Cain Goes Forth (Gen 4:16)

You Can’t Go Home Again

¹⁶ Cain went forth from before YHWH וַיֵּ֥צֵא קַ֖יִן מִלִּפְנֵ֣י יְ׳הוָ֑ה

This is in clear Hebrew and is a reasonably straightforward remark, and most commentators are in a hurry to get past it to talk about the land of Nod (which we won’t get to until next time). Nahum Sarna, a religious man as well as a scholar, notes in the JPS Torah Commentary:

The audience with God, sovereign Judge of the world, is now concluded.

But the language used here is more interesting than most commentators seem to find it. If the text had simply said, “Cain left and settled in the land of Nod” or “Cain went to the land of Nod and settled there,” we would not have noticed anything amiss. In the text as we have it — much to my surprise — there is something amiss.

The root יצא y-tz-aleph means “to go out” from somewhere. So far, we have seen a river “going out” of Eden to water the garden (2:10) and the earth being told to “bring out” living creatures (1:24; actually God had to make them, in v. 25). Cain is the first human being to do this verb. His parents did not “go forth” from Xanadu Park; they were dismissed and expelled.

Does anyone else in the Bible “go forth from before YHWH”? Answer: Not exactly. Moses does “bring forth” the staffs of the tribal leaders “from before YHWH” (Num 17:24, using the same verbal root, יצא, in the causative Hiphil binyan) to show that Aaron’s staff has blossomed, so he himself obviously “went forth” with them, though the text doesn’t express it that way.

The two things — not people — that do “go forth from before YHWH” in the Bible are:

• אש ‘fire’ (Lev 9:24 & 10:2, first to consume the very first sacrificial offering made at the inauguration of the Tabernacle and then to consume Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu)

• קצף ‘wrath’ (Num 17:11, where a plague strikes the people for siding with the Korah rebellion; see also 2 Chr 19:2)

Yet the very first goer-outer “from before YHWH” in the Bible, the only other subject of this verb that uses this phrase, is none other than Cain. Let’s talk it through.