Cain, and How Far It Spreads

Begin where the text begins, with two names that are doing work. Eve says in 4:1, 'With the help of the LORD I have brought forth a man,' and the verb behind it, qanah, which can mean to get or acquire (the KJV has 'I have gotten a man from the LORD'), sounds like Cain, qayin; the BSB footnotes the sound-play. Abel is hevel, which is the word Ecclesiastes uses more than thirty times for breath, vapour, a thing that does not last. The second brother's name is what happens to him, and a reader who knows Hebrew has been warned before the offerings are brought.

Then the offerings. Cain, who works the ground, brings some of the fruit of the soil as an offering. Abel, who keeps sheep, brings the best portions of the firstborn of his flock. The LORD looks with favor on Abel and his offering, but has no regard for Cain and his offering, and the narrator supplies no reason. Four explanations are in circulation and you should be able to assess all four.

The first says a blood sacrifice was required and Cain brought grain. It has the advantage of simplicity and the serious disadvantage that Leviticus 2 legislates a grain offering as a proper offering to the LORD, so a cereal gift is not defective in principle, and Genesis 4 nowhere states a requirement. The second says the difference is quality. This is the strongest reading from the wording itself, because the descriptions are asymmetrical: Abel's gift carries two qualifiers, firstborn and what the Hebrew calls fat portions, which are the choice parts, and Cain's carries none. A caution about the BSB here: it renders the second qualifier 'best portions', which puts the quality reading on the page before the student has weighed it, so check the Hebrew word, and remember that the other explanations do not depend on it. Hebrews 11:4 moves in a related direction, saying that by faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did and was commended as righteous. The third says the issue is the man rather than the gift, and points out that the text puts the person first in both halves of 4:4 to 5, that it is Abel and his offering, Cain and his offering. The New Testament reads it this way too: 1 John 3:12 says Cain's deeds were evil, and Jude 11 can speak of the path of Cain as a recognised category.

The fourth explanation says the silence is the point. Claus Westermann and Gerhard von Rad both argued that the narrative deliberately withholds a reason, that God's freedom in accepting and not accepting is part of what the story is about, and that the reader is meant to feel the apparent unfairness along with Cain. There is a strong piece of internal evidence for this: the very next thing that happens is that God speaks to Cain, and what he addresses is not Cain's liturgy but Cain's face. He does not say your grain was the wrong commodity. He says why are you angry, and he warns him about what is at the door. If the problem had been a procedural mistake, the remedy would have been obvious and 4:7 would have stated it.

Here is how to hold this honestly. The two best-supported readings are the qualitative one, which has the wording and Hebrews 11:4 behind it, and the divine-freedom one, which has the narrator's silence and the content of 4:6 to 7 behind it, and they are not even mutually exclusive, since a God who declines to explain may still be responding to something real. What the passage does not support is a confident pulpit assertion that Cain's problem was the absence of blood, and preaching it that way teaches students to supply reasons the Bible withholds, which is a habit that will cost them later in Job.

Genesis 4:7 is, by common consent among Hebraists, one of the hardest verses in the book, and it is worth telling students that before you teach it. The first clause is extremely compressed in Hebrew, which is why English versions differ over whether what is lifted up is Cain's face, his offering or his guilt. The BSB's 'will you not be accepted' is a reasonable rendering of a phrase about lifting, and other versions take the lifting as the removal of sin. The BSB also settles the opening condition in moral terms, 'If you do what is right', where the Hebrew is simply the verb for doing well or good; keep the plainer sense in view. Flag the difficulty rather than hiding it; the rest of the verse is where the theology is.

'But if you refuse to do what is right, sin is crouching at your door.' The participle robets, crouching, pictures an animal lying in wait, and it is masculine while the noun for sin is feminine, a grammatical mismatch that has prompted a well-known proposal: that robets here carries the sense of the Akkadian rabisu, a demon that lurks at thresholds and doorways. If that is right, the image is not a vague inclination but a crouching thing outside the house, which fits the verse's next move. Treat the suggestion as a strong possibility rather than a certainty, since the Hebrew participle has a perfectly ordinary meaning of its own.

Then the clause that ties this lesson to the last one: 'It desires you, but you must master it.' Teshuqah, desire, and mashal, to rule, which the BSB translates 'master' here. That is exactly the pair of Hebrew words used in 3:16 of the woman and her husband, and the pairing is the reason the argument over 3:16 cannot be settled from 3:16 alone. The BSB's footnote, 'Or it desires to control you', shows the same ambiguity being carried in 4:7. Here the desire is clearly hostile and the ruling is clearly to be desired, so a reader who takes 4:7 as the control for 3:16 ends up with Susan Foh's reading of the woman's desire as a desire to dominate, which is the argument the previous lesson set out. A reader who takes Song of Solomon 7:10 as the control ends up somewhere else. Note that the direction of the inference is a choice the interpreter makes, not a fact the Hebrew supplies.

