The Cain and Abel story seemed to me like a “startup problem”, where God, the founder, hadn’t had enough practice to get good at His job and was just discovering how perverse these beings with free will could be at interpreting things their own way rather than how He might expect them to behave.
Consider Genesis 4:9, “ And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?”. Hello?—did God forget His omniscience? Why is he asking Cain what happened? Perhaps to see if Cain will lie, but then shouldn’t He know that? Then, in the very next verse, Abel’s blood cries out to God. What, didn’t God know?
Then, murder not having come up before, God has to figure out what to do about it, and is surprisingly lenient. This is not the God of Exodus 21:23–25, “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” Instead, Cain is sent wandering and later has a son and founds a city.
It’s like God is learning just how troublesome these creatures with minds of their own can be, not unlike creators of large language models who are embarrassed unto panic when their creations start to speak impolite truths their creators would never utter.
Other examples which seem to me like a God learning on the job are when in Genesis 18:20–33 Abraham dickers with God about how many righteous must be found in Sodom in order to spare the city and negotiates God’s first offer of fifty all the way down to ten. In 18:33, when “the LORD went his way…”, one can imagine Him muttering, “Remind Me not to haggle with that guy in the bazaar”.
Or consider when the burning bush commands Moses to lead the Israelites out of Egypt in Exodus 4:10–16 and Moses doesn’t want to take the job, angering God. But Moses negotiates Him down until He appoints Aaron to be Moses’s spokesman in Egypt.
“Start-ups”, God muttered, “It’s like an endless game of Whac-A-Mole.”