Divine or Demon? (Gen 4:8)

You Can’t Go Home Again

⁸ Cain said to his brother Abel. וַיֹּ֥אמֶר קַ֖יִן אֶל־הֶ֣בֶל אָחִ֑יו

We resume our discussion of Gen 4:8, with its strange failure to tell us what Cain said to Abel. Did you notice, by the way, that we are being reminded — for the first time since v. 2 — that Abel is Cain’s brother? In vv. 8–11, their relationship will be highlighted no less than six times.

Now for that missing line from the script. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia has the answer:

mlt Mss Edd hic interv; frt ins c ⅏𝔊𝔖𝔘 נֵלְכָה הַשָׂדֶה cf 𝔗^{J JII}

Get it? All right, I can’t blame you if you didn’t. They are trying to pack a lot of information into a small space by using symbols and abbreviations — in Latin, no less, a language that no one speaks any longer but that everyone of BHS caliber is supposed to understand. The significant information here is that the ancient Greek, Syriac, and Latin translations, and (most importantly) the Samaritan version of the Torah, which is in Hebrew, all add נֵלְכָה הַשָׂדֶה nel’kha ha-sadeh ‘let’s go to the field’ or a translation of it.

Must’ve fallen out of the MT through homoioteleuton, no? Or, as some would call it, parablepsis — no more intelligible, but a lot funner to say. Jargon aside, Richard Elliott Friedman explains:

Cain's words appear to have been skipped in the Masoretic Text by a scribe whose eye jumped from the first phrase containing the word "field" to the second.

That’s easy enough to do. I have most certainly done it myself. However …

We’ve mentioned BHQ once or twice on the blog; Q is for Quinta. It’s the evolving 5^th edition of Biblia Hebraica, of which BHS is the 4^th edition. BHQ focuses intently on analyzing the text of the Hebrew Bible. In a 400-word comment on the same “missing words” problem that we’re working on, BHQ points out:

Also noteworthy is the absence of the speech in the Qumran fragment 4QGen^b.

If the “missing” words have been missing since the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that means the “missing” version has been around for at least as long as the inserted words have been there, and perhaps longer.

Since I’ve left those words out, you understand that I’m assuming this was a deliberate literary choice, as perhaps it was in Jonah as well. It’s easy to understand why a translator or copyist might assume this was a mistake, and an easy one to fix. But if you think about it, you’ll realize that “Let’s go to the field” doesn’t actually explain very much. BHQ too suggests that the versions were trying to “fix” something that wasn’t broken.

One set of translations, the Targumim (various Jewish translations into Aramaic) goes far beyond the somewhat lame addition of “Let’s go to the field.” I suggest everyone go to the Targum Search page of the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (your tax dollars at work) and click on Gen 4:8. Yes, even if you can’t read the Hebrew/Aramaic alphabet. What you’ll see is a single line for Targum Onkelos, the standard Aramaic translation of the Torah, which translates the Hebrew quite literally, followed by eight (count ‘em, 8) long paragraphs that ostensibly also “translate” our verse.

You will find as much as you might want to know about these translations in an article by Jouette Μ. Bassler from almost 40 years ago. She writes:

The Palestinian Targums not only record that Cain said to Abel, "Let us go into the field," but also present a theological debate that occurred between the brothers once they arrived at the field. All of the Targums agree that the dispute ultimately led to the fratricide.

[There are four versions but here is the basic argument, more or less the same as in Job:]

“Cain answered and said to Abel: ‘There is no judgment, there is no judge, there is no other world, there is no gift of good reward for the just and no punishment for the wicked.’ Abel answered and said to Cain: ‘There is judgment, there is a judge, there is another world. There is the gift of good reward for the just and punishment for the wicked.’”

All the Targums conclude with the biblical line: "Cain rose against Abel his brother and killed him.”

It is a matter of “Righteous Abel, Wicked Cain,” as Joel N. Lohr puts it in his own article:

Through what might be called a theological translation, the LXX paints a negative portrait of Cain (in his offering and in other ways), one that has left an indelible mark on later tradition. In this article I aim to show how this is the case, exploring how this reading has influenced later tradition, particularly the NT. I argue that the MT reveals a more elusive and ambiguous picture, while the development of Cain's character in the LXX and elsewhere is decidedly negative.

The Qur’an too (more on this in a later post) portrays Cain (without naming him) negatively: he is determined to kill Abel immediately after his offering is ignored: