Why did God ask Cain about Abel? Isn’t He all-knowing?
Those sentences which are colored in orange are from Maharishi Dayananda Saraswati book Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) and those which are colored in black are Jerry Thomas’s response.
"And the Lord said unto Cain, where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What has thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth." (4:9 – 11.) C. Could not God known about Abel's death without inquiring from Cain? Can the voice of blood ever cry unto anyone from the ground? All these things are like the doings of the ignorant. This book could not, therefore, have been made by go or even by a learned man.
Answer: As Maharishi progresses with his low-level questions, his ignorance is becoming evident. It is very evident from the passage itself that God knew about the murder of Abel. When Cain denied knowing anything about Abel, God Himself gave the information. So the question is why did God ask this question? Let us read a similar passage where two human beings are speaking. 1 Samuel 15:11-16 “I greatly regret that I have set up Saul [as] king, for he has turned back from following Me, and has not performed My commandments." And it grieved Samuel, and he cried out to the LORD all night. So when Samuel rose early in the morning to meet Saul, it was told Samuel, saying, "Saul went to Carmel, and indeed, he set up a monument for himself; and he has gone on around, passed by, and gone down to Gilgal. Then Samuel went to Saul, and Saul said to him, "Blessed [are] you of the LORD! I have performed the commandment of the LORD. But Samuel said, "What then [is] this bleating of the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear. And Saul said, "They have brought them from the Amalekites; for the people spared the best of the sheep and the oxen, to sacrifice to the LORD your God; and the rest we have utterly destroyed”. Then Samuel said to Saul, "Be quiet! And I will tell you what the LORD said to me last night." Prophet Samuel already knew that Saul did not obey the LORD. He still asked the question as he was performing the role of a judge. Again, when we come to Acts 5, Apostle Peter asks the question to Ananias and later to his wife, though Apostle Peter already knew the answer. He was also performing the role of a judge. Similarly, LORD God is acting as the Judge in this passage and the question is very much relevant. The ignorant may mock at this question but the learned surely knows the meaning of it. Further, blood crying out is a figurative speech. The life of a person is in the blood (Leviticus 17:11). In other words, God is speaking about the life that is taken.
