In Saramago's version, it was Cain who prevented the killing of the child from taking place – the angel sent to prevent it having been delayed by an accident, and but for Cain would have gotten there too late.
Cain gets to the scene of Abraham about to kill his son Isaac, at the order of God. The agency thus moving Cain through time and space is never shown or identified. Upon Cain's departure from Lilith's city, he undergoes a series of time travels, taking him back and forth to various episodes in the Bible - all calculated to present to Cain (and to the reader) God at his most cruel and unjust. Cain is firmly established in his role as the Queen's lover, survives an assassination attempt by Lilith's ineffective husband Noah, and gets Lilith pregnant - whereupon he is overcome by wanderlust and departs on a wondrous clever donkey, the parting gift of the heartbroken Lilith. After being cleaned up (and sexually titillated) by female slaves, he is taken into Lilith's bed and becomes her lover (a theme loosely reminiscent of The Arabian Nights). He soon catches the attention of the wanton Queen Lilith. The wandering Cain reaches a small city-state where he is at first employed as a manual worker in the construction of a palace. There follows a long episode based not on the Bible but on the later myth of Lilith. The story of the birth of Cain and Abel, their jealousy and Cain's killing of Abel also follows closely the Biblical text - the main difference is that after the murder, the Bible's account of a righteous angry God banishing Cain to a life of perpetual wandering is replaced by Saramago with Cain debating with God as en equal, proving that God was in fact an accomplice to the killing of Abel, and getting God to promise to safeguard Cain from all threats during his wanderings. 
There is a hint that the angel, rather than Adam, fathered Eve's "angelic" son Abel. To this, Saramago adds various anecdotes not attested in the Bible - such as the expelled Adam and Eve starving in the wilderness, whereupon the coquettish Eve flirts with the angel guarding the barred gates of Paradise, and gets him to provide some fruits from the forbidden garden, behind God's back.
A preliminary part follows the story line of the early chapters in the Book of Genesis, describing the Original Sin, Fall of Man, and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise - depicted as a rebellion against the dictatorial and unjust rule of God. The novel is mostly told through the eyes of Cain as he witnesses and recounts passages from the Bible that add to his increasing hatred of God. In Cain, Saramago focuses on the Hebrew Bible (mainly the Pentateuch). 
In an earlier novel, " The Gospel According to Jesus Christ", Saramago retold the main events of the life of Jesus Christ, as narrated in the New Testament, presenting God as the villain.
Cain is the last novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese author José Saramago.
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