There is a third dispute inside the clause and it is the most consequential. 'You must master it' translates an imperfect verb, which in Hebrew can carry obligation, capability or prediction. The BSB's 'must' has taken the first of those, and its 'but' sets the ruling against the desire; both are the translators' choices. Is God commanding Cain, enabling Cain, or telling him what will happen? Each reading has defenders, and the pastoral difference is large: a command places the weight on responsibility, a capability statement places it on the resources Cain actually has, and a prediction makes the verse an announcement rather than a warning. What all three share is the thing that should strike any reader: God talks to Cain before the murder. He names the anger, he describes the danger in a vivid image, and he addresses him as someone who can still do otherwise. Genesis offers that conversation and then records what Cain does with it.

What Cain does is in 4:8, and the narration is as spare as the subject deserves: the BSB reads 'Let us go out to the field,' and then Cain rose up against his brother and killed him. Those spoken words are not in the Hebrew text we have, which says only that Cain spoke to his brother; the BSB follows the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, the Syriac and the Vulgate, and says so in a footnote. Either way the narration after that is spare. Then the interrogation, and it echoes chapter 3 deliberately. God asks where Abel is, as he had asked where the man was. Cain's answer is a lie wrapped in a question, and the question uses a verb you met two lessons ago: am I my brother's shomer, his keeper, from shamar, the verb used in 2:15 of keeping the garden and in Numbers 3 of Levitical guard duty. The creature made to keep now refuses to keep his brother. The blood cries from the ground in 4:10, which makes the victim a plaintiff and the soil a witness, and the ground that was cursed in 3:17 has now opened its mouth to receive blood. In 4:12 Cain becomes a wanderer, and in 4:16 he settles in the land of Nod, east of Eden, which is the same direction as the exit in 3:24. The movement of these chapters is consistently eastward and away.

Two notes before leaving the chapter. First, the sign in 4:15 is protective. God's answer to Cain's fear is a sevenfold deterrent and a mark that keeps him alive. It is not a stigma, the text does not say what it was, and the use of the so-called mark of Cain to justify theories about race has no footing whatever in the passage; it is an abuse with a body count, and it is worth naming as such in a class. Second, look at what Cain's line produces in 4:17 to 22: a city, then livestock, then music, then bronze and iron. Genesis does not sneer at any of it. Culture arises in the condemned line and Genesis simply reports it, which is a more interesting theology of culture than most of what gets built on this chapter.

Genesis 4:23 to 24 is the second poem in the Bible, after the man's two lines in 2:23, and it is a boast. Lamech addresses his two wives, Adah and Zillah, whose names appeared in 4:19 at the first mention of polygamy in scripture, and he tells them: 'For I have slain a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me.' Then the arithmetic: 'If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.' Read it as poetry and notice the two things it is proud of. It is proud of the killing, and it is proud of the disproportion.

Set that against Cain seven verses earlier. Cain killed his brother, lied about it, and was afraid; the sevenfold number was God's protection granted to a frightened murderer. Lamech kills a man for a wound, takes God's number, multiplies it by eleven and sets it to music for his household. Nothing has been added to the human situation except time, and in that time concealment has become celebration and a divine safeguard has become a personal threat. That is the chapter's argument about escalation, made in two lines of verse rather than in a paragraph of comment, and it is the reason Genesis 4 does not end with the murder.

The legal trajectory of the Old Testament runs in the opposite direction and Lamech is the measure of why it was needed. The lex talionis of Exodus 21:23 to 25, eye for eye and tooth for tooth, is usually heard as savage and is in fact a ceiling: it limits redress to equivalence, which is precisely what Lamech refuses. Numbers 35 and Deuteronomy 19 build cities of refuge so that a killing is adjudicated rather than avenged, and they distinguish the accidental from the deliberate. Read Genesis 4:24 first and the law looks like restraint rather than brutality.

Then the detail that makes this passage worth teaching to a church. In Matthew 18:21 Peter asks how often he must forgive his brother, and offers seven times. Jesus answers, in the BSB, 'not just seven times, but seventy-seven times,' and the BSB footnotes the alternative, 'seventy times seven', pointing to the Septuagint of Genesis 4:24. The Septuagint of Genesis 4:24 uses the same pairing of seven and seventy-seven, which makes the verbal link close. Whether Jesus intends a deliberate reversal of Lamech is an inference rather than a stated citation, and you should present it as one, but the inference is a natural one: the number a murderer used to measure vengeance is handed back as the measure of forgiveness. Teach it that way and Matthew 18 stops being an arithmetic puzzle about whether four hundred and ninety is the limit.

