A Thirsty Demon (Gen 4:7)

You Can’t Go Home Again

⁷ For you it will thirst וְאֵלֶ֙יךָ֙ תְּשׁ֣וּקָת֔וֹ

I struggled mightily to understand v. 7a, but v. 7b is a breeze to translate. In fact, some of you may remember that I translated it quite some while ago, back in September, when I was still living in Philadelphia. A quick recap:

The word תשוקה is an unusual one. The dictionaries will tell you that it comes from a root שׁוק which doesn’t actually exist and point also to שׁקק (which exists but isn’t common enough to really explain what’s going on) and שׁקה, which is reasonably common and has something to do with giving someone something to drink.

The most striking thing about תשוקה is the two other places in the Bible where it’s found. The first one, Gen 4:7, cannot possibly have been written independently of our verse, because it also reuses the משל phrase.

Gen 3:16b, in which YHWH is speaking to Cain’s mother (as he is now speaking to Cain) says this:

Yet for your man will you thirst, and he will govern you.

וְאֶל־אִישֵׁךְ֙ תְּשׁ֣וּקָתֵ֔ךְ וְה֖וּא יִמְשָׁל־בָּֽךְ׃ 

He has just warned that pregnancy would be “way more grievous” and that giving birth would be grievous as well, so the implication of the next remark is that she will not be able to avoid those difficult situations. Now we are seeing an almost identical phrase. Before we examine it, let’s take a quick look (as promised) at the Song of Songs:

There is only one other place in the entire Bible where this word teshukah occurs, and that is in the Song of Songs. In Song 7:11 (7:10 in Christian Bibles), ready to invite her lover to the orchard where she will give him her love, the woman says, “I am my beloved’s, and his desire [תְּשׁוּקָתֽוֹ teshukato] is for me.” I don’t know what form the Genesis stories were in at the time the author of the Song of Songs was writing, but I am convinced of this: she knew the traditional saying that, though women would find childbirth painful, they would nevertheless have desire for their husbands—and she flipped it 180 degrees.

See more on p. 230 of my book The Bible’s Many Voices.