Sin (Gen 4:7)

You Can’t Go Home Again

First on the agenda for today: some housekeeping notes.

I’m very appreciative when people discover this blog. Many thanks to those of you who have shared or recommended it. The point of it all, as I explained back in 2022, is to read the Bible slowly and with care, to see what we might learn by focusing not on the stories as we broadly remember them, but on the precise words the A/author(s) used to write them. I, for one, have been amazed at how much I’ve learned that I did not realize before. I hope you too feel this way.

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And now (having vamped as long as I can) … let’s talk about sin.

Over the last few posts, I’ve come up with the following translation for Gen 4:7a:

⁷ If you do the right thing, you’ll be happy, won’t you? But if you do the wrong thing, at the tent of sin [חַטָּ֣את ḥaṭṭaʾt] a demon crouches.

I don’t ordinarily bother to transliterate the ט and the א so precisely; I just want to make clear that the t at the end of the word is an ending — the root of this word is חטא ḥ-ṭ-ʾaleph.

I’m tempted to find a different translation for it than “sin,” but some of you have been waiting to hear that word ever since. As I explained umpteen times in our discussion of Version 2 of the creation story, when our friends snacked from the wrong tree, the word sin did not appear anywhere in the story. When I said “sin,” חטאת is the word I was talking about.

First, some discussion of what this root does in the Bible. We’ll finish with some comments about what the word is doing here in the story of Cain.

Here are all the Biblical Hebrew words that have חטא as their root. I’m using the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew for this because the first number you see after the word tells you how many times that word appears in the Bible.¹ The one in bold is the one in our verse.

חטא _238.5.7 vb. sin

—Qal _182.5.6

1a. sin, incur guilt, endanger or forfeit life ; miss, fail to attain

1b. ptc. as noun, sinner

Pi. ₁₅

1. purify, cleanse from sin

2. offer as sin offering

3. bear the loss of

Hi. _32.0.1

1. cause to sin.

2. declare guilty.

3. miss the target, in slinging of stones

Htp. ₉

1. purify oneself, be purified (from sin)

2. withdraw oneself

חַטָּא _19.0.1 n.m. & adj. sinner, sinful

חֲטָאָה ₈ n.f. sin—

1. of sin as an act

2. sin offering

חַטָּאָה _2.0.8 n.f. sin

חֶטְאָה ₁ n.f. sin

חַטָּאת I _291.5.52 n.f. sin

1. sin, of sins against humans, sins against God.

2. sin offering.

3. punishment for sin.

4. guilt of sin.

5. purification from sin.

6. appar. sinner.

חַטָּאת II ₁ n.f. penury

חַטָּאת III ₂ n.f. step

Etymology is not a good guide to what a word really means. You know that from the way we use our own language, hardly ever thinking about where words come from or why they mean what they do, and sometimes even being surprised when we discover the origins of a word we’ve been using for years without knowing its history.

In ancient texts, we do think about etymology, and we push words far beyond what they would tolerate in their natural habitat, simply because there is no one alive who still has that native-speaker competence in the language. In an ancient text like the Bible, which itself came into being over the course of 1,000 years, things are even more complicated, because language changes. I’ve seen words in English change their meaning and usage over the course of my own lifetime. So caution is in order as we proceed.

The basic sense of sin in English seems to me well put by the first definition in the OED:

An act which is regarded as a transgression of the divine law and an offence against God.

A transgression of government law is a crime; a transgression of God’s … law? will? instructions? … is a sin.

But חטא, to my ear, carries a different flavor: not a crime, but an act that …

• fails to achieve something that would have been appropriate to do

• does something that leaves a stain

On that last point, note especially meanings #2 and #5 of our noun, and the Piel and Hitpael meanings of our verb, where חטא can also refer to an action that reverses the effects of חטא. (The fancy word for this is privative. English example: to pit an olive or peel an orange.)

It is not clear from YHWH’s remark whether Cain has already sinned (using the English term in the חטא sense) or whether the warning is only about what might happen. Cain does seem to have “missed the mark” in his offering, but remember that we don’t know why he brought it or what, if anything, YHWH expected. Israel Knohl, in an article called “Cain: Son of God or Son of Satan?”, elaborates:

After the child Cain grew up, he became the founder of sacrificial worship. We are told that he brought an offering to the Lord, but Scripture never explains why Cain decides to offer his sacrifice. Presumably he wanted to form a relationship with God, ‘‘his father,’’ by means of an offering; possibly this was because, as a farmer, he had to struggle daily with the curse that God had laid upon the earth as punishment for his [human] father’s sin (Gn 3.17–19). Perhaps Cain hoped that an offering would atone for Adam’s sin and remove the curse from the earth. His offering, however, was rejected by God.

…

I fully agree with Harold Bloom’s assessment of Cain as ‘‘a tragic rebel and not a villain.’’

We’ve already seen Nahum Sarna’s admission that “Cain’s purpose was noble”; he adds, “but his act was not ungrudging and openhearted.” The truth is with Knohl: the text does not evaluate Cain’s offering for us in either the first or the second of these two ways. Cain is most certainly not a villain, at least not yet. Is he a rebel? I’ve presented my own perspective: that YHWH is deliberately trying to push Cain’s buttons. The director of this movie needs a way to make the Flood happen, and Cain’s reaction to YHWH — both his failure to pay attention to Cain’s offering and his somewhat obtuse response to Cain’s depression — will push the story in that direction.

We’ll talk about that more in a later post. First, we must finish v. 7, which will lead us back to Genesis 3 and from there to the Song of Songs.

1. The numbers indicate, in order, 1. the Hebrew Bible; 2. Ben Sira; 3. the Dead Sea Scrolls and related texts; 4. inscriptions and other such texts.