Life in the Big City (Gen 4:17)

You Can’t Go Home Again

¹⁷ Cain was intimate with his wife וַיֵּ֤דַע קַ֙יִן֙ אֶת־אִשְׁתּ֔וֹ

Whoa, wait a minute. He was intimate with whom?

Yes, that’s right — Cain, who according to our story is the third human being ever to live on earth, and who has just killed the fourth, turns out to be a married man.

As we’ve mentioned before, the boys were born with twin sisters, Abel actually not with just one but with two:

R. Joshua b. Karah said: Only two entered the bed, and seven left it: Cain and his twin sister, Abel and his two twin sisters. [Genesis Rabbah 22:2]

Really, of course, this story of Cain — not of Cain and Abel, who is here just in a bit part as Cain’s brother — was told elsewhere in a completely different context, one where farming and sheepherding were already part of civilization. Cain had a wife because of course he did. It’s not as if Rabbi Joshua had a source of information that we no longer have. If you read the story in the context of Genesis 3, there have to be three sisters: one for each of them to marry and a third to provoke a deadly quarrel.

One more thing is worth pointing out before we go on. “The man had been intimate [וְהָ֣אָדָ֔ם יָדַ֖ע] with his wife” (v. 1); Cain was intimate [וַיֵּ֤דַע קַ֙יִן] with his wife” (v. 17). We are not starting a new episode. This is the imperfect consecutive, the biblical storytelling past tense, letting us know that this was the next thing that happened in the story after Cain settled down in Restlessstan. Otherwise, however, the language is the same.

and she got pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. וַתַּ֖הַר וַתֵּ֣לֶד אֶת־חֲנ֑וֹךְ

This too follows exactly what we saw at the beginning of the chapter, except that this boy naturally has a different name. It was clear when YHWH reamed out Cain that we were hearing a variant of the same thing Cain’s father had been told in Genesis 3. Now — but only up to here, as far as the etnaḥta marking the end of v. 17a — the music from earlier in the story is again repeating itself, even to the extent that she gave birth to a child already named, just as Ḥavvah did to Cain.

That’s where the reprise stops, however. The next thing that happens at the beginning of the chapter is that Cain’s mother explains why she gave him that name. Enoch’s name will remain unexplained. Then, of course, Cain’s mother gave birth a second time, to “his brother” Abel, before disappearing from the Bible forever. Cain’s wife disappears just as soon as she gives birth to Enoch.