Genesis - Chapter 04 - Line 00092

Contemplative Summary

When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield its strength to you. A wanderer and a fugitive shall you be in the earth.

The sentence continues — consequence deepening into condition. The Hebrew lo-tosef tet-kochah lakh — “it shall no longer yield its strength to you” — speaks not of barrenness but of withdrawal; the living earth closes its resonance to the hand that broke trust. Cain, once cultivator, now becomes alien to his own craft. The soil that mirrored his effort now mirrors his dissonance.

Then comes the new identity: na va’nad tihyeh ba’aretz — “a wanderer and a fugitive shall you be in the earth.” The doubling of motion, na and nad, carries the rhythm of exile — one meaning movement without rest, the other displacement without home. Yet within this sentence hums a strange mercy: though the ground denies its fruit, it does not deny its path. The earth remains, vast and open, a field through which the restless may still walk.

To contemplate this line is to sense the transformation of belonging. When harmony breaks, movement becomes the teacher; wandering replaces rooting as the way toward remembrance. Every exile, inward or outer, is this same journey — the soul learning again how to touch the world without taking from it, until the earth itself begins to yield not sustenance, but peace.