Genesis 4:17 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Genesis 4:17

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He gathers himself together, though he's a fearful man now, and he's going to be accompanied by insecurity all his life. Yet he's going to fight it, he is determined to prove that God is wrong, and that he is right and he can succeed. All this comes from false worship. And very soon, one of his early descendants is going to be the first polygamist. His legacy will be to be known as a proud, self-seeking, and works-based man, and his descendants will soon turn to polygamy and idolatry. ‘Cain knew his wife’ – we see the same delicacy covering the matter of sexual relations which the Bible always uses, and which warns us not to be too explicit. ‘And she conceived, and bare Enoch.’ This is not the Enoch who was seventh from Adam, who was a prophet, and who was in the line of Seth, not in the line of Cain; this was another Enoch, an earlier one. ‘She conceived and bare Enoch: and he builded a city’ – that is to say, Cain built a city. Some people believe he did not finish it.Why did he build a city? Well, his rebel heart is still working. ‘I am not going to be a nomad. I am not going to be a wanderer, a vagabond, a fugitive in the earth. I am going to build a city.’ What was meant by city, we do not know. If you think of a city in modern times, you think of a mass of people and tall buildings. This ‘city’ may have been a few huts in an enclosure, or something quite modest, nevertheless it stands for the same thing: ‘I am going to settle. I am going to be in one place. I am going to have people around me. I am going to have family and find neighbours who agree with me. I am going to set up my own nation, my own party. I am defying God. I think he is unjust. I think he is unfair. He should have accepted me. He should not have accepted my brother. And I am going to defy him in this.’But the suggestion is this, that somehow God overruled, and having built the city he himself could never occupy it. What makes us feel that? Well, because it was named after his son. Surely Cain would have named it after his own proud self if he had the opportunity, but he names it after his son. Maybe something got hold of him. God cast him out of his own city by giving him some sort of abhorrence to the place. He could not stand to be there. He was compelled to go out, and serve his sentence and live as a nomad. One can only suggest that.

Application

Questions

Whom did Cain marry? Only a few individuals have been named so far in the record, but Moses’ purpose has not been to give us a complete record of human history, but to focus on the main events relevant to God’s dealings with mankind. The existence of other human beings is hinted at even in this verse, where a city is spoken of. Scripture is clear that the entire human race is descended from one man, Adam, and therefore there was no other possibility than for Adam’s children to take wives from their near relatives, and so the most likely explanation is that Cain married his sister. Adam was created with great genetic richness and diversity, containing in himself all the different variations of human form that would come from him. In the early generations of mankind, there was not the same danger that in-breeding now produces. Later, under the law of Moses, there were limits placed on who could be married (Leviticus 18), but these are not in place at the time of Cain.

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Genesis 4:17 Commentary and Bible Study