Genesis 4:11-12 - Exposition

Convicted, if not humbled, the culprit is speechless, and can only listen in consternation to the threefold judgment which pronounced him " cursed in his soul, vagabond in his body, and unprosperous in his labors" (Willet). And now —either at this time , already (cf. Joshua 14:11 ; Hosea 2:10 ), or for this cause , because thou hast done this ( Genesis 3:14 ; cf. Genesis 19:9 ; Exodus 18:19 )— art thou cursed. The first curse pronounced against a human being . Adam and Eve were not cursed, though the serpent and the devil were. If we may not conclude that Cain was thereby for ever excluded from the hope of salvation if he should repent, still less must we explain the Divine judgment down to a simple sentence of banishment from Eden. The fratricide was henceforth to bear the displeasure and indignation of his Maker, whose image in Abel he had slain; of which indignation and displeasure his expatriation was to be a symbol. Different explanations have been offered of the clause, from the earth , or ground , Adhamah , which, however, cannot mean more than the ground , which already had been cursed ( Genesis 3:17 ; Lunge), since "the curse of the soil and the misery of man cannot well be compared with each other" (Kalisch); or simply away from the district , the scene of his crime (Kalisch, Speaker's, Rosenmüller, Tuch, Gerlach, Delitzsch), as if all that the sentence implied was banishment from Eden; but must involve in addition the idea that the curse was to leap upon him from the earth , or ground, in general (Aben Ezra, Kimchi, Knobel, Alford, Murphy). Which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand . The terrible significance of this curse is further opened in the words which follow. The earth was to be against him—

1. In refusing him its substance . When thou tillest (literally, shalt till ) the ground, it shall not henceforth yield (literally, add to give ) unto thee her strength. Neither a double curse upon the entire earth for man's sake (Alford), nor a doom of sterility inflicted only on the district of Eden (Kalisch); but a judgment on Cain and his descendants with respect to their labors. Their tillage of the ground was not to prosper, which ultimately, Bonar thinks, drove the Cainites to city-building and mechanical invention.

2. In denying him a home . A fugitive and a vagabond —literally, moving and wandering ; " groan ing and trembling" ( LXX ; erroneously), " banished and homeless" (Keil)— shalt thou be in the earth . "As robbers are wont to be who have no quiet and secure resting-place" (Calvin); driven on by the agonizing tortures of a remorseful and alarmed conscience, and not simply by " the earth denying to him the expected fruits of his labor" (Delitzsch). The ban of wandering, which David pronounced upon his enemies ( Psalms 59:12 ; Psalms 109:10 ), in later years fell upon the Jews, who "for shedding the blood of Christ, the most innocent Lamb of God, are vagabonds to this day over the face of the earth" (Willet). Thus the earth was made the minister of God's curse, not a partaker of it, as some have strangely imagined, as if by drinking up the blood of Abel it had become a participant of Cain's crime (Delitzsch).