1And the human knew Eve his woman and she conceived and bore Cain, and she said, “I have got me a man with the LORD.” 2And she bore as well his brother, Abel, and Abel became a herder of sheep while Cain was a tiller of the soil. 3And it happened in the course of time that Cain brought from the fruit of the soil an offering to the LORD. 4And Abel too had brought from the choice firstlings of his flock, and the LORD regarded Abel and his offering 5but He did not regard Cain and his offering, and Cain was very incensed, and his face fell. 6And the LORD said to Cain.
“Why are you incensed,
and why is your face fallen?
7For whether you offer well,
or whether you do not,
at the tent flap sin crouches
and for you is its longing
but you will rule over it.”
8And Cain said to Abel his brother, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose against Abel his brother and killed him. 9And the LORD said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And he said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” 10And He said, “What have you done? Listen! your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil. 11And so, cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brother’s blood from your hand. 12If you till the soil, it will no longer give you its strength. A restless wanderer shall you be on the earth.” 13And Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is too great to bear. 14Now that You have driven me this day from the soil and I must hide from Your presence, I shall be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me.” 15And the LORD said to him, “Therefore whoever kills Cain shall suffer sevenfold vengeance.” And the LORD set a mark upon Cain so that whoever found him would not slay him.
16And Cain went out from the LORD’s presence and dwelled in the land of Nod east of Eden. 17And Cain knew his wife and she conceived and bore Enoch. Then he became the builder of a city and called the name of the city, like his son’s name, Enoch. 18And Irad was born to Enoch, and Irad begot Mehujael and Mehujael begot Methusael and Methusael begot Lamech. 19And Lamech took him two wives, the name of the one was Adah and the name of the other was Zillah. 20And Adah bore Jabal: he was the first of tent dwellers with livestock. 21And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the first of all who play on the lyre and pipe. 22As for Zillah, she bore Tubal-Cain, who forged every tool of copper and iron. And the sister of Tubal-Cain was Naamah. 23And Lamech said to his wives,
“Adah and Zillah, O hearken my voice,
You wives of Lamech, give ear to my speech.
For a man have I slain for my wound,
a boy for my bruising.
24For sevenfold Cain is avenged,
and Lamech seventy and seven.”
25And Adam again knew his wife and she bore a son and called his name Seth, as to say, “God has granted me other seed in place of Abel, for Cain has killed him.” 26As for Seth, to him, too, a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. It was then that the name of the LORD was first invoked.
CHAPTER 4 NOTES
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1. knew. The Hebrew verb suggests intimate knowledge and hence sexual possession. Amos Funkenstein notes that it is the one term for sexual intercourse associated with legitimate possession—and in a few antithetical instances, with perverse violation of legitimate possession. Given the clumsiness of modern English equivalents like “had experience of,” “cohabited with,” “was intimate with,” and, given the familiarity of the King James Version’s literal rendering, “to know” remains the least objectionable English solution.
I have got me a man with the LORD. Eve’s naming-speech puns on the verb qanah, “to get,” “to acquire,” or perhaps, “to make,” and qayin, “Cain.” His name actually means “smith,” an etymology that will be reflected in his linear descendant Tubal-Cain, the legendary first metalworker. (“Tubal” also means “smith” in Sumerian and Akkadian.) Eve, upon bringing forth the third human being, imagines herself as a kind of partner of God in man-making.
2. Abel. No etymology is given, but it has been proposed that the Hebrew hevel, “vapor” or “puff of air,” may be associated with his fleeting life span.
4–5. The widespread culture-founding story of rivalry between herdsman and farmer is recast in a pattern that will dominate Genesis—the displacement of the firstborn by the younger son. If there is any other reason intimated as to why God would favor Abel’s offering and not Cain’s, it would be in the narrator’s stipulation that Abel brings the very best of his flock to God.
6–7. This is the first of two enigmatic and probably quite archaic poems in the chapter. God’s initial words pick up the two locutions for dejection of the immediately preceding narrative report and turn them into the parallel utterances of formal verse. The first clause of verse 7 is particularly elliptic in the Hebrew, and thus any construction is no more than an educated guess. The narrative context of sacrifices may suggest that the cryptic s’eit (elsewhere, “preeminence”) might be related to masʾeit, a “gift” or “cultic offering.”
