Was Cain a restless wanderer, or did he settle down and build a city?

The sentence of 4:11–12 is about Cain’s bond with the ground and with God. The ground that had drunk Abel’s blood would no longer yield its strength to him, so the farmer (4:2) could no longer live from his fields; he was driven “from the face of the earth” (Hebrew ha-adamah, ‘the ground’) and hidden from God’s face (4:14). The words na‘ wa-nad, ‘a fugitive and a vagabond’, come from verbs meaning to totter and to wander: an uprooted, restless life, cut off from home, land and God.

Genesis then tells us where that sentence took him: Cain “dwelt in the land of Nod” (4:16). Nod comes from the same root as nad, ‘wanderer’, so the land’s very name means ‘Wandering’. The writer who recorded the sentence saw it carried out in the place where Cain lived. Nor does ‘dwelt’ (yashav) have to mean settled: the same verb is used a few verses later of Jabal, “the father of such as dwell in tents” (4:20).

The city does not undo the sentence either. The Hebrew of 4:17, wayhi boneh ‘ir, says ‘and he was building a city’: it describes the work under way, not necessarily finished, and the Septuagint keeps that sense. The word ‘ir can mean any walled settlement, however small. Keil and Delitzsch saw in it Cain’s wish to make up for his banishment by giving his family a centre to hold it together, in place of the fellowship with God he had lost. A walled place may also have answered the fear he had voiced: “every one that findeth me shall slay me” (4:14). The city was a sign of his unrest, not the end of it.

A wanderer for a time

Eric Lyons (Apologetics Press) notes how little Genesis tells of the rest of Cain’s life. A man with a wife and a son can still live a roving life, stopping for short spells in one place, and Cain may have worked on his settlement for a time and then moved on.

A troubled conscience

The Septuagint renders the sentence ‘groaning and trembling shalt thou be on the earth’, and some, as Gill reports, have taken it of Cain’s inner restlessness and fear as much as of his travels.

Driven from his home

Luther, as Keil and Delitzsch report, took the wandering to be Cain’s expulsion from his home near Eden into an unknown land, with no promise or command to guide him; that was fulfilled when he went to Nod.

Genesis does not say how long Cain wandered before he began to build, or whether he finished the city.