⅔ Human (Gen 4:1)

You Can’t Go Home Again

^4:1 She said, “I have gained a man with YHWH.” וַתֹּ֕אמֶר קָנִ֥יתִי אִ֖ישׁ אֶת־יְ׳הוָֽה׃

In my last post, we had a look at “Cain” and “gained,” the English wordplay used by the NJPS translation to convey the Hebrew קין and קניתי. As with so many names in the Bible, and no doubt in real life throughout history, the explanations provided by the parents for the name they give their child don’t necessarily have anything to do with philology. “Sounds like” is a perfectly good explanation for why you chose that name, no matter what some professor (like me) might say.

We saw an example of that back when the original human being gave Ḥavvah her name. The explanation given here, though it doesn’t include the word כי ki that we saw in 3:20, nonetheless seems to imply that Ḥavvah is the one who named him -- rather than he being somehow born with that name already in place as it seemed when we first began to read. We will talk more about mothers naming their children when we get to v. 25. I’m not going to speculate why here in v. 1 the text does not simply say that Ḥavvah gave Cain his name (if that is what we are supposed to think).

The much more startling statement comes at the end of the verse:

I have gained a man with YHWH.

Okay, wow! Let’s talk about it.

The first thing that perhaps those who know some Hebrew will wonder about is that I’ve translated את et, normally a particle that indicates the definite direct object of a verb, as with. That is what את means approximately 10,000 times in the Bible, two of them earlier in this same verse. In fact, את also (perhaps originally?) means with. That usage occurs some nine hundred or so times in the Bible, just a tenth of the total, still quite a substantial amount. (The two את’s generally look different when you add a suffix to them; see Lesson 9 of my Hebrew course. Remember that you can always watch the first lesson for free here.) My computer search program says this is the first time et is used in the Bible to mean with.

Good thing, too. This verb קניתי ‘gained’ already has a(n indefinite) direct object, אישׁ ish ‘a man’, so we would have to understand את coming afterwards as the vav explicativum: “I have gained a man, that is, YHWH.” Unless you think Ḥavvah thinks she has given birth to a human who is actually YHWH, we’d probably better avoid that explanation.

Or perhaps we shouldn’t; stay tuned. First, though, some more standard explanations of what she is saying. Besides את, there are two things to talk about:

• a man

• with YHWH

NJPS translates this way:

I have gained a male child with the help of the Lord.

The Hebrew, however, says nothing about a child; Cain is an אישׁ ish, the male equivalent of an אשׁה isha, which is what Ḥavvah herself is. Isaac Abarbanel (ca. 1500) explains that she was proud. It’s as if she was saying to her husband:

A female came forth from you, but now a male has come forth from me and we are even.

A better explanation may be this: Since ha-adam will soon become Adam (or perhaps already has), that may be the reason to call the baby an ish and not an adam. “A” man involves no confusion; “a” human would be אדם, which would be easy to read as her husband’s name.

Now “with the help of the Lord.” “Help” does not seem to be in the Hebrew, but (says Speiser in the Anchor Bible) you can find it there with a little effort:

with the help of. Heb. ʾet “with,” which has drawn considerable suspicion and speculation. It is worth mentioning, therefore, that Akk. personal names often employ the corresponding element itti, e.g., Itti-Bēl-balāṭu “With Bel there is life.”

Nahum Sarna expands on the subject:

A similar phrase is used in the Akkadian Atranasis Epic when the mother goddess Mami, who has been ordered to create man, replies that she can do so only with the help of the god Enki (itti Enki-ma).

The role of God in human procreation is frequently acknowledged in the Bible. As Niddah 31a [in the Babylonian Talmud] expresses it, “There are three copartners in the production of a human being: God, father, and mother.”

I said earlier that we had probably better avoid the explanation Ḥavvah thinks she has given birth to a human who is actually YHWH. However, Niddah 31a made me think of the unusual ancestry of Gilgamesh, described here in Genetics in Medicine by Hutan Ashrafian:

In the poem, Gilgamesh is described as the son of a minor Sumerian goddess Ninsun and her mortal consort, the postdiluvian king Lugulbanda “the shepherd.” The figure of two-thirds god and one-third human is, however, unique in the ancient world and stands out by this exact fraction described for inheritance. Other examples of human-god offspring follow the trend of the much more frequent concept of half-man half-god. 

I wonder whether Cain is indeed being implicitly described as two-thirds human and one-third divine (two human parents + YHWH) or perhaps even as “half-man half-god.”

I made a similar proposal about the child Hannah asks for in 1 Samuel 1, where I wrote:

I am suggesting that what Hannah asked for in the original telling of this story was not זרע אנשים [zéra anashim ‘a human child’, a strange thing to ask for] but זרע אלהים [zéra elohim], a child that would be given her by God. The difficult phrase זרע אנשים is an artifact, placed in her mouth by a kind of Tiqqun Soferim, a reflexive correction of Hannah’s request by a scribe who (perhaps) misunderstood it and (certainly) found it uncomfortable.

The Bible is less monotheistic than most people think. The stories of the ancient Israelites were even less so. Most of that material did not make it into the Bible — but we’ll have a chance to see some of it when we get to Genesis 6. For now, I’m suggesting that the “original” story of Cain (if there was such a thing) might have put him in the Gilgamesh category.

I’ve kept Cain’s brother offstage for too long. We’ll meet him next time.