Tents and Livestock (Gen 4:20)

You Can’t Go Home Again

Before we resume our close reading of Genesis, a few timely words about close reading from Shani Tzoref, a colleague in biblical studies. The particular verse she writes about is Esther 6:8 and, as Jewish readers will know, we’ll be reading that in just a few days on Purim:

Paying close attention to possible alternative meanings can open up avenues of interpretation that might not be obvious at first. This is true about the meaning of individual words, and also about the arrangement of larger units of words—the syntactic structure of a verse.

I hope to open one of those “avenues of interpretation that might not be obvious at first” in this post. So let’s turn to Gen 4:20 with our own habitual close attention.

²⁰ whoever dwells with tents and livestock. יֹשֵׁ֥ב אֹ֖הֶל וּמִקְנֶֽה׃

Who exactly was our pal Yaval the godfather of? That’s an easy question to answer in a somewhat foggy way, more difficult if we try to be precise.

The easy answer is that he was a sort of nomadic herdsman. (HALOT identifies Yaval as “ancestor of the bedouin.”) An óhel אֹ֖הֶל is a tent, and miqne מִקְנֶֽה means “livestock” (though we’ll talk more about this word shortly). It’s interesting that, like his name (as we discussed last time), this notion seems to refer to the story of Cain and Abel — in this case, combining both of them in a single occupation. Abel raised livestock; Cain was told he would be a nomad, na va-nad. Once again, if our author intended this reference, he did not say so.

If we want to be more precise, the answer becomes more difficult and — as I’m sure you’ve guessed — involves some grammar. The first two words, which have drawn the lion’s share of comment in the reference books, are the easy part. ישֵׁב yoshev, the present tense of Modern Hebrew, is a participle (verbal adjective) in Biblical Hebrew, so it might be doing one of two things:

• acting like a verb, taking “tent” as an object (really a kind of adverbial noun, which is a thing in Biblical Hebrew); or

• acting like an adjective, in construct with “tent” to make a compound noun.

⇥ See Lessons 13 and 14 of my Hebrew course for more about the construct form, which I call “Hebrew’s Trailer Hitch.” ⇤

Here, for example, is the Jouön-Muraoka reference grammar’s take on our phrase:

in cases like Gn 4.20 אֲבִי ישֵׁב אֹ֫הֶל prototype of tent-dwellers ישֵׁב is most likely in the cst. [construct] state. [§129m n. 30]

“Prototype,” by the way, is an elegant translation for avi, even if it is not quite as entertaining — or as accurate — as “godfather.” In any case, whichever way the words yoshev óhel are connected, we are talking about a combination that means “tent-dweller” — and not just one of them. As we saw so often in Genesis 1 and, if I am correct, at the end of Genesis 3 as well, Hebrew likes to use the singular as a collective plural (“500 head of cattle”).

We’ll have more to say about this phrase, and why it matters, before we’re done today. Right now, however, we’ve got some livestock to consider. That’s what מִקְנֶה miqneh means, which leaves us with an extremely awkward phrase. BHQ comments:

The syntactical difficulty of the MT sequence is alleviated in the versions and Targumim by a change in the wording from “cattle” to “cattle owners” or “cattle raisers,” all of them taking ישב as a collective.

And here is Richard Elliott Friedman:

He was father of tent-dweller and cattleman.

 A more accurate, if wildly stranger, translation would have been:

He was father of tent-dweller and cattle.