ancestor of Genesis that no one may say their own line matters more than another. The two versions differ in wording and transmission and the relation between them is a standing subject of comparative study, but the shared move is the same: a story about one murder is turned into a statement about the value of any single life.