Like Mother, Like Son (Gen 4:10)

You Can’t Go Home Again

¹⁰ [YHWH] replied, “What have you done?!” וַיֹּ֖אמֶר מֶ֣ה עָשִׂ֑יתָ

Cain has just killed his brother Abel. (Don’t say murder; there’s a different Hebrew verb for that.) YHWH’s first reaction was to ask, “Where is your brother Abel?”, just as he had asked Cain’s father (in 3:9), “Where are you?” — like father, like son. Cain announced that he did not know and was not aware that he was supposed to be keeping an eye on him.

YHWH responds by asking Cain essentially the same question he had asked Cain’s mother in 3:13, “What have you done?!”

As we saw back then, this is not a question you ask when you are curious about something. Speiser in the Anchor Bible translates the question to Ḥavvah this way: “How could you do such a thing?” Curiously, he translates the question to Cain as “What have you done!” The only difference between the two questions (besides changing feminine asit to masculine asíta) is that the question to Ḥavvah included זאת zōt ‘this’: “What is this [that] you have done?”

Our intuition says that what Mom did is nowhere near as bad as what her kid did. But our intuition may not be the greatest guide to what the Bible is telling us (let alone to what the real God actually wants of us). True, Cain has killed a man and Ḥavvah merely ate a piece of fruit and gave some to her husband. On the other hand, after Cain’s act the rest of the world continues as before. What Ḥavvah did led to the humans being kicked out of Paradise and deprived of the opportunity to live forever.

That means, however, that civilization could get started. Now — as we’ll see in a few verses — Cain will be on the move. Before the end of this Primeval History (Genesis 1–11), God will ensure that humanity begins to spread across the planet. “What” Cain “has done” is (apparently) the second step in getting that process started, just as “what” Ḥavvah did was the first step.

“Listen! Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”

 ק֚וֹל דְּמֵ֣י אָחִ֔יךָ צֹעֲקִ֥ים אֵלַ֖י מִן־הָֽאֲדָמָֽה׃

We have seen this word qol before. Its basic meaning is “a sound” or “a voice.” Here, for the first time, we find it at the beginning of a sentence — where (as we discussed when we first saw the word) it can mean “Hark!” An ultra-literal translation of qol d’mei aḥikha might be “the voice of the bloods of your brother”; I’m using the “Hark!” meaning of the word here and translating somewhat more idiomatically.

In our story, the surface meaning of those words is:

Did you really think I don’t know where your brother is? You killed and buried him, and he is begging me to avenge his spilled blood!

I’m calling that the surface meaning because the story will continue as if YHWH is confronting Cain with his having killed his brother. That’s the most natural thing for these words to mean in context. But today we’re going to look at another possible way to read them, one that we’ll find in Genesis Rabbah, one of the most important sources of midrash on the stories in Genesis.