“
Cain—like his fellow fratricide, Romulus—founded a city, and some of his descendants were the ancestors of men practicing various arts: the city and the arts, so alien to man’s original simplicity, owe their origin to Cain and his race rather than to Seth, the substitute for Abel, and his race. It goes without saying that this is not the last word of the Bible on the city and the arts but it is its first word, just as the prohibition against eating of the tree of knowledge is, one may say, its first word simply, and the revelation of the Torah—i.e., the highest kind of knowledge of good and evil that is vouchsafed to men—is its last word.
”
”