Settling Down in Restlessstan (Gen 4:16)
You Can’t Go Home Again
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16 … and settled down וַיֵּ֥שֶׁב
Some of you, no doubt, remember that after leaving God’s presence Cain “dwelt in the land of Nod.” As usual, I have pushed the envelope somewhat, for the purpose of focusing in on these words to defamiliarize them so we can think about them a little more closely. We’ll get to Nod (as Cain did) eventually, but first, “dwelt.”
It’s quite important throughout the Torah to note that you can live somewhere with one of three different verbs:
ישב y-sh-b ‘settle, live [in your own land]’
גור g-u-r ‘sojourn, live [in someone else’s land]’
היה h-y-h ‘be’
I include that last verb specifically because it’s used along with the other two in chapter 1 of the book of Ruth. If you’re reading that book in English, you will completely miss something the author of that book wanted you to know about Naomi’s family and their relationship to Moab, where they went after famine struck Judah.
For now, what’s important is the distinction between ישב and גור. The latter root also gives us the word ger, nowadays used for a convert to Judaism but meaning in biblical times someone who lives in a place where he is not a full citizen. The assumption of the word, not necessarily based on the facts of any particular case, is that the person is there temporarily and will eventually return to the place where he is a toshav — the place where he belongs, the place where he does the verb ישׁב.
This is a phenomenon we understand perfectly well from the contemporary world. The United States maintained “Alien Registration Month” until nearly the end of the 20th century. The point for us to notice is that Cain, who was told he would be, and who expected to be, rootless and restless, is instantly anything but that. He has settled down. ישׁב means settle because its basic meaning is sit (you can see that the English verbs are related, too). Almost immediately after leaving YHWH’s presence, he has done the opposite of what YHWH told him he would be doing.
in Restlessstan בְּאֶֽרֶץ־נ֖וֹד
You probably have to be of a certain age to remember Wynken, Blynken, and Nod, who sailed off one night during the 1890s in a wooden shoe. I doubt that Eugene Field was thinking of the story of Cain when he wrote this, though subliminally “the land of Nod” might have suggested that name to him. The composer of the Cain story had a much closer memory jog. Or rather he expected to jog our memories.
Which he did successfully only if we have been reading his work in the original Hebrew. Do have a look at this post on my other “Bible Guy” blog with four easy steps that will help you “Learn Biblical Hebrew NOW!” For those who have been delaying, let me point you in the meantime to our discussion of Cain being “restless and rootless” — that is (in Hebrew) נָ֥ע וָנָ֖ד na va-nad.
Yes, Cain, who has been condemned to do the verbs nu’a and nud, will include one of those terms by reference (as we say in the scholarship game) and move to a country called “Nōd” (long o, rhymes with road). The Talmud has an interesting take on this:
Rab Judah the son of R. Hiyya said: Exile atones for the half of sin. First it is written, And I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer (Gen 4:14), but then, And he settled in the land of Nod [wandering] (Gen 4:16). [Soncino translation, B. Sanhedrin 37b]
Get it? Rab Judah’s point is that, if you view na and nad as two separate components of Cain’s punishment, exile to a land called Nod invokes and (as it were) cancels out half of the punishment. Instead of doing נוד yourself, you “achieve” נוד by virtue of living in a land with that name. Now, only נוע remains of your double punishment.
Rab Judah’s comment is in a section of the Babylonian Talmud commenting on the Mishnah that we looked at earlier in our reading of the biblical story of Cain:
How do they admonish the witnesses in capital cases? [M. Sanhedrin 4:5]
In the Talmud, there’s quite a long discussion bouncing off this already long mishnah describing the rabbinic equivalent of making sure that witnesses tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The discussion eventually traces a line starting from the story of Cain on through the exile from Jerusalem in 586 BCE and down to the second exile resulting from the revolts against the Romans in 66–73 and 132–135 CE.
Since I translated נע ונד as “restless and rootless,” I’m showing the connection by using “rootless” in the name of this mysterious country as well. As pointed out by the Masorah — the technical Jewish tradition that attempted to preserve every detail of the Hebrew text — this land is mentioned nowhere else in the Bible. James Davila notes in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, “It is unlikely that an actual geographical location is meant.” Instead, this seems to be a “land” invented for the precise purpose that Rab Judah uses it for, to commute half of Cain’s “sentence.”
Nahmanides has figured out a way to align this name with the earlier part of the story:
He did not go everywhere on earth, but “settled” in the land of Nod (“wandering”), always wandering and never resting anywhere. The land got its name from his wandering.
Abraham ibn Ezra has a clever name for this country — but it was I, of course, who thought up this clever bit of English to use in my Commentators’ Bible translation, so there is no reason I cannot offer it to you as well:
It acquired this name—“Wanderland”—from Cain, who was cursed to be “a ceaseless wanderer” (v. 12).
Cain in Wanderland has a ring to it, I admit, but since in my own translation I described him as being cursed to be “restless and rootless,” I had to make a country name out of rootless. “Rootlessia” was an obvious way to go, but I realized I could make it slightly more euphonious and vastly more amusing with an illusion to its more-or-less geographically correct intended location, somewhere along the Silk Road, by making it one of the -stans that are so popular (for some reason) in that part of the world. Besides, Restlessstan offers us the rare opportunity to have three esses in a row.
And just where do we imagine Restlessstan to be?
16 … to the east of Xanadu. קִדְמַת־עֵֽדֶן׃
The last time we saw the word qidmat, we were in Xanadu itself, pausing for a brief geography lesson. One of the famous “four rivers” (take that, Pittsburgh!), the Tigris, runs “to the east” of Assyria.
We’ll see that word qidmat only two more times anywhere in the Bible: in 1 Sam 13:5, telling us that Michmash is “to the east of” Beth-aven, and one final time in Ezekiel 39:11, in the story of Gog and Magog, where there will be a burial place “to the east of the sea.”
Speiser (in the Anchor Bible) makes this observation:
The retreat of the Mesopotamian Flood hero Utnapishtim is similarly located “faraway, at the mouth of the rivers” (Gilg., Tablet XI, line 196), east of the head of the Persian Gulf.
If you live in Mesopotamia, the one thing that’s guaranteed to come from elsewhere is the water, which comes (via the Tigris and the Euphrates) from the north. Why movement to the east is so important in these stories is something we’ll have to explore another time. In our story, Cain is about to start a family.