Eve’s Words at Cain’s Birth

The promise of Genesis 3:15 was spoken to the serpent in the hearing of the first man and woman. A seed would come, a “He,” who would bruise the serpent’s head. One chapter later the woman gave birth for the first time, and she said something about the child. Here is the verse as the YLV renders it.

Genesis 4:1 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bore Cain, and said: "I have gotten a man (ish אִישׁ eesh), the LORD."

“I have gotten a man (ish), the LORD.” If you are used to another translation, this will sound strange. Most English Bibles read, “I have gotten a man with the help of the LORD,” or “with the LORD.” The words “the help of” are not in the Hebrew at all. Translators add them because the bare sentence seems hard to make sense of. Whether “with” belongs there is the question of this chapter, and the answer turns on one small word that appears three times in the verse.

Eve’s words are only four in Hebrew: qaniti, “I have gotten”; ish, “a man”; et, the small word we are about to look at; and the name of God, which this book writes as the LORD. There is no word for help, and no word for from or by. Everything a translation adds to those four words is the translator’s judgment about what Eve must have meant.

The Same Word Three Times

The small word is et אֶת ayth. In Hebrew it usually stands in front of the definite object of a verb. It has no English equivalent, because English shows the object by word order; et simply points to the word that receives the action. There is also a word spelled the same way that means “with.”

In Genesis 4:1, et occurs three times, and all three are written the same, consonants and vowel points alike.

Adam knew et Eve. She bore et Cain. She said, “I have gotten a man, et the LORD.” In the first two places every translation treats et as the mark of the object. In the third, the standard analysis and most translations take it as “with.” Yet nothing in the text marks the third et as different from the first two.

A reader who met the word three times in one sentence, written alike each time, would naturally read it the same way each time unless something in the sentence told him otherwise. The reason for reading the third one differently does not come from any mark in the text. It comes from the sense a reader expects the sentence to have, and that is a judgment about meaning, not a fact of grammar.

How often does et carry each meaning? In the exact form it has in this verse, et (אֶת) with no ending attached, the word marks the object 6,461 times in the Hebrew Bible and means “with” 253 times. That is, in about 96.2 percent of cases it is the object marker.

You should weigh this fairly. “With” is a real meaning of et, found hundreds of times, and so the common reading is grammatically possible. The study does not say otherwise. What it points out is that the distinction has no basis in this verse itself: the same word, in the same form, stands before Eve, before Cain, and before the LORD, and only the third is read differently. On these grounds the YLV reads the third et the way the first two are read, as the mark of the object, and renders the sentence “I have gotten a man (ish), the LORD.”

A Man, Not a Baby

The second word to look at is ish (אִישׁ). It is the ordinary Hebrew word for a grown man, and it occurs more than two thousand times in the Old Testament. A newborn is normally called ben, a son, not ish.

A survey of the whole Hebrew Bible finds 24 verses in which the verb “to bear” (H3205) and the word ish stand together. In none of them does ish refer to a newly born child. Jeremiah 20:15 shows the difference within one verse.

Jeremiah 20:15 Cursed be the man (ish) who brought tidings to my father, saying, A male son is born to you, making him very glad.

The grown man who brought the news is ha-ish, “the man.” The newborn is a son, ben. The two words are not used for the same thing.

Eve’s own words later in the chapter make the same point. When she bore again, after Cain had killed his brother, the text says this:

Genesis 4:25 And Adam knew his woman (ishah אִשָּׁה ish-shaw') again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth: "For God has appointed for me another seed instead of Abel, because Cain killed him."

The narrator calls the child “a son,” ben, and Eve speaks of him as “another seed.” Neither word is ish. Genesis 4:1 is the only place where Eve uses ish of a child she has borne.

The Words of One Who Had Heard

Put the two observations together. The same et stands before Cain and before the LORD, with nothing in the text to tell them apart, and on its own et is the object marker in 96 cases out of 100. And the noun Eve chose, ish, is a word Scripture does not use for a newborn. So the study reads Eve’s sentence as it stands: “I have gotten a man (ish), the LORD.”

The study understands this not as a description of a baby but as the declaration of a woman who had heard the promise of Genesis 3:15. When she held her first son, she spoke of a man, and she spoke the name of the LORD beside him.

The chapter itself shows what happened to that son. Cain rose up against his brother Abel in the field and killed him (Genesis 4:8). When Seth was born, Eve said, “God has appointed for me another seed,” and the word she used, seed (zera זֶרַע zeh'-rah), is the very word of the promise in Genesis 3:15.

Two Verses, One Expectation

Set Genesis 3:15 and Genesis 4:1 side by side and you can see the line that runs from one to the other.

In the first, the promised seed is taken up by a masculine “He.” In the second, the first mother speaks of a man and names the LORD in the same breath. Neither verse needs anything added to it to be read. Both read most simply as the Hebrew has them.

From Eve the promise passed down through the generations of Genesis, by way of Abraham and Isaac, to Jacob. And at the end of Jacob’s life, as he blessed his sons, two words from the garden came to his lips together in a single sentence: the serpent and the heel.