8. Let us go out to the field. This sentence is missing in the Masoretic Text but supplied in the Greek, Syriac, and Aramaic versions.
his brother. In keeping with the biblical practice of using thematically fraught relational epithets, the victim of the first murder is twice called “his brother” here, and God will repeatedly refer to Abel in accusing Cain as “your brother.”
9–12. There are several verbal echoes of Adam’s interrogation by God and Adam’s curse, setting up a general biblical pattern in which history is seen as a cycle of approximate and significant recurrences. Adam’s being driven from the Garden to till a landscape of thorn and thistle is replayed here in God’s insistence that Cain is cursed by—the preposition also could mean “of” or “from”—the soil (ʾadamah) that had hitherto yielded its bounty to him. The biblical imagination is equally preoccupied with the theme of exile (this is already the second expulsion) and with the arduousness or precariousness of agriculture, a blessing that easily turns into blight.
11. that gaped with its mouth to take your brother’s blood from your hand. The image is strongly physical: a gaping mouth taking in blood from the murderer’s hand.
14. whoever finds me. This, and the subsequent report of Cain with a wife in the land of Nod, are a famous inconsistency. Either the writer was assuming knowledge of some other account of human origins involving more than a single founding family, or, because the schematic simplicity of the single nuclear-family plot impeded narrative development after Cain’s banishment, he decided not to bother with consistency.
15. a mark. It is of course a mark of protection, not a stigma as the English idiom “mark of Cain” suggests.
16. the land of Nod. “Nod” in Hebrew is cognate with “wanderer” in verse 12.
17. the builder of a city. The first recorded founder of a city is also the first murderer, a possible reflection of the antiurban bias in Genesis.
20. he was the first. The Hebrew says literally “father of,” in keeping with the predisposition of the language and culture to imagine historical concatenation genealogically.
22. Naamah. One might expect an identification that would align Naamah with her siblings as a founder of some basic activity of human culture, but if such an identification was part of the original epic roll call, it has been either lost or deleted. The Midrash recognized that the root of her name can refer to song: perhaps Naamah is meant to be associated with her half brother Jubal, the founder of instrumental music—he as accompanist, she as singer.
23–24. The narrative context of this poem is long lost, but it looks like a warrior’s triumphal song, cast as a boast to his wives. Unlike the looser form of the earlier poetic insets, this poem follows the parallelistic pattern of biblical verse with exemplary rigor. Every term in each initial verset has its semantic counterpart in the second verset. In the Hebrew, the first pair of versets has four accented syllables in each; every subsequent verset has three accented syllables. The last pair of versets, with its numbers, provides a paradigm case for poetic parallelism in the Bible: when a number occurs in the first half of the line, it must be increased—by one, by a decimal, or by a decimal added to the original number, as here, in the second half of the line. In the same way, there is a pronounced tendency in the poetry to intensify semantic material as it is repeated in approximate synonymity. Perhaps, then, what Lamech is saying (quite barbarically) is that not only has he killed a man for wounding him, he has not hesitated to kill a mere boy for hurting him.
25. Seth . . . granted me. The naming-pun plays on the similarity of sound between “Seth,” shet, and “granted,” shat.
26. Enosh. The name is also a common noun in Hebrew meaning “man,” and that conceivably might explain why, from the universalist perspective of the writer, the name YHWH began to be invoked in this generation. In any case, the narrative unit that begins with one general term for human being, ʾadam, in verse 1, here concludes with another, ʾenosh, and those two words elsewhere are bracketed together in poetic parallelism.
the name of the LORD was first invoked. That is, the distinctive Israelite designation for the deity, YHWH, represented in this translation, according to precedent in the King James Version, as the LORD. The existence of primordial monotheism is an odd biblical notion that seeks to reinforce the universalism of the monotheistic idea. The enigmatic claim, made here with an atypical and vague passive form of the verb, is contradicted by the report in Exodus that only with Moses was the name YHWH revealed to man.