The Farmers and the Ranchers (Gen 4:2)

You Can’t Go Home Again

² Abel was a flock-grazer; Cain was an earth-worker.

 וַֽיְהִי־הֶ֙בֶל֙ רֹ֣עֵה צֹ֔אן וְקַ֕יִן הָיָ֖ה עֹבֵ֥ד אֲדָמָֽה׃

The farmer and the cowman should be friends — but mostly, they aren’t. You have to think that’s what’s going on here as well, even if the “cowman” in our story is actually a sheepman. More on this soon; first, we’ve got grammar and vocabulary to discuss. I learned from a lecture by Moshe Greenberg at Brandeis on a chapter of the Ezekiel commentary he was writing that it’s important to put the puzzle together piece by piece before looking at what you imagine the big picture will be.

The grammar first. I’ve got two points to make. The first is a reminder of something we saw more than a year ago, back in Gen 1:5. The two different forms of the verb to be here have a specific purpose: to put the mens’ two professions side-by-side. If it were va-yehi hével … va-yehi káyin, that would list their professions in sequence. Pulling the verb away from the conjunction (v’káyin haya) lists them in parallel.

The second grammatical point is halfway to vocabulary. Two of the translations commonly used in the Jewish community these days (NJPS, the newer of the two versions produced by the Jewish Publication Society, and also that of Everett Fox in his attempt to recreate the Buber-Rosenzweig German translation in English) both say that the boys “became” a keeper of sheep and a tiller of the soil. Other standard English translations, more correctly, say that they “were” these things.

I’ll remind readers that part of my intent in this blog is to help people learn Biblical Hebrew or improve their knowledge. The Hebrew for “become” is actually an idiom using the verb to be:

• היה haya ‘to be’

• היה ל־ haya l’- ‘to become’

The gap between v. 2a and our phrase, v. 2b, makes it seem obvious that the boys had to “become” a shepherd and a farmer, respectively — after all, they have just been born. But that’s not what the Hebrew says. The Hebrew tells us merely that they “were” a shepherd and a farmer. To me, this is another indication that Genesis 4 is not the natural continuation of the Xanadu Park story, but a story about Cain that originated in some other context.