More Birth (Gen 4:2)

You Can’t Go Home Again

^4:1 … with YHWH. אֶת־יְ׳הוָֽה׃

One thing you have to say about Abel is, “He don’t get no respect.” He can’t say it for himself, because he is the first character in the Bible who never speaks. Even I am going to delay his appearance for just a few more lines so we can take one more look at the very end of v. 1. That will give Nahum Sarna a chance to point out:

The most sacred divine name YHVH is here uttered by a human being, a woman, for the first time.

This would seem to contradict YHWH’s assertion to Moses in Exod 6:2; we’ll come back to that discussion when we reach v. 26. For now, it may be more important to point out that, except in the conversation between snake and woman in 3:1–5, in Version 2 the divine character in the story has always been “YHWH God” (י׳הוה אלהים). Now that combination is gone. We’ve seen it 20 times, and it appears elsewhere in the entire Bible no more than another 20. It does appear twice in 3:22–24, an argument for the Christian chapter division.

Here in 4:1, the LXX uses θεοῦ theou ‘God’, not κῡ́ριος kyrios ‘Lord’ as it usually translates the Tetragammaton. BHQ, the 5^th edition of the Hebrew Bible that academic scholars use, which focuses in on the biblical text with a high-powered microscope, says this:

Note the preference G [= the standard Greek text] gives to θεός in rendering י׳הוה, instead of the regular κύριος. The former renders the Tetragrammaton in Genesis twenty-five times, as against the latter, which is used eighty-seven times. Apparently, there is no consistency or pattern underlying this phenomenon. Thus, for example, in 17:1 κύριος is the subject of וַיֵּרָא, while in 18:1 the same verb, in a similar situation, has θεός as subject.

My emphasis in bold. As I’ve said before and will say again, the evidence of what scholars call “the versions,” the translations into ancient languages — especially Greek and Aramaic — sometimes gives us profound insight into what the original writer was trying to say and sometimes it’s completely irrelevant. This seems to be one of the irrelevant ones. I thought it needed to be mentioned because, as I said, this is the moment when “YHWH God,” the divine character of Version 2 of the creation story, stops being called that.

And now, at long last, Cain’s brother.

² She went on to give birth to his brother Abel. וַתֹּ֣סֶף לָלֶ֔דֶת אֶת־אָחִ֖יו אֶת־הָ֑בֶל

The big question, of course, is whether she “went on” right away or a year (or more) later. So we must discuss the verb I’ve translated as “went on.” (Notice, by the way, that no grief or pain seems to be involved in either of these births. Is this an indication that the Cain story was indeed originally separate from “In and Out of the Garden”?)

This is our first look at יסף y-s-p, the root of וַתֹּ֣סֶף va-tósef. This is a verb with two basic meanings. One is ‘add, increase’; if you ever wondered (as I did, when I was a kid in high-school U.S. history), why Cotton Mather’s dad was called Increase Mather, now you know: his father, Richard Mather, was trying to translate “Joseph” into English. (See Gen 30:24.)