Genesis 4:1

1. Adam knew Eve A euphemism, based upon a profound conception of the marital relation . “Generation in man is an act of personal free-will, not a blind impulse of nature . It flows from the divine institution of marriage, and is, therefore, knowing the wife . ” Keil .

Bare Cain In the Hebrew the word Cain has the emphatic particle את before it, the Cain . In these most ancient narratives names have special significance, and the name Cain is most naturally derived from the Hebrew קון , kun, or קנה , kana, the word immediately used by Eve, and translated in our text, I have gotten. A better translation would be, I have begotten . The name Cain, then, would signify offspring, or one begotten, rather than possession, as held by many writers . See Furst’s Hebrews Lex . and T . Lewis’s note in Lange in loc .

A man from the Lord Literally, a man, the Jehovah . This exact rendering appears to us better than our common version, which follows the Targum of Onkelos; better than the Sept . and Vulg . by the Lord; better than any attempt to paraphrase the passage, or construe the את as a preposition . With MacWhorter (see Bib . Sacra for January, 1857, and the volume entitled “Yahveh Christ, or, the Memorial Name”) and Jacobus, we understand Eve’s exclamation as a kind of joyful eureka over the firstborn of the race, as if in this seed of the woman was to be realized the promise of the protevangelium recorded in chap . 3:15 . Keil’s objection to this view, on the ground that Eve knew nothing of the divine nature of the promised seed, and could not have uttered the name Jehovah, because it was not revealed until a later period, is unwarrantable assumption . The statement of Exodus 6:3, (where see note,) that the name Jehovah was not known to the patriarchs, does not mean that the name was never used before the days of Moses; and if these are not the very words of Eve, or their exact equivalent, why should we believe that she said any thing of the kind? If the name JEHOVAH was used at all by Eve, it is likely that something of its profound significance had been revealed in connexion with the first promise of the coming One. And it would have been very natural for the first mother, in her enthusiasm over the birth of her first child, to imagine him the promised Conqueror. But, as T. Lewis observes, “The greatness of Eve’s mistake in applying the expression to one who was the type of Antichrist rather than of the Redeemer, should not so shock us as to affect the interpretation of the passage, now that the covenant God is revealed to us as a being so transcendently different. The limitation of Eve’s knowledge, and perhaps her want of due distinction between the divine and the human, only sets in a stronger light the intensity of her hope, and the subjective truthfulness of her language. Had her reported words, at such a time, contained no reference to the promised seed of the woman, the Rationalist would doubtless have used it as a proof that she could have known nothing of any such prediction, and that therefore Genesis 3:15, and Genesis 4:1, must have been written by different authors, ignoring or contradicting each other.” Eve’s hasty and mistaken expectation of the coming Deliverer is a fitting type of the periodic but mistaken pre-millennialism of New Testament times, which has, with almost every generation, disturbed the Church with excitement over the expected immediate coming of Christ.