Cain Plays Dumb (Gen 4:9)

You Can’t Go Home Again

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⁹ He said, “I don’t know.” וַיֹּ֙אמֶר֙ לֹ֣א יָדַ֔עְתִּי

For the first time in Genesis 4, the first time since Gen 3:13, we have two characters who are actually talking to each other. As so often happens, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a lot of communication is going on.

First a quick look at the grammar here. (As you all know, part of my goal in this column is to help and encourage people to learn Biblical Hebrew.) Beginners, and perhaps those who know a little bit of Modern Hebrew, look at יָדַ֔עְתִּי yadáti and see a past tense, “I knew.” That’s usually the case in Biblical Hebrew too (where this form is called the perfect; see Lesson 11 of my Hebrew course).

A little learning is a dangerous thing. In Biblical Hebrew, “to know” can be a stative verb — a verb that describes a state you are in rather than something you do. Once you have achieved that state, you may still be in it. So yadáti, which means “I knew” in Modern Hebrew, can mean “I know” in Biblical Hebrew.

Why does Cain say this? As we have come to expect, the text itself does not tell us. That hasn’t stopped commentators from offering their opinions:

• Rashi: He was attempting to fool the One on high.

• Kimhi: Cain assumed that it was a real question and thought he could lie to Him.

• Cassuto: He makes a desperate attempt to silence the voice that confronts him with this terrifying question and to free himself from the burden of responsibility for his crime by brazen words that reject this responsibility.

• Jon Levenson (Jewish Study Bible): Cain’s flippant answer offends against the Torah’s ethic of responsibility for one’s kinsman and neighbor (e.g., Lev. 19.16; Deut. 21.1–9). [That passage in Deuteronomy, of course, is the one we looked at last time, another Deuteronomic case of a killing “in the field.”]

For my part, I am not going to speculate. Our author has left all of Cain’s actions in this chapter so far unmotivated. If I am correct that “Cain said to Abel” (v. 8) deliberately omitted the words that were said, leaving Cain’s actions unexplained is an artistic choice, not a failure. My own speculation has no more chance of being “right” than anyone else’s, because this is a story.

I compare this kind of thing to Vermeer’s The Art of Painting. Whenever I see this painting — and I’ve had the great good fortune to see it once in person — I desperately want to pull back that curtain over the left side of the painting and see what it’s hiding. It’s not hiding anything, of course. What’s under there is blank canvas. In our story too, Cain is doing things the author wants him to do, and it’s pointless to ask what the “real” Cain was thinking. (And there was a real Cain in the earlier version of the story; it is Abel that is the fake name.)

Am I supposed to be watching my brother? הֲשֹׁמֵ֥ר אָחִ֖י אָנֹֽכִי׃

Cain is not the only person in the Bible who says, “I don’t know.” Pharaoh, for example, says in Exod 5:2, “I don’t know YHWH.” Cain is the only person who asks whether he is supposed to be keeping an eye on his brother. Claus Westermann — slightly unclear on the concept, I believe — observes, “Cain then is correct in his retort inasmuch as it is not really his job to be looking after his brother constantly.”

But isn’t he actually saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper”? You won’t be surprised to learn that there’s a grammatical question involved here too. That word שֹׁמֵ֥ר shomer is a participle. As we’ve discussed before, a participle (in any language) is a kind of half-verb/half-adjective — and an adjective can also be used as a noun: “the rich get richer and the poor get children.” You’ll find more about participles in Biblical Hebrew in Lesson 17 of my Hebrew course (watch the first lesson for free here).

Now. Since adjectives act like nouns, they can have a “construct” form connected to another noun — in this case, אָחִ֖י aḥi: “the keeper of my brother.” (See Lectures 13–14 of the Hebrew course for more detail on the construct form.) But … since participles are also verbs, they can take a direct object: “Am I keeping my brother?” Finally, some construct forms are identifiable because they are different from the regular (“absolute”) forms, but some are just the same — like this one.

That means there’s no grammatical way to decide whether shomer is serving as a noun or as a verb here — it could be either. As is my habit, I’m taking the less common but equally plausible possibility, to help remove the cobwebs from the beautiful but automatic translations we sometimes use. It helps that we don’t really have “keepers” nowadays, unless you are a zookeeper.

My translation may still be missing something important. That’s what Richard Elliott Friedman thinks. He translates our phrase: “Am I my brother's watchman?”

It is hard to give up the famous English translation, "Am I my brother's keeper?" but I think it is important to convey the continuing play on forms of the word for "watch" (Hebrew šmr [שׁמר]). Humans had been put in the garden "to watch over it [‏וּלְשָׁמְרָֽהּ]" (2:15), but in the end the cherubs are put there "to watch over [לִשְׁמֹ֕ר]" the way to the tree of life (3:24). Now the first human to murder another questions cynically his responsibility to watch out for his brother.

Friedman thinks these three uses of שׁמר are pointing to Gen 26:4–5, where Abraham is praised for doing that verb. It is indeed quite common in the stories of the Patriarchs — but we will not encounter it again until Genesis 17. I’m not convinced the three occurrences of it in Version 2 are saying anything profound.

I’ll just add that a shomer, a guard, may be there to protect you or he may be there to prevent you from leaving. I can’t help but think of the executioner in Nabokov’s novel Invitation to a Beheading, who is imprisoned because, as he explains to his cellmate, “I was accused of attempting to help you escape from here.” (Think about it.)

Why Cain is trying to brazen it out remains unclear to me. When we meet again, YHWH will drop all pretense. Next time, Cain will be facing a question that we’ve seen before, one that sounds as if it might be a question that has an answer — but it is really an accusation.