YHWH Speaks! (Gen 4:6)

You Can’t Go Home Again

⁶ YHWH said to Cain, “Why are you depressed, why crestfallen? …”

וַיֹּ֥אמֶר יְ׳הוָ֖ה אֶל־קָ֑יִן לָ֚מָּה חָ֣רָה לָ֔ךְ וְלָ֖מָּה נָפְל֥וּ פָנֶֽיךָ׃

The ellipsis in my translation simply means that YHWH has not stopped talking; he’ll have more to say in v. 7. I discussed the translations “depressed” and “crestfallen” in the post before this one; go there if you missed it.

So there’s really nothing new to talk about here, right? “YHWH said to Cain” is not exactly a translation challenge.

But it is a literary challenge and perhaps a theological challenge as well.

We don’t really know what happened when Ḥavvah “gained a man with YHWH” (in 4:1), but no conversation was reported there. The last time we know for sure that God spoke to another character was in 3:13, when YHWH God speaks to Ḥavvah and she replies. The apparent addresses to snake, woman, and man respectively in 3:14–19 may actually have been God muttering to himself.

Now, all of a sudden — admittedly in a story that was originally told in a completely different context — YHWH speaks to Cain. It’s true that Cain does not reply, but va-yomer seems much more straightforward here than it did when it suddenly disappeared in 3:14–19.

There are a couple of obvious questions to ask (before we get to a bigger question that may not be quite as obvious to you as it is to me):

• How did YHWH speak to Cain? I’m not asking the question the medieval philosophers asked; they assumed that God was immaterial and wondered how he gave people the sensation of hearing him speak. I’m simply wondering whether Cain and Abel were used to conversing with God as their parents apparently sometimes did. Is there any warning he is about to speak to you? How do you know it’s him?

• Why did YHWH choose this moment to speak? Considering what’s been going on, we might have expected to hear — perhaps in between v. 3a and v. 3b — the words “YHWH said to Cain and Abel, ‘Offer me some of what you have produced, in thanks” (or something of that nature).

• Isn’t it somewhat disingenuous of YHWH to wonder why Cain is depressed? You paid no attention to him, dude! If Cain has done something wrong, or at the very least insufficient, why not explain that to him?

All these questions disappear if we understand that we are not reading journalism or even history, but a story. Then (of course) they immediately reappear, because the things that happen in a story — even a completely fictional one — have to make story sense. They have to be plausible in the context and not make us think, “That character would never do or say that.” The story has to be believable.

A friend has reminded me of something I said long ago about the movie Field of Dreams. All sorts of magical things happen in the film — as in the fine original book, Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella — which are completely believable in the context of “suspended disbelief” in which one reads fiction. (Millions of real people have lived and died on earth who are not as “real” to us as Sherlock Holmes.) But the movie had one scene in which a character made an impassioned speech that persuaded a school board not to ban a book, and I told my friend that was the one scene in the movie that I could not possibly believe.

So we’ve got to ask our questions again. This scene has only just begun, but here are some preliminary answers:

• How? The Bible, and especially Genesis, almost never seems interested in this question, so I have no answer for it here. We may have other opportunities to discuss it as our reading together continues.

• Why now? Guessing here. What has happened so far is apparently not enough to provoke the killing, and God himself must step in to push the plot forward.

• Why doesn’t YHWH explain? The obvious answer here is the opposite of the previous answer. If God told Cain, “You did something wrong; here is the right way to do it,” that would have steered the plot away from the potential killing, which is bound to happen in order to set things rolling toward the Flood.

We’ll have the chance to speak more when YHWH’s remark continues. For now, I must admit that I’m reminded of the book of Job. It’s a completely different story — one that even rabbinic tradition suggests may be quite fictional. There too (abridging this enormous book shamelessly) something bad happens to Job and God speaks to him without explaining.

I don’t mean to suggest that our author knew the book of Job. But, as we’ve seen, Version 2 of the creation story is quite clearly interacting with the “wisdom” tradition in ancient Israel, a category into which the book of Job most certainly falls. Our story is about a killing, but it is not a police procedural. It’s about human life on this planet, including our interactions with God, who is not human but is able to communicate with us and interested enough in doing so to be part of our story.

Or perhaps it is better to say, enough to make us part of his story. That is certainly what happens in Job. I long ago suggested a fine book to begin the study of Job, so I’ll say no more about that here (do follow the updated link at the end of that post). Nonetheless, it’s important to understand, even if you accept the doctrine of inerrancy, that the story we’re being told is very selective.

We don’t know what the boys had for breakfast this morning or what they are wearing. We don’t whether YHWH spoke to Cain on the same day they brought their offerings or later. We only know what our author (or Author) wants to tell us, and we are very much in a story that is concerned with what human beings can learn about the world by using our own minds. As we’ll see as we move forward with God’s speech, this story has been deliberately woven together with the wisdom story of Genesis 3. Keep that in mind as we read on.