Genesis 4 then closes by opening a second line. In 4:25 Eve bears Seth, and she says God has granted her another seed in place of Abel (the BSB footnotes that Seth probably means granted or appointed), using a verb that puns on the name as her first son's name had punned on hers. And 4:26 adds a sentence that sits oddly in a chapter about murder: at that time people began to call upon the name of the LORD. Two lines now run in parallel, Cain's and Seth's, the first making cities and songs about killing and the second calling on God, and the next chapter will follow the second.

Genesis 5 is the chapter readers skip, and it is doing at least four things. First, it is structured: ten names from Adam to Noah, matched later by ten from Shem to Abram in 11:10 to 26, so the pre-history is given a frame. Second, it carries the story across a gap, which is what genealogies are for in Genesis, and each entry follows a fixed formula: he lived so many years, he became the father of, he lived so many more, and he died. Count the deaths. The phrase 'and then he died' lands eight times in one chapter, which is 2:17's sentence being carried out in instalments, and the formula is the chapter's theological comment rather than its filler. Third, it transmits the image: 5:1 to 3 restates Genesis 1:27 and then says Adam had a son in his own likeness, after his own image, so the thing given in chapter 1 is passed down after chapter 3, which the image lesson in this module took as one of its hinges.

The fourth thing Genesis 5 does is break its own pattern twice, and both breaks are the point. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, gets no death notice: 5:24 says he walked with God, and then he was no more, because God had taken him away. In a chapter whose rhythm is 'and then he died', that is a deafening silence. And Noah's birth stops the machinery for a sentence of hope in 5:29, where Lamech, a different Lamech from Cain's line, names him and says, 'May this one comfort us in the labor and toil of our hands caused by the ground that the LORD has cursed.' That sentence quotes 3:17 to 19 back at the reader and attaches a hope to a baby, which is what the rest of Genesis will keep doing.

Now the lifespans, honestly. Four approaches are taken by people who believe the Bible. The straightforward reading takes the numbers as elapsed years. The symbolic reading notes that the figures are often built from factors of five, seven and sixty and reads them as meaningful rather than measured. The honorific reading treats great age as a mark of status, as the Sumerian King List does, where the eight or ten kings before the flood reign for tens of thousands of years each; on this comparison Genesis's numbers are already a drastic deflation of the genre, and its figures are given to fathers rather than kings. The declining-lifespan reading observes that the figures fall away after the flood, through Shem's 600, Abraham's 175 and Moses's 120, and reads the fall as the slow working out of mortality. State its own awkwardness while you are there: before the flood there is no decline to speak of, and Noah's 950 years in 9:29 are more than Adam's 930 and exceeded only by Jared's 962 and Methuselah's 969, so the trajectory the reading needs does not begin until chapter 11. There is no consensus, including among conservative Old Testament scholars, and the chapter never comments on its own numbers.

One fact settles a related question and it is not well enough known. If you want to use Genesis 5 and 11 as a chronology you first have to decide which text to use, because the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch give materially different figures, with the Septuagint commonly adding a hundred years to the age at fatherhood, and the totals from Adam to Abraham diverge by centuries. On top of that, biblical genealogies demonstrably compress: Matthew 1:8 goes from Joram to Uzziah and leaves out three reigning kings. William Henry Green made the argument in 1890 that these lists were never designed as chronologies. Andrew Steinmann and others reply that the arithmetic in Genesis 5 and 11 is too deliberate to be ornamental, since each entry gives the father's age at the son's birth, which is exactly the datum a chronology needs and exactly the datum other genealogies omit. Both sides have a real case. Give your students the textual variants first, because they change what the argument is about.

Which brings you to Genesis 6:1 to 4, three and a bit verses that have generated a library. The sons of God see that the daughters of men are beautiful and take as wives whomever they chose; the LORD says man's days shall be 120 years; and the Nephilim are on the earth in those days, and the children born are the 'mighty men of old, men of renown'. Three readings are serious. The divine-being reading takes bene ha'elohim in its sense elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, where at Job 1:6, 2:1 and 38:7 it means heavenly beings, and it is the oldest reading on record: 1 Enoch 6 to 11 builds the whole Watchers tradition on it, Jubilees and several Qumran texts follow, Josephus reports it, and Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria take it. 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6, which speak of angels who did not stay within their own domain but abandoned their proper dwelling, are read by many as referring to this episode, and Jude 7 goes straight on to Sodom's sexual sin, which strengthens the connection. Two further points belong to the case. The phrase bene ha'elohim is never used of human beings anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible, so the reading is asking only that the words keep the sense they have in every other occurrence. And the passage's own outcome fits it: the union produces the Nephilim and the mighty men of renown, a category the narrative treats as remarkable, which is a strange thing to say about the children of ordinary human marriages. There is ancient translational evidence too, of the same kind that mattered in the last lesson. Some Septuagint manuscripts render the phrase at 6:2 not as sons of God but as angels of God, so Greek-speaking Jewish readers in antiquity were already taking it that way when they turned it into another language. Its difficulties are three and they are not trivial. Matthew 22:30 says that in the resurrection people are like the angels in heaven, who neither marry nor are given in marriage. Behind that lies the physiological question, which scripture nowhere else answers, since it gives heavenly beings no bodies that reproduce. And the New Testament support is itself disputed, because many interpreters refer 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 to the original angelic rebellion rather than to Genesis 6, which would leave only the Job and Psalms usage standing.

