No More Vigor (Gen 4:12)

You Can’t Go Home Again

¹² When you work the ground, it will no longer go on giving its vigor to you.

כִּ֤י תַֽעֲבֹד֙ אֶת־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה לֹֽא־תֹסֵ֥ף תֵּת־כֹּחָ֖הּ לָ֑ךְ

The “curse” of v. 11 continues, and it continues once again in parallel with the curse in 3:17–19. There, the man was told that he would eat “in grief,” that the ground would sprout thorns and thistles, and he would end up eating “plants,” which he would have to turn into bread at the cost of having sweat on his face. But the verb עבד ayin-b-d ‘work’ does not appear there, even though that is theoretically what the original human was created to do.

Now, Cain is told that if he does work the ground it will not continue “giving its vigor” to him. (תֵּת tet is the infinitive construct, the Biblical Hebrew equivalent of the English gerund “giving.”) This presumably is what it had done previously, when he had a successful crop year and offered some of what he reaped to YHWH in thanks. כח ko’aḥ is usually translated as “strength,” and it is a relatively common word in the Bible, but to “give strength” is not a common idiom. I find it only in two other places in the Bible, and in both of them I think “vigor” is a better translation:

• “YHWH your God gives you the vigor to get wealth” (Deut 8:18)

• “He [YHWH] gives vigor to the weary” (Isa 40:29)

But YHWH is not described as giving of his own vigor to the person; rather, he is making the Israelites (in Deuteronomy) and the weary (in Second Isaiah) as vigorous as they need to be. The adama definitely had given of its own vigor.

It’s interesting to realize that the ground is being personified here:

• It is cursed. Cursing and blessing are aspects of the human relationship to God, nature, and society. You have to be a person (not necessarily a human being) in order to be blessed or cursed.

• It has vigor. We’re not talking about, let’s say, the “strength” of a metal or anything of that sort. This is autonomous power, like the ko’aḥ of YHWH’s right hand in Exod 15:6.

• It gives of its vigor to those who get their sustenance from it. As I said, I don’t find any comparable expression anywhere else in the Bible.

I understand, of course, that this is metaphoric. But let’s put the adama on the couch for a few minutes just to see what might have prompted it to take this drastic step of withholding its life-giving vigor from Cain. Paging Dr. Freud!:

Freud: What brings you here today?