“Do the Wrong Thing” (Gen 4:7)

You Can’t Go Home Again

⁷ But if you do the wrong thing, at the tent of sin a demon crouches.

 וְאִם֙ לֹ֣א תֵיטִ֔יב לַפֶּ֖תַח חַטָּ֣את רֹבֵ֑ץ

As we said last time, this verse — certainly at least the first half of it — is a crux, a phrase that most interpreters cannot make sense of. Let’s start with what we’ve figured out so far. If tetiv means “you do the right thing,” then lo tetiv must mean “you do the wrong thing.” For now, at least, we’re sticking with that interpretation. Then the “crux” continues:

• la-petaḥ = “at the entrance”

• ḥattat = “sin”

• rovetz = “crouching”

At the entrance, sin will be crouching.

Okay, that sounds like a sentence. What’s the problem?

In fact, there are problems with this short phrase at just about every level: grammatical, lexicographical, contextual, and theological.

Let’s start at the most basic: ḥattat is a feminine noun, but rovetz is a masculine verb. It’s actually the Qal masculine singular participle of רבץ. In Modern Hebrew, this form is the present tense — “it crouches” — but in Biblical Hebrew, this is a participle. Look it up (as I had to do once when an inquisitive student asked me, “What’s a participle?”): it’s a verbal adjective.

• I am sleeping.

Sounds like a verb, but it is an adjective:

• Let sleeping dogs lie.

You can have big dogs, fast dogs, or sleeping dogs, in fact, any kind you like. An adjective that can also be used as a verb is called a participle. In Biblical Hebrew, this makes the sentence a “nominal” (noun) sentence, because the tense of the verb, the time when it occurs, is not built in to the word. It could refer to past, present, or future, but since Cain is being told about something he will or won’t do, we are talking about something that “will be” crouching.

But if the gender of the verb doesn’t match that of the noun, something’s wrong. And I can’t find any phrase in the Bible that matches the syntax we see here, not even in poetry.

The Hebrew punctuation says that “at the entrance” needs a comma after it, but the punctuation marks, as you know, aren’t much more than a thousand years old. The original writer didn’t have them and couldn’t use them. Suppose we postpone that comma for one word:¹

At the entrance of sin … 

Now we have an answer to the contextual question, “the entrance” of what? That leaves us with a further question: what could be “crouching”? Answer: a demon.