Genesis4chapter 4

Genesis 4:1-2

Eve's words at Cain's birth are difficult in the Hebrew and have often been read as a hope that this child is the promised seed of chapter 3. If that is the sense, she was wrong about the son and wrong about the timing. Abel's name means breath or vapour, which the story turns into an epitaph, and the writer sets the younger brother's work down before the elder's.

Genesis 4:3-5

Two brothers bring what they have and God receives one offering and not the other. The verse names the man before the gift in both cases, and Hebrews says Abel offered his by faith, while Genesis notes that his came from the firstlings and the fat. This is the first of six times in the book that the choice falls past the elder brother, and Isaac, Jacob, Pharez, Ephraim and Judah follow. Paul quotes the Jacob and Esau case at Romans 9 and reads the reversal as election rather than natural right.

Genesis 4:6-7

God speaks to Cain before he kills, and speaks kindly, telling him the door is still open. This is the first time the word sin appears in the Bible, and it appears as an animal crouched at an entrance wanting him, using the two words used of the woman's desire in the previous chapter. Adam Clarke reads the same Hebrew noun as a sin offering couching at the door, which would put a remedy in the sentence beside the warning. Either way, Cain is told he may rule over it.

Genesis 4:8

The first death in the human family is a murder, and it happens in a field after a conversation the Hebrew does not record. Jerome notes that the Samaritan text fills the gap with the words let us go out into the field, and that the Hebrew leaves it blank. John says plainly why he did it, that his own works were evil and his brother's righteous. Genesis opens here with a man killing his brother and closes with a man refusing to, and the beats between are Isaac and Ishmael burying Abraham together, Esau running to weep on Jacob's neck, and Joseph weeping on the brothers who sold him and telling them God meant it unto good.

Genesis 4:9-10

God asks Cain a question he already knows the answer to, as he had asked Adam where art thou one chapter earlier. Cain answers with a question of his own that the rest of Scripture answers yes. Blood crying from the ground becomes an image the Bible keeps, and Hebrews names it directly, saying the blood of Jesus speaks better things than that of Abel. Matthew Henry notes that the Hebrew word is plural, the voice of thy brother's bloods.

Genesis 4:11-12

The ground cursed in chapter 3 for Adam's sake now refuses Cain its strength altogether, and the tiller of the ground is driven off the ground. The earth that opened to receive the blood becomes the thing that will not feed him, so the sentence is cut from the crime. He goes out a fugitive and a vagabond, one step further than his father, who was put outside the garden but still worked the soil.

Genesis 4:13-14

My punishment is greater than I can bear: Cain complains of the sentence rather than of the sin. Adam Clarke notes that the same Hebrew can be rendered mine iniquity is greater than that it may be forgiven, which would make this despair rather than self pity. What he names either way is the loss, being hidden from God's face, driven from the ground, and hunted by whoever finds him, and he never names the wrong.

Genesis 4:15

The mark is protection rather than a brand, since God sets it on him so that no one finding him will kill him. What it was is not said, and Adam Clarke runs through the old conjectures mainly to show that none of them is in the text. The sevenfold vengeance promised here is the figure Lamech will seize and inflate into a song before the chapter ends. Judgment and restraint come down in the same breath.

Genesis 4:16-17

went out from the presence of the LORD: Cain goes out from the presence of the LORD and settles east of Eden, the direction in which the garden gate was barred in chapter 3 and the direction Lot chooses when he separates from Abram. He then builds a city and names it after his son, so settled life in Genesis begins in the line of the man under judgment. The text reports it without comment, and within five verses this branch has produced herding, music and metalwork.

Genesis 4:18-19

The line runs seven names from Cain and then stops, and several of its names come back in Seth's line in the next chapter, an Enoch and a Lamech in each. The two lines are told apart by what the men do rather than by what they are called, since Cain's Enoch has a city named after him and Seth's walks with God. Lamech then takes two wives, the first man in Scripture to do so, and the writer sets it against the one flesh of chapter 2 without a word of comment.

Genesis 4:20-22

Jabal, Jubal and Tubalcain give the world herding, music and metalwork, and the passage does not sneer at any of it. These are real gifts, and the text records only that they arose in the line of the man who went out from God's presence, while the line of promise ran elsewhere. Naamah is named and nothing else about her is given, and Genesis names very few women in a genealogy at all.

Genesis 4:23-24

Lamech's speech to his wives is set out as a song, and its subject is a killing he is proud of. He takes what God had said in protection of Cain and turns it into a private licence, seventy and sevenfold where God had said sevenfold. When Peter asks how often he must forgive his brother, Jesus answers with Lamech's own number and turns it the other way.

Genesis 4:25-26

Seth is given in place of Abel, and Eve names him another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew, which sets the promise of chapter 3 back on its feet after a funeral. The next division of the book opens at chapter 5 with the generations of Adam and follows Seth, and Cain's line is never traced again. In the days of Seth's son men began to call on the name of the LORD, the phrase that will follow Abram from altar to altar in chapters 12 and 13, and a chapter that opened with a murder closes with prayer.