14 “Look, you’ve expelled me today from off the surface of the ground!”
הֵן֩ גֵּרַ֨שְׁתָּ אֹתִ֜י הַיּ֗וֹם מֵעַל֙ פְּנֵ֣י הָֽאֲדָמָ֔ה
This phrase — v. 14aα, not even a full half-verse — has three words that we saw in the little introductory paragraph to the story we’re calling “You Can’t Go Home Again,” the last three verses of Genesis 3, one word per verse:
I’ve highlighted those words in that little paragraph; look here [הן], here [האדמה], and here [ויגרש] for fuller discussion of each of them. I’ve also included the פ and ס that tell us that 3:22 starts a new section, and that v. 24 completes a “semi-paragraph” in that section.
As far as I’m concerned, this little graphic demonstrates nicely that …
The last three verses of Genesis 3 do, indeed, introduce Genesis 4.
The story of Cain does, indeed, constitute a second stage of the expulsion of the humans from “Paradise” and their being compelled to fill the earth.
The expulsion is, indeed, a sneak preview of the Israelites’ expulsion from Egypt.
Perhaps you’d like to add that we are also getting a preview of the exile of the Ten Tribes from the (northern) kingdom of Israel after the Assyrian conquest of 722 BCE and the exile of a significant portion of the population of the (southern) kingdom of Judah after the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and subsequent destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE. You will get no argument from me on those points — though I am not making that argument myself.
I also want to take this opportunity to reiterate that our author is writing literature, not journalism. As I’ve said before, I can’t always distinguish between the words of the composer of Genesis as a whole and those he found ready for him in the earlier sources he used to create his narrative. We will talk more about this when we get to Genesis 5, when the “voice” in which the story is told — the “document,” for you Documentary Hypothesis fans — will change again (from J to P, using the documentary terminology).
I’ll simply add that what Cain says here, continuing his statement from v. 13, would seem to confirm Ibn Ezra’s assertion that he is complaining about excessive punishment rather than his own inability to live with having caused the death of Abel. (Our narrator too seems to relate to that death rather callously.) Let me just add one comment about the littlest of our three little words.
When Cain says hēn (rhyme intended), he is saying something that YHWH himself said in 3:22. That is, he is speaking in the same register and using the same kind of logical argument that God himself used. This confirms the very point that YHWH made when he said הן: “Look, the humans have become like one of us.” This transfer of the musical motif (if I may put it that way) from YHWH to Cain is an extremely clever compositional technique, contributing — as it does — to the point of the story as well as to the narration of it.
and I am invisible to you וּמִפָּנֶ֖יךָ אֶסָּתֵ֑ר
As promised, with this phrase we come to the second Biblical Hebrew verb for “hiding,” סתר s-t-r. The root used twice in Genesis 3 is חבא ḥ-b-aleph. As I wrote back then:
I can tell you now that in the few cases we have of people talking about themselves hiding, they use the Niphal binyan to say so. Ours is the only example with חבא, but there are half a dozen of them with סתר.
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