Killing (Gen 4:8)
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8 Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him. וַיָּ֥קָם קַ֛יִן אֶל־הֶ֥בֶל אָחִ֖יו וַיַּהַרְגֵֽהוּ׃
As promised last time, when paid subscribers got a sneak preview, we’ll be looking at this phrase through the lens of Deut 22:26, to which it bears a surprising resemblance. A man rapes an engaged girl in the countryside — בַּשָּׂדֶ֞ה ba-śadeh, literally “in the field,” exactly where today’s action occurs — because there, outside the city, even if she screams there will be no one to hear her. It is, says Deuteronomy, like the case of …
• a man attacking another and murdering him
- ish yaqum al-re’ehu u-r’tzaḥo néfesh
- qáyin va-yáqom el-hével aḥiv va-yahargéhu
• Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him
The transliterated Hebrew has subject and verb flipped to match the English syntax. Laid out this way, it’s easy to see that, specifics aside, the two phrases exactly match. We’ve discussed the names of Cain and Abel already; what we’ll do today is look at …
the verb קום qum, and
הרג vs. רצח.
All of this will let us see — to the extent that the author of the story wanted us to — just what happened when this killing took place.
First, qum. This is a verb that literally means “to rise,” but it has other meanings, including its use as what I was taught in elementary school to call a “helping verb.” The result is that it occurs more than 600 times in the Bible, and not often with the literal meaning of “to stand up.” It certainly doesn’t mean that here. It’s not impossible to sit down in the countryside, but I don’t imagine anyone thinks Cain and Abel were sitting around with a couple of brewskis and then Cain got to his feet in order to kill his brother.
What is happening, then?
There are two possibilities I can think of, and I like both of them. Since both make sense in the story, I’ll assume both are at play unless I find a reason to reject one. (Yes, it is Greenstein’s Law in action.)
The first is using קום as a helping verb, which is extremely common. What it means in that case is not (necessarily) to stand up, but to begin an action. English has a very similar construction which would theoretically work quite well here:
Cain up and killed his brother.
To “up and do something” means to initiate an action. usually (I guess) a somewhat surprising action in the context. Lots of people have left lots of places, but someone who “up and left” has done something different than just leaving, whether or not it would appear so on the video of the event.
Nonetheless, “Cain up and killed his brother” sounds a bit casual for such a dramatic and powerful action. I do think our author wanted a flavor of this meaning in his phrase, since the Hebrew idiom doesn’t carry the somewhat jokey nuance that the English one does.
The literal meaning here — the melody note under which the “up and killed” harmony is playing — leans on the fact that “to rise” can be used in the context of a power struggle. We have the same metaphor in English, as you know if you remember “the Easter Rising” in Ireland in 1916 or, more generally, the use of “uprising” in the sense of revolt.
The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew lists quite a number of occasions where קום has a meaning of this kind (ours is in bold):
2a. arise (against), rise up (against), in hostility, contention or rebellion, <SUBJ> Y. Nm 1035 Is 1422 2821 312 Am 79 Ps 77 682, Israel 2 K 324, עַם people Nm 2324, גּוֹי nation Jr 4914 Ob1.1, מִשְׁפָּחָה clan 2 S 147, Abimelech Jg 943, Abiram Nm 162, Athaliah 2 K 111||2 C 2210, Balak Jos 249, Cain Gn 48 (unless §1b), Dathan Nm 162, Eleazar 2 S 2310, Gideon Jg 821.21, Ishmael Jr 412, J(eh)oram 2 K 821||2 C 219, Jeroboam 2 C 136, Jether Jg 820, Korah Nm 162, Nebuchadrezzar Jr 4928.31, On Nm 162.
“Unless §1b” refers to the other meaning we’ve discussed:
1b. arise (to do), get ready, act, begin to act, rise for action, make a move and do something
As I said, there’s no reason both meanings can’t be in play here. (It’s interesting that someone “up and kills” someone else, using the same language as in our verse, three times in the story of Gideon in Judges 8–9 and no other place in the Bible.)
Now we turn to הרג h-r-g ‘kill’, a verb that appears 172 times in the Bible. (When I present numbers of this kind, they are either from DCH or from my Accordance Bible software.) This is, I would say, the second-most neutral verb for “kill” in the Bible. The most neutral would be המית hemit ‘cause [someone/something] to die’, which we will not see until Genesis 18.
Nonetheless, there is a clear contrast between “kill” and “murder.” The famous commandment “thou shalt not kill” does not use הרג (our verb) but רצח r-tz-ḥ ‘murder’, the verb in Deut 22:26. Cain definitely killed Abel; it seems entirely reasonable to say that he “murdered” him, but our story avoids doing that. Especially if our author (or the “composer”) had the matching Deuteronomy verse in mind, that seems notable.
Nor is this the first killing on earth. It is the first reported case of one human killing another, but as we saw the first to kill another living thing was Abel, when he kills some sheep. (How else do you “offer” them to YHWH?) The vegetarian — or perhaps vegan? — ethos of Genesis 1 is not at play in Version 2, or it would have been Abel who was accused of sin, not Cain. So it seems this killing is being presented about as neutrally as it could possibly be.
How did Cain kill Abel? The inimitable Abraham ibn Ezra reacts to this question (in my Commentators’ Bible translation) with contempt:
Some people who were born in a fog wonder how he could have killed him, when there was no such thing as a sword in the world yet. What a pointless question. He could easily have strangled him. Anyway, there were thousands of sticks and stones lying around.
Nonetheless, we’ll discuss that question further — with help from Ibn Ezra’s frenemy Nahmanides and from the Qur’an — next time.
I love your "up and killed"! another great insight to share in your name.