(BA) Genesis 4:17

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2 August 2022 Navigate 'up to the Genesis index: index-genesis.

And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. And he built a city, and named it after the name of his son, Enoch.

There are two puzzles about population here, considering that our narrative only has Adam, Eve, and Cain mentioned as alive up to this point, and explicitly refers to Eve as the mother of all living. If the whole world is generated from two people, incest between their children is the only logical way to populate the planet. And yet biblical thinking generally opposes incest, and the text never explicitly says incest occurred.

A second puzzle is how Cain built a city. As a member of earth's first family, you wouldn't expect Cain to build a city. You would expect that sort of thing to occur much later, in an inhabited earth.

Both puzzles make more sense if the original intention was for Cain to become the father of the Kenites. Later, on this hypothesis, material about Cain was incorporated into the grand epic that became the Hebrew Bible, effectively stranding him before the Flood as only the ancestor of a doomed lineage, leaving oddities here and there as a trace of the former situation.

Where the Masoretic Text reads, after the name of his son, Enoch, Kittel suggests that the text originally read, perhaps, after his own name, Enoch, making Enoch rather than Cain the city-builder. It is perhaps more sensible to take this as the intended reading, as it would be strange for Cain to build a city right after God cursed him to transience. It is appropriate, either way, that from a farming lineage cities would spring: urban culture depends on agriculture.