Anyone who is a student of the Hebrew Bible (or what Orthodox Jews called the 'Tanakh') is familiar with an interesting and slightly amusing textual variant in the first book of the Torah, the book of Genesis. In Genesis 4:8, the variant occurs between the Masoretic text (𝕸) and a few other witnesses which we will talk about soon.
The variant is that some witnesses include Cain saying "Let us go out to the field", whereas the Masoretic text omits these words. I will first give a brief summary of the manuscript evidence. The Leningrad Codex here will represent the Masoretic text (Many OT scholars such as Emmanuel Tov regard the Leningrad Codex as being a model for the Masoretic text tradition), and I will include the manuscripts that support the other reading.
As you can see here, the words "Let us go out into the field" are not contained in this manuscript. The words in the blue boxes are the words in which "Let us go out into the field" lie in between within other textual witnesses.
The Latin Vulgate
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| Codex Amiatinus preserves the Latin Vulgate from Jerome |
The Samaritan Torah
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| Genesis 4:18 in a printed version of the Samaritan Torah (Der hebräische Pentateuch der Samaritaner) |
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| Genesis 4:8 in the Septuagint (Codex Vaticanus) |
A Helpful Footnote:
The NET Bible gives a helpful footnote on this verse:
'The MT has simply “and Cain said to Abel his brother,” omitting Cain’s words to Abel. It is possible that the elliptical text is original. Perhaps the author uses the technique of aposiopesis, “a sudden silence” to create tension. In the midst of the story the narrator suddenly rushes ahead to what happened in the field. It is more likely that the ancient versions (Samaritan Pentateuch, LXX, Vulgate, and Syriac), which include Cain’s words, “Let’s go out to the field,” preserve the original reading here. After writing אָחִיו (’akhiyv, “his brother”), a scribe’s eye may have jumped to the end of the form בַּשָּׂדֶה (basadeh, “to the field”) and accidentally omitted the quotation. This would be an error of virtual homoioteleuton. In older phases of the Hebrew script the sequence יו (yod-vav) on אָחִיו is graphically similar to the final ה (he) on בַּשָּׂדֶה.'
Peter Williams' Research:
Over at the Evangelical Textual Criticism Blog, Peter J. Williams provide what I believe to be some helpful information on this subject. Take a look:
The problem in MT is the appearance of the phrase 'and he said' or ויאמר without any quoted speech. Westermann (Genesis 1-11: A Commentary [London: SPCK, 1984], p. 302) is typical of commentators in asserting that the Samaritan Pentateuch, LXX, Peshitta, and Vulgate seem to supply נלכה השדה 'let us go into the field'.
If we ignore proposals of emendation, commentators usually choose one of the following options:
1) MT has a lacuna that has been creatively supplied by versions (not necessarily independently of each other);
2) The versions preserve words which dropped out of MT;
3) MT can be retained by supposing that ויאמר 'and he said' does not have to be followed by direct speech, being equivalent to 'and he spoke' (thus, for example, the KJV).
Undoubtedly both readings—the one including the words נלכה השדה and the one excluding them—have a high antiquity. MT omits the words, but some manuscripts show a space (pisqah be'emsa' pasuq) that may show knowledge of a tradition including the words. Furthermore, 4QGen-b from the Dead Sea Scrolls, a manuscript remarkable because throughout it only differs from the consonants of MT in one minor point of spelling, lacks the words. The Samaritan Pentateuch is the only Hebrew witness for the inclusion of the words. The reading of the LXX, διεθωμεν εις το πεδιον, is best explained as a translation of נלכה השדה since in 85 out of 129 occurrences of πεδιον or its plural it corresponds to שדה or its plural in MT.
It is frequently added at this point that the Peshitta also supports the longer reading. U. Cassuto, for example, claims that the Peshitta reads 'let us go into the open country' (A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part 1 [Jerusalem: Magnes, 1961], p. 214). The editors of 4QGen-b agree that the Peshitta supports SP ([DJD XII; Oxford: Clarendon, 1994], p. 37). However, the Syriac in fact reads 'let us travel to the valley' (ܢܪܕܐ ܠܦܩܥܬܐ [nrd' lpq't']). It is precisely at this point that we see that the Syriac has not arisen from a Hebrew Vorlage, but from consultation of the Greek. Weitzman holds that the Syriac ܦܩܥܬܐ (pq't') may have meant 'plain' originally, and seeks to support this on the basis of LXX's πεδιον (M.P. Weitzman, The Syriac Version of the Old Testament [Cambridge: CUP, 1999], pp. 74-75). However, it is possible to look at this from another angle. Though the LXX's πεδιον may mean 'plain', the Syriac translator (having no access to the Hebrew נלכה השדה) has understood it as 'valley'. The Peshitta seems generally to have been translated from a Hebrew text, but that the translators occasionally consulted the LXX, especially in places of difficulty. It is consistent with this if we suppose that here the Peshitta is in fact a witness to the absence of נלכה השדה in its Vorlage. If it had השדה why would it not translate with ܚܩܠܐ the normal word for 'field' as in fact it did for שדה later in Genesis 4:8? The best explanation for the difference of word in the Syriac is that for the first occurrence the translators did not have a Hebrew text, but for the second they did.
(I give all credit P.J. Williams for this).
Why this is not a grammatical problem:
Many of those folks who insist that the words "Let us go out into the field" base it essentially on an argument that says that without these words that the verse would be grammatically incorrect since it reads "Cain spoke to Abel his brother". Why would it say that but then never give any quoted speech? There is actually not a problem here when one looks at the Hebrew. In the phrase "Cain spoke to his brother Abel", the Hebrew word for "spoke" (וַיֹּ֥אמֶר) is in translated in the past tense, therefore there does not necessarily need to be any quoted speech following directly after it. For example, if I were to say "I talked to my brother", I don't have to give any quoted speech. If I were to say "I said to my brother...", you probably would expect me to tell you what I said directly after. The ESV translates וַיֹּ֥אמֶר as "talked" thus giving a less awkward sentence.
There are other examples of this type of phrasing structure in the Old Testament, proving that וַיֹּ֥אמֶר doesn't necessarily require embedded dialogue coming right after it. Here is one example:
Conclusion:
Ultimately, if it is true that the scribes intentionally left out Cain's (alleged) words "Let us go out to the field", then I think there are two plausible reasons:
1) The scribe made a mistake. His eye might have skipped from אָחִ֑יו to וַֽיְהִי֙ . This could have been easy to do since the first word (אָחִ֑יו) ends with the letter ו (waw) and the next word (וַֽיְהִי֙) begins with the letter waw and seeing them side by side could have caused a slip-up. I have had that exact same problem when I am reading the Hebrew text.
2) The scribe wasn't concerned with Cain's dialogue to Abel, rather the center of the story was the death of Abel rather than Cain talking to him. Perhaps the original did indeed omit Cain's embedded dialogue in order to invoke a feeling of suspense on the reader.
I think that while this variant is certainly an important one, it would discredit anything important, such as the Cain and Abel narrative or the book of Genesis as a whole.
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