Genesis - Chapter 04 - Line 00094

Contemplative Summary

See—today you have driven me away from the face of the ground, and from your presence I will be hidden. I will be a wanderer and a fugitive in the land, and anyone who finds me will kill me.

The lament expands, voice stretched across distance. The Hebrew hen gerashta oti hayom — “see, today you have driven me out” — holds immediacy and awe: the realization of separation made real. Cain now feels exile not as decree but as atmosphere. From the “face of the ground” he is cut, and from the “face of God” concealed — twin estrangements that mirror one another: material and divine, outer and inner. The doubling of na va-nad, “wanderer and fugitive,” amplifies instability, the trembling of one unanchored in field or form.

Yet his words also pulse with awareness. Fear rises — “anyone who finds me will kill me” — but beneath the fear lies the recognition of relational consequence. The ground, the divine, humanity itself — all have become mirrors through which he now perceives the reverberation of his act. To be hidden from presence is to lose coherence; to wander is to move without resonance.

To contemplate this line is to feel the sorrow of disconnection made conscious. Every soul that awakens to its own exile speaks this same cry: cut from the ground that once held it, longing to be seen once more. And still, even within the lament, awareness flickers — that what has been hidden can yet be found, and the wanderer still carries the memory of home.