Genesis 4:1: The Expectation of Adam and Eve That Cain Would Be the Messiah

Another example of the correlation between Scripture in the original language and Ellen White’s insights is found in her comments on the thinking of Adam and Eve when their first child, Cain, was born. White writes: “The Savior’s coming was foretold in Eden. When Adam and Eve first heard the promise, they looked for its speedy fulfillment. They joyfully welcomed their firstborn son, hoping that he might be the Deliverer. But the fulfillment of the promise tarried.” ^{21Ellen G. White, The Desire of Ages (Oakland, Calif.: Pacific Press®, 1898), 31.} Can this thinking of Adam and Eve be substantiated from Scripture? Some years ago I was reading Genesis 4 in my Hebrew Bible and serendipitously came across something I had never noticed before in verse 1: “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, ‘I have acquired a man [child]’ ”— and then most English versions translate— “with the help of the Lord.” But as is apparent in modern versions of the Bible that place the supplied words in italics (e.g., KJV, NKJV, NASB), the phrase “the help of’ is not present in the Hebrew original.GOP 160.2

In the Hebrew of this verse, immediately after the word “man [child, Heb. ’ish]” comes the particle ’et, which can either represent the preposition “with” or be an indicator that the next word is a direct object in the sentence. Translating simply as a preposition, “with the Lord,” does not really make any sense in the immediate context. ^{22Unless one adopts a recent critical reading of the text which argues that “scriptural texts share an Aristotelian view of how conception occurs but adapt it distinctively so that there are three parties involved—God, the male with his seed, and the female with the blood or fluids of her womb—and all three parties are understood to be actively involved in the production of a human fetus.” Since “the life force that generates and develops the fetus in the mother’s womb is divine,” eventually in biblical accounts “any mention of male seed disappears” and leads to the possibility of a “virgin” birth of Jesus where the human male seed is totally supplanted by reference to the Holy Spirit, in parallel to the genre of Greco-Roman biography where great figures are conceived by “a union between one of the gods and a human mother, with no human male involved in the process” (Andrew Lincoln, “How Babies Were Made in Jesus’Time,” Biblical Archaeology Review 40, no. 6 [2014]: 46, 47). Such reading ultimately goes against the grain of the biblical text in seeking to explain the virgin birth of Christ in humanistic terms, and does not fit into the biblical worldview.} One must add “the help of” as many modern translations do, but an examination of other passages in Scripture using this particle as the preposition “with” reveals no clear examples where it can mean “with the help of.” Thus the addition of “the help of’ seems unlikely as the best translation.GOP 160.3

The alternative that remains is to take the particle ’et as the sign of the direct object, which in English can be represented by a one-em dash. So the translation of this verse would be: “I have gotten a Man Child—the Lord!” This translation makes good sense, and the grammatical construction is paralleled elsewhere in Scripture. ^{23For this same grammatical construction with a second direct object, see, e.g., Gen. 26:34.} Thus I conclude that translating ’et as a direct object is the best choice in this verse. This is the translation represented, for example, in the New American Standard Bible in the margin. Evangelical scholars such as Walter Kaiser have carefully analyzed this passage and have come to the same conclusion. ^{24Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., Toward an Old Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978), 37.} This text implies that when Adam and Eve were naming Cain, they were thinking He might be the promised messianic Seed, Yahweh Himself. They hoped that the Messiah had come, only to find out that Cain was not the Messiah but a murderer.GOP 161.1

Ellen White under inspiration wrote what was consistent with the biblical data, as revealed in the Hebrew original.GOP 161.2