Genesis 1:1-6:9

Blind Luck

This week’s reading opens with an account of the creation of the world, including the creation of the first two human beings, Adam and Eve. These chapters are so significant that we tend to overlook the rest of this week’s reading, which goes on to the tell the story of Adam and Eve’s children, Cain and Abel. But their history was scarcely less significant.

Cain was evil. In a fit of anger he killed his brother Abel, and God sentenced him to be a homeless wanderer throughout the land, lacking the protection that a permanent home might have afforded him. He must have died a violent death.

But if so, it is puzzling that the Torah says nothing about Cain’s demise. The only possible clue that ancient interpreters could find was something that Cain’s descendant Lamech is reported to have said some generations later.

 

Lamech said to his wives: Adah and Zillah, hear my voice! O wives of Lamech, attend to what I say:

I have killed a man for wounding me, in fact, a boy for a mere bruise!

If Cain is avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-seven. (Gen 4:23-24)

 

This is the usual translation of Lamech’s words, but I think it’s wrong. “I have killed…” could, in biblical Hebrew, report a past-tense action. But it could likewise be understood in a conditional sense, “I would kill,” and that makes more sense in context. Lamech is boasting of his practice of taking unfair revenge on his enemies: he would kill someone to avenge a mere wound, in fact, he would slay an (apparently innocent) boy to avenge a little nick that someone from the boy’s family had inflicted on Lamech. This threat of lopsided revenge, Lamech adds, tops even that of his ancestor Cain. If Cain, as a wanderer, was in the habit of inflicting sevenfold vengeance on any threatening attacker, then Lamech boasts that his vengeance will be far more severe: seventy-seven times more!

Well, this may be the straightforward meaning of Lamech’s boast, but ancient interpreters, perhaps no longer familiar with the conditional “I would kill…,” took Lamech’s words as referring to some real past act, “I killed a man for wounding me.” The Torah doesn’t say who that person might have been, but interpreters reasonably concluded that it was no other than Lamech’s ancestor Cain. After all, the world’s population was still quite small, and there was one important figure whose death had never been reported in the Torah: Cain. Interpreters thus suggested that Lamech had killed his own ancestor.

But why would Cain have killed him? Interpreters came to believe that Cain’s death must have been accidental. When God had sentenced Cain to be a homeless wanderer, He provided him with a sign (the famous “brand of Cain”) to ward off any potential attacker. Interpreters disagreed on the nature of this sign, but one suggestion was that God had given Cain a pair of frightening horns. The horns worked pretty well for a while, scaring off all attackers, but one day, when Lamech was out hunting with his son Tubal-cain, “Stop!” the boy suddenly cried out. “I see a pair of horns in back of that bush!” Lamech, an excellent hunter, immediately shot an arrow in the direction of the bush. But when he went to recover his prey, he was shocked to discover that he had accidentally killed Cain.

All this made great sense of a somewhat puzzling episode in this week’s reading. But one last question remained to be answered: why did Tubal-cain have to point out the horns behind that bush: couldn’t Lamech see them for himself?

The answer, interpreters suggested, was that Lamech was blind. Apparently, he was not blind from birth but had lost his sight because of some injury. His powerful arms still made him an excellent hunter, but he needed a spotter—his own son Tubal-cain—to direct him: “Twenty degrees southeast,” “Thirty cubits forward and a cubit-and-a-half to the left,” and so forth.

When Lamech found out what he had accidentally done, he was so disturbed by this outcome that he clapped his hands together with great force—so hard, in fact, that he accidentally killed Tubal-cain. This, interpreters concluded, was the true sense of Lamech’s words to his wives when he went home. “I killed a man”—Cain—“because of the wound that long ago left me blind. In fact, because of my blindness I also killed a boy—Tubal-cain. But if Cain could be given a sevenfold stay of divine execution after killing Abel, then I, as the victim of my own blindness, should be granted a stay of seventy-seven.”

 

Shabbat shalom!