Where is Abel? (Gen 4:9)

You Can’t Go Home Again

⁹ YHWH said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יְ׳הוָה֙ אֶל־קַ֔יִן אֵ֖י הֶ֣בֶל אָחִ֑יךָ

Our author does not waste any time with transitions. The very last word of Gen 4:8 was וַיַּהַרְגֵֽהוּ va-y’hargéhu ‘he killed him’, and immediately YHWH asks Cain where he is. Gee, were you standing there watching? (We’ll ask that question again not much later in this story.)

As perhaps you have noticed, essentially the same question occurs in Gen 3:9, when Cain’s parents ate the fruit of a tree they’d been told not to eat and then hid when they heard the owner of the garden coming:

YHWH God called the human and said to him, “Where are you?”

Claus Westermann thinks the two stories are exactly parallel, following the same legal procedure, “two acts of trial and punishment,” a procedure that is “primeval” because it “takes place only in these two places”:

The Trial

3:9-13       4:9-10

The Pronouncement of Punishment (Curse)

3:14-19     4:11-12

Mitigation of the Punishment

3:21           4:13-15

Expulsion (Alienation)

3;23, 24    4:16

The Germans, for whatever reason, prefer to focus on the technical aspects of things like this. I’m trying very hard to read it as a story. In either case, the repetition of the “where?” question clearly calls on us to recall that story as we read this one.

Nahum Sarna thinks YHWH knows exactly where Abel is:

As in Genesis 3:9, the question is a means of opening the conversation, perhaps eliciting confession and contrition.

We took a very different angle on the Genesis 3 question, assuming that YHWH really did not know where the man was hiding. I once wrote an entire article on the question of God’s omniscience in the Bible — read it here or listen to me interviewed about it here — so I won’t belabor the point. In Genesis 3, if only for story purposes, YHWH is not omniscient.

What about here? As we’ll learn from v. 10, he knows that Abel has been killed. How?