The Sethite reading takes the sons of God as the godly line of Seth and the daughters of man as the line of Cain, so the sin is intermarriage that dissolves the distinction Genesis 4:25 to 5:32 has just drawn. Augustine argues it in City of God book fifteen, Chrysostom holds it, and it became the standard Reformation and post-Reformation Protestant view, with Calvin and later Keil among its defenders. Its strengths are substantial. The narrative has just spent two chapters separating exactly these two lines, Cain's in 4:17 to 24 and Seth's in 4:25 to 5:32, so a sin of intermarriage is the one transgression the preceding material has prepared the reader for. Scripture elsewhere calls the covenant people God's sons, at Deuteronomy 14:1 and Hosea 1:10, so the idiom is available. And the judgement that follows falls on human beings and not on any heavenly party, which fits a human sin better than an angelic one. Two further points. The reading needs no category the chapter has not already used, where the divine-being reading has to import heavenly beings into a narrative that has mentioned none since the cherubim of 3:24. And it explains why 6:3 responds to the episode by limiting the days of man: a verdict on human lifespan is an odd answer to an angelic trespass and a natural one to a human marriage that has gone wrong. Its difficulty is lexical: in 6:1 the word adam, man, means humanity in general, and in 6:2 the daughters of that same adam are the ones in view, so the contrast the verse draws looks like divine against human rather than pious against impious. The Sethite answer is that 6:1 is setting the scene for the whole race and 6:2 is narrowing to two groups within it, which Hebrew narrative does constantly, and that the sonship texts already cited supply the idiom the chapter has not spelled out.

The royal reading, argued by Meredith Kline in a 1962 article, takes the sons of God as dynastic rulers who claimed divine sonship in the way the image lesson described, so that the sin is despotic harem-building. Its case is better than its brevity in most summaries suggests. The chapter's own language is royal: gibborim, mighty men, is what Near Eastern kings called their warriors, and men of renown is literally men of the name, which is the vocabulary the Babel builders will use of themselves in 11:4. Taking any wives they chose is what kings did and what ordinary men could not do, and the first polygamist in Genesis was Lamech seven verses earlier. It also keeps the whole passage inside the critique of divine kingship that Genesis has been running since chapter 1, which no other reading does. Two more supports. The reading gives the episode a recognisable sin: not a metaphysical trespass and not a mixed marriage, but rulers taking women because they could, which is the crime Nathan will charge David with and the crime the prophets charge kings with throughout the Old Testament. And it fits the flood's stated cause, since 6:11 and 6:13 say the earth was full of violence, and tyranny is the form violence takes when it has a throne behind it. Its difficulties are that the specific plural phrase bene ha'elohim is not attested of kings anywhere in Hebrew, that the passage supplies none of the ordinary royal vocabulary of thrones, cities or crowns, and that the Egyptian and Mesopotamian evidence concerns the title son of a god in the singular, applied to one man, which is some distance from the plural phrase Genesis actually uses. It also has the thinnest history of the three, with no significant ancient or Reformation-era support to appeal to, which is not an argument against it but does mean it is being proposed rather than defended.

Hold all three and declare none. Then notice that 6:3 is disputed on its own terms (the BSB's 'My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal' translates a hard Hebrew word, and its footnote records that the Septuagint and Syriac read 'My Spirit will not remain in man forever'), and the 120 years is read by some as a new ceiling on human life and by others as a countdown to the flood, with Noah's 950 years telling against the first. Notice that the Nephilim reappear in Numbers 13:33 and that the etymology of the name is not securely known. And notice where the passage lands. Genesis 6:5 says the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great upon the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was altogether evil all the time. In 6:6 the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and was grieved in His heart, which is the strongest statement of divine grief in the Torah and which no theology of impassibility can simply delete. Then 6:8: 'Noah, however, found favor in the eyes of the LORD.' That is the first occurrence of the word chen, favour or grace, in the Bible, it arrives one verse after the verdict, and it is where the next lesson starts.