A Curse (Gen 4:11)

You Can’t Go Home Again

¹¹ And now — וְעַתָּ֖ה

וְעַתָּ֖ה v’atta ‘and now’ — as we learned near the end of Genesis 3 — tells us that we are moving past the introductory material to something new, the main point the writer intends to make. I’m not trying to suggest that Abel’s death is insignificant, of course, but I’ve caught this v’atta wave, so let’s ride it for a while.

Abel has never said anything in this story (unlike some of the retellings of it). He is “Cain’s brother” and appears to have been set up as his antagonist by YHWH, not through any action of his own. It’s not implausible that, thinking of our text as a kind of musical composition (as you know I like to do), the purpose of our story may have been what in a piece of music from the classical era we would a “modulating bridge,” text that is not set in a single key but transitions from one important theme to the next.

In our case — still under the assumption that ועתה is telling us we’ve reached the next important moment — we see that a new curse is being added to the humans’ dismissal from the Garden, which has condemned them to ultimate death. But that mention of a curse shows us that we are also returning to an earlier theme in Genesis 3, that of curse and earth. It’s another indication — like the “where?” question asked of both Cain and his father, and the “what have you done?” question asked of both Cain and his mother — that the “theme” of Genesis 3 is being further developed here in Genesis 4.

you are cursed more than the ground אָר֣וּר אָ֑תָּה מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָה֙

In 3:17, YHWH tells the man (perhaps not directly to him) ארורה האדמה בעבורך arura ha-adamah ba’avurekha ‘Cursed is the soil on your account’. Now Cain — like the snake in v. 14 — is himself cursed, but from the land. That’s the opposite of the snake, who was cursed down to the adama.

What can it mean that Cain is cursed min ha-adama? As we said with the snake, there are two possible meanings of min in this expression:

• Cain is cursed that he must leave from the adama and continue to live only as a wanderer.

• Cain is cursed more than the adama. That is, we moved beyond the stage we were at at the end of Genesis 3 and have reached a further stage of disfunction or derangement.