Expulsion #2 (Gen 4:12)

You Can’t Go Home Again

¹² You shall be restless and rootless on the earth. נָ֥ע וָנָ֖ד תִּֽהְיֶ֥ה בָאָֽרֶץ׃

The first two humans — Cain’s parents, in the story as we have it now in Genesis 3 — were dismissed from Xanadu Park, but for all we know, they simply set up camp right outside the wall. We assume the garden must have been walled because the humans have been expelled and access to the Tree of Life is guarded by “the Griffins and the Blaze of the Tumbling Sword” (3:24). Perhaps they lived alongside one of the four rivers that leave the garden or perhaps even alongside the one river that enters it.

Cain, who has settled down long enough to grow a year’s crop, will not be so lucky. We have no idea where he is living. The original Cain story may have identified its location, but in Genesis 4, I suppose, we are meant to think he is somewhere in the vicinity of his parents. Our author clearly does not flesh out this possibility, since they never appear, as they most certainly would if this story had originally occurred in a world with a population of four.

No matter. The point is that YHWH is telling him, “Hit the road, Cain, and don’t be a pain.” Cassuto explains:

Death at the hands of Heaven is not the penalty for murder, and, in any case, it would not have been right for the Lord to have slain Cain as well, and thus to have inflicted on Adam and Eve, who were guiltless, a twofold tragedy. Judicial execution is indeed the usual punishment of the murderer, but at that time there were no established courts of law. To be put to death by the blood-avenger is a method of punishment to which the Torah is opposed, as we have already stated, and as we shall note in greater detail later.

Where the court cannot sentence the murderer to death because he did not kill wittingly, the Torah imposes on the slayer, as we know, the penalty of banishment to one of the cities of refuge. Similarly in this case, since the death-sentence does not apply to Cain for the reasons mentioned, it is replaced by exile.

But the verb גלה g-l-h ‘exile’ is not found here — though it is used in the Aramaic translation (see below). Instead Cain will be doing the participles of two hollow verbs, נוע n-u-ayin and נוד n-u-d. (To brush up on hollow verbs, see Lesson 23 of my Hebrew course; for participles, see Lesson 17.) As you remember from v. 9, where Cain asks whether he is supposed to be watching his brother, the participle can be translated as a progressive, -ing ending verb tense (“I’m watching a movie”) or as the adjective “watching,” or as a noun (“watcher,” as if it described a “watching person”).

In our case, the use of two verbs linked by “and” gives many translators and commentators a push to treat the combinations as a hendiadys. Here are some who do that: