This short passage narrates a tragic turn of events and is one of the best known of stories, of a fight between brothers which ended badly (for both brothers). Perhaps the sibling dimension was once only an incidental feature of a story whose really significant dimension may have been a reflection of the conflict in human history between two different ways of life, the agricultural and the pastoral. Be that as it may, it has turned into a tale whose message, as EF points out, is even more universal. This passage is the first of several in Genesis to play out the theme of sibling rivalry; see my analysis.
Out "in the field", bassade, by which we may understand that they were on their own at the time, without human witnesses, a man murders his brother in uncontrollable anger. God calls him to account and condemns him, not to death, but to wander about in exile. In this way the two brothers, the victim and the perpetrator, are both "lost", echoing, it seems, Rebecca's fears for her two sons when the older brother, Esau, is likewise furious with his younger sibling, Jacob; she will tell Jacob to run away, because, she asks (27:45, BNIE), lámma eshkal gam sh'nekhem yom exad 'why should I lose you / both in one day?' She might well have added: "like Cain and Abel."
We know the story of Jacob's theft of Esau's birthright and blessing, but what had happened to drive Cain to such terrible anger with Abel? We don't really know! A problem arose that had to do with a sacrifice: God liked Abel's animal sacrifice but wasn't keen on Cain's offering of the fruit of his crops. What was such a big deal? There is little explanation, and we are left thinking we must be missing something.
For the translator, though, the worst bit is verse 4:7 for which no satisfactory and convincing translation has been found because we can hardly make sense of what it says: halo im tetiv sh'et w'im lo tetiv lappétax xatat rovetz w'elekha t'shuqato w'atta timshol bo. I am not going to go into a detailed discussion of this because it would get too complicated, so instead let's just compare a few of the translations of this verse, and the difficulties will be evident:
- (LXX) οὐκ, ἐὰν ὀρθῶς προσενέγκῃς, ὀρθῶς δὲ μὴ διέλῃς, ἥμαρτες; ἡσύχασον· πρὸς σὲ ἡ ἀποστροφὴ αὐτοῦ, καὶ σὺ ἄρξεις αὐτοῦ
- (Speiser's translation of the first part of LXX) Is it not true that, when you sacrifice correctly but dissect incorrectly, you are a sinner? Subside then.
- (Vulg.) nonne si bene egeris recipies sin autem male statim in foribus peccatum aderit sed sub te erit appetitus eius et tu dominaberis illius
- (KJV) If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.
- (ESV) If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.
- (JPS) Surely, if you do right, / There is uplift. / But if you do not do right / Sin couches at the door; / Its urge is toward you, / Yet you can be its master.
- (EAS) Surely, if you act right, it should mean exaltation. But if you do not, sin is the demon at the door, whose urge is toward you; yet you can be his master.
- (EF) Is it not thus: / If you intend good, bear-it-aloft, / but if you do not intend good, / at the entrance is sin, a crouching-demon, / toward you his lust - / but you can rule over him.
- (NBIE) surely you shan't be taken / if you do what is right? / and if you do not do what is right / at the entrance of the house awaits the not-good / desiring you, and you will give the order
There are other "problems" (or oddities) about the Cain genealogy, which in the context of the Cain and Abel narrative is merely a side branch, of less interest than the main trunk which will bring us down to Noah in preparation for the next big drama in the Genesis story. Perhaps what jars most of all literarily (and it is explained by adopting the hypothesis that the story of Cain and Abel is an intrusion) is that the genealogy we now read doesn't contain any hint of the fact that this is the genealogy of someone who committed the most heinous of crimes and has been expelled from the face of God. It's the story of a family, that of the first son of the first humans. In comparion, the notice we get at the very end about the birth of Seth, a new son, to Adam and Eve after the death of Abel and the expulsion of Cain from God's presence, is presented as a mere afterthought, a footnote really.
I will refrain from attempting to comment much on the names listed in such a genealogy. I do not have the kind of knowledge which would be helpful for clarifying much of interest, and see no point in mechanically transferring here notes found elsewhere. The anecdotal annotations in the text regarding some of the personages mentioned in the lists (such as, in the present case, Lamech of the two wives, Jabal the father of dwellers of tents, Jubal the musician, Tubal-Cain the sharpener of tools) are also not something I feel I have much to say about in general.
4:1 w'ha'adam yada‛ et xawwa ishto
The very common verb y-d-‛, usually glossed as 'to know', has a number of uses and sub-meanings. Sometimes, as here, it clearly means 'have sex with', or 'have carnal knowledge of' if you insist. We have to be wary of translating this as 'Adam knew Eve', whether out of prudishness or a commitment to literal translation: either way, it is nonsense because in English (and most languages) this does not mean the same thing. The H text is not written in code, it is explicit about what it says. How to word it appropriately is another matter, but let us not say something that makes no sense. So also, in this passage, at 4:17 wayyéda‛ qáyin et ishto and yet again at 4:25 wayyéda‛ adam ‛od et ishto.
xawwa
Concerning the name of Eve, see my note on 3:20.
wattómer...
'And she said...' introduces a name game which purports to "explain" the name qáyin, referring it to the H verb root q-n-h (see following note). Compare the repeated formula whereby Jacob's wives name their sons in ch. 21-30. Note that apparently it is the mother who names her children (not the father, as is often suggested in other narratives). It has been suggested that the former practice corresponds to a more archaic stage in the development of Israelite society and therefore that the narratives where the mother names her children, such as this one, are likely to come from an older stratum.
qáyin, qaníti...
The name qáyin is associated, in Genesis, with the ethnonym qeni 'Kenite' (15:19); the Kenites are said to have been nomads. (However, if we wished to be literal, we would run into great difficulties connecting the Kenites to Cain on account of the Flood which wiped out all of humanity except for Noah's family; how, then, did the antediluvian descendants of Cain manage to seed a people found in the postdiluvian world that is not descended from Noah? Oops!) On the other hand, we should not take seriously the attempt in the present passage to make a far-fetched connection between qáyin's name and the verb q-n-h 'to acquire' (whence also 'to buy'; but on comparative evidence it is thought that an earlier meaning of this verb might have been 'to produce'). There is also a H word qáyin 'metalworker', but it is uncertain if they are really related. And here's something else: the name qáyin 'Cain' is also found in the compound name tuval-qáyin in the next passage (4:22), and it is also interesting that he has a half-brother called yaval (4:20), somewhat reminiscent of hével 'Abel' (in consonantal writing, they are just one letter off: הבל hével versus יבל yaval). I also wonder about the name tuval-qáyin itself: the first component also shares the last two letters of hével, so might not the tradition that speaks of a character called tuval-qáyin have had something to do with another tradition that speaks of two brothers, hével AND qáyin? In any case, this seems to suggests a possibility that there might have been another ancient tradition involving brothers with names similar to Cain and Abel, here both incorporated into a single "story line".
ish
Eve says she has acquired (or produced, originally?) a man: qaníti ish. Perhaps she means a male child as opposed to a female? EH contains the suggestion that the subtext of this might be: "I, woman, was produced from man; now I, woman, have in turn produced a man." Alternatively, she might just have meant 'a human being', using ish in that generic sense. The fact is that this passage is obscure.
et YHWH
This means 'with the Lord' or 'from the Lord', but the sense is unclear and thought to be corrupt.
4:2 hável / hével
Certain H words, which may happen to be proper names like this one is, possess two alternating forms, one of the shape XáYeZ and the other shaped XéYeZ; they represent the same word and the alternation is triggered by prosodic phenomena. The form with á, known as the pausal form, is thought to represent the more archaic shape of the two but only occurs before a pause, as the name indicates. In Greek and other translations, such names are sometimes transcribed using the name's pausal form, sometimes using the non-pausal form, giving rise to doublets or to different vowels in different languages (and at different places within the H text, of course). This is an example. It should be noted that MH has generalised the non-pausal form; thus the MH form of this name is Hével. On the other hand, this name happened to be adopted in Greek in the pausal form Abel, and that is what has stuck in other languages. Both may be considered equally "correct". This name is not "explained" in the text, and we do not know where it comes from either. It only occurs here. On a possible connection with yaval in 4:20, see note on qáyin in 4:1.
ro‛e tzon... ‛oved adama
Agriculture and animal husbandry were the two major components of the economy generally in the Israelites' "world". In terms of history at the macro level, agriculture was earlier and primary; it is a pre-requisite to the domestication of animals, although herds of sheep, cattle etc. may be moved from place to place to take advantage of available grazing, whereas agriculture by its nature requires a certain degree of sedentariness. The early Israelites seem to have seen themselves principally as herdsmen (cf. the constant references to this activity, much more frequent in Genesis than references to agriculture, and the explicit statements at the end of the Joseph cycle that the patriarchs tended herds and flocks (which made them abhorrent to the more "civilised" Egyptians, apparently). In this early story, the dichotomy is already set out symbolically in the persons of the first two brothers: Abel (the good guy and the younger brother, see my discussion of themes in Genesis) is a shepherd, whereas Cain works the earth.
4:3 way'hi
This is a form of the verb h-y-h literally meaning 'was' (in this case, 'it was'), and also '(it) happened' (see my note on the meanings of this verb in 1:3). But it is frequently employed, as here, as a sort of discourse marker, followed by a full clause (generally also introduced by wa-), thus: way'hi wa-... (CLAUSE), or as in this case, way'hi (TIME EXPRESSION) wa-... (CLAUSE). Literally this might be rendered as 'It happened that (CLAUSE)' and 'It happened (TIME EXPRESSION) that (CLAUSE).' This is the way it is translated in the KJV, except that this favours the time-worn refrain it came to pass where I have just said it happened. The problem is that while these might work, sort of, as literal translations, they do nothing for the naturalness and flow of the prose in the translation; in other words this is not good as a functional translation. How, then, ought we to translate way'hi in these cases? The answer is: we can't really translate it, its only function is to introduce the next statement in the narration and the English equivalent to that is just to say the next statement in the narration; no corresponding discourse particle is really used in English. Hence, way'hi should not be translated. Compare, therefore, KJV 'And in process of time (sic!) it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord', or Everett Fox's unfelicitous attempt to mimic the H with 'It was (= way'hi), after the passing of days / that Kayin brought, from the fruit of the soil, a gift to YHWH', with what I consider in this sense better English translations such as ESV 'In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground', JPS 'In the course of time, Cain brought an offering to the Lord from the fruit of the soil', or with NBIE's 'the days passed, Kain brought / fruit of the field to offer Our Lord.'
minxa
The first of many offerings narrated in Genesis (see my blog essay on the most frequent topics)! Given that the story is allegorical, it is no more pertinent to raise issues about "anachronism" regarding sacrifices than it is to worry about the amazing leap from agriculture to livestock in a single generation! Besides, perhaps it was just an intuitive act of thanksgiving: each brother did what they thought best, but for some reason God was more pleased with one than the other.
4:4 wayyisha‛
This verb, root sh-‛-h, also occurring in 4:5 as sha‛a, is found in only 15 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible, and in Genesis only here. It has cognates in Ug. and Akk. (EK) and is glossed 'gaze at, look at, care for.' Clearly in the context it is meant to denote approval. Translations include epeiden and proseskhen (LXX), respexit (Vulg.), had respect (KJV, obviously calqued from the Latin), had regard (ESV, a compromise between the KJV tradition and sense), paid heed (JPS). NBIE has: 'Our Lord looked at Habel and his gift / and Kain and his gift he did not see.'
4:5 w'el qáyin w'el minxato lo sha‛a
But why was God displeased with Kain's offering? We have absolutely no idea. Commentators conclude that here something must be missing from the story to make sense of it. That begs the question, why the omission? All we can surmise is: there must have been a reason. Another thing that seems, on the face of it, to be missing from the story is how it was known that God wasn't happy with Cain's offering: perhaps another omission? The only possible thing we have to go on, in the story as it stands, is the fact that Abel's was an animal sacrifice, and Cain's a vegetable one, or that Abel was a herdsman and Cain a farmer. Does God really prefer herdsmen to farmers??
wayyíxar qáyin m'od wayyipp'lu panaw
The H text, in good Semitic style, achieves emphasis by giving the same information twice in different words. The first clause, wayyíxar qáyin m'od 'Kain was very angry' is a direct, explicit statement of what happened; the second, wayyipp'lu panaw, lit. 'his face fell', uses an idiomatic expression, metaphorical but conventional. From the perspective of factual content, it might suffice for a prose translation to conflate this into just one clause, e.g. 'Cain was terribly annoyed', but in poetic terms that hardly reflects the feel. NBIE says, simply and directly: 'Kain was very angry, his face fell.' Poetically, the pair of synonymous clauses in its entirety is echoed back in 4:6 (NBIE): lámma xara lakh w'lámma naf'lu panékha 'why are you angry / why has your face fallen?'
4:7
On this difficult verse, see my comment at the top. For more discussion, see EAS, pp. 32-3, which is interesting but too long to repeat here.
4:8 wayyómer qáyin el hével axiw
There is evidently a lacuna here in the Masoretic text, which is filled in the LXX (dielthômen eis to pedion) and some other ancient translations: 'Let us go out into the field.'
4:9
This verse presents the briefest of exchanges between God and Cain. GOD: e xével axíkha CAIN: lo yadá‛ti 'Where is Abel, your brother? - I don't know' (compare God's question to Adam, ayékka 'Where are you?', in 3:9). The pragmatical meaning of this exchange is not the superficial one of God requesting information and Cain declining to provide it: God doesn't need Cain's response to know where Abel is, and they both know that Cain does know. Then comes Cain's famous retort: hashomer axi anókhi 'Am I my brothers keeper?'
4:10 mé ‛asíta
'What have you done?' another rhetorical question. (The a of ma 'what' has changed to an open e (segol) influenced by the following syllable ‛a- with initial ‛ayin. God doesn't wait for an answer.)
qol d'mey axíkha tzo‛aqim...
There are some minor syntactic issues to clarify here. The subject of the plural participle tzo‛aqim '[are] crying out' appears to be the chain of constructs qol d'me axikha 'the voice of the blood of your brother', except that (1) that is a singular, and tzo‛aqim is plural, and (2) d'me lit. 'bloods of' (sic) is plural, but what about qol 'voice of'? It seems that occasionally dam 'blood' is thus used, in the plural, to mean 'blood (that has been shed)', so the plural construct form d'me is kosher. The qol problem is a bit harder to resolve, but it might just be a case of strictly ungrammatical disagreement on account of attraction from the plural d'me. That seems credible enough, I should think. The JPS translation takes a different approach: 'Hark, your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground!' Here qol 'voice, sound' is interpreted not as a construct noun, the syntactic subject of the clause, but as an interjection meaning 'listen!' That is a usage only attested in one (other) verse in the whole Tanakh (Isaiah 40:3 and 6), which is given as uncertain in CHALOT, which together with the present verse makes two uncertain instances!
4:11 arur atta min ha'adama
Remember that adama is 'ground' in a physical sense (as opposed to eretz 'land' in a geographic sense). arur might mean 'cursed' or 'banished' (cf. note on 3:14), but this is in any case not a banishment from a place. Cain was the farmer, let us recall, and it is in this sense that his curse hits hardest: the earth he had tilled will no longer respond to him, and the reason (poetically) is that it has drunk his brother's blood shed by his own hand. Other proposed interpretations of this phrase are that it means 'cursed by the ground' or even 'more cursed than the ground' (JPS), which to make sense would have to refer back to Adam's curse with its obscure phrasing in 3:17, arura ha'adama ba‛avurékha 'cursed is the ground on your account' (possibly to be amended to ba‛avodékha '...on your tilling'), but that seems forced and makes little sense really. Better Speiser's 'banned from the soil.'
lo tosef tet koxah lakh
Lit. 'It will not continue to give its strength to you', hence KJV it shall no longer yield to you its strength, but in BH kóax 'strength' in association with 'ground, land' means 'produce' and is better so understood. NBIE 'it shall no longer produce for you.'
4:12 na‛ wanad
This is an alliterating hendiadys, to be compared to tóhu wavóhu (see note, 1:2). na‛ wanad tihye ba'áretz has been variously translated stenôn kai tremôn esêi epi tês gês (LXX), a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth (KJV), You shall become a ceaseless wanderer on earth (JPS), wavering and wandering must you be on earth! (EF), etc. In Nawat I have rendered this: wan tiasneki ka senkak / tikyawalua ne taltikpak 'and you will go away [i.e. move off from the place you are now] to wander around the earth'. The conjunction 'and' takes the form wa- here as a phonologically conditioned variant of the usual w-.
4:13 gadol ‛awoni minn'so
I.e. gadol 'big, great' ‛awon-i 'my guilt' min- 'from' n'so 'to lift, carry'. Following an adjective, min 'from' sometimes means 'than', requiring us to understand the preceding adjective as a comparative, hence: 'greater [is] my guilt than bearing.' It is often suggested that in this context ‛awon really refers not to the guilt but the punishment, although I don't see any need to draw too fine a distinction; we might simply call it 'burden' (metaphorically), so something like 'my burden is greater than [what anyone can] bear'. Older translations move within these limits, from the LXX meizôn hê aitia mou tou aphethênai me to the KJV my punishment is greater than I can bear (cf. Vulg. maior est iniquitas mea quam ut veniam merear). But if I am not mistaken, this construction, where the word following min is a verb, can also be translated as 'too (ADJECTIVE) to (VERB)', i.e. 'my burden is too great to bear', which sounds more like real English! In terms of grammar the real point here is that BH does not have dedicated structures expressing degrees of comparison (whether it be the comparative 'greater (than)' or the excessive 'too great (to)'), which can only be interpreted into a H sentence upon translation into European languages; whether these words "really mean" 'greater than [I can] bear' or 'too great to bear' is only a relevant question in English, not in Hebrew. Now in any case, explicit degrees of comparison are a rather peculiar European thing that is not part of the grammar of many other languages, so this may become a complete red herring; what we need to do is look at the H and see how it maps onto the target language. Nawat has no degrees of comparison (except when it calques them from Spanish), and my translation of this clause, nukimil wey / ken inte weli muselia literally says: 'my load is big / like it cannot be borne.'
4:14 hen geráshta oti hayyom
The general idea of this verse is fairly clear but some of the full syntactic nuances are a bit up in the air. The H words mean, on the face of it, 'hen you have banished me today...', where hen might be glossed as a presentative, actually untranslatable but which may be represented roughly as any of 'here', 'see', 'behold' or whatever, hence the KJV 'Behold, you have driven me out this day...', but in reality it can also be seen as a discourse connector, so Speiser, for example, translates this as 'Now that you have banished me...' and JPS gives 'Since you have banished me...' The LXX interpretes hen as 'if' (ei), which seems to imply that the whole clause is subordinated to the preceding 'my punishment is greater than I can bear'. But it might also be nice to get back to basics, consider hen untranslatable, and go with something like NBIE: 'so heavy is my load / that it cannot be borne / on this day you have chased me off, etc.'
umippanéykha essater
Lit. '(and) from your face I shall hide [myself]'. You can either go the literal route now, and say something like 'I will hide from your face', or the idiomatic route and render this more simply as 'I will hide from you.' It is an unending argument: the last phrase does sound more normal in English but it doesn't convey the fact that the H sentence has the word for 'face' in it. JPS has reformulated it as 'I must avoid your presence.' NBIE has 'I will hide away out of your sight.' But now for the bigger question: how do you hide from God's face (presence, sight etc.)? And also, in what way is physical banishment understood to lead to concealment from a universal God? Isn't God everywhere? Perhaps not, in the mind of the people who developed this story. And while these words are Cain's, God doesn't exactly contradict him on it, he just offers a palliative. (The same idea is reinforced by v. 16, JPS: wayyetze qáyin millifne YHWH 'Cain left the presence of the Lord.') Maybe that is why the Onk. translation of this sentence says something different: instead of 'I shall hide from your face' it says umin qadamakh let efshar l'iTT'mara 'and from before you it is impossible to hide'! But let us bear in mind that Onkelos represents a more recent tradition than the H original; the amendment is understandable, but the question remains unchanged. All we learn from this is that by the time of Onk., the problem had been noticed.
w'haya khol motz'i yahargéni
'And whoever finds me will kill me.' (For w'haya, see my not on way'hi in 4:3.) This is troubling for readers committed to literal acceptance of this as a single continuous narrative representing absolute truth, for who was going to find him? But there is actually nothing intrinsic to the story of Cain and Abel making it necessary for narrative purposes for these brothers to have been the first people after Adam and Eve; even the introduction of these characters belongs to the present narrative itself, not to the story of Adam and Eve. In reality then, these are in origin surely separate myths that have been quite deftly stitched together, but here a bit of the seam is left showing.
4:15 lakhen
This means 'therefore.' The LXX translation oukh houtôs 'not so!' is due to a (mis?)reading of lakhen as lo khen 'not so' (or maybe as the Aramaic equivalent la khen?). This reading was transferred to the Vulg. (nequaquam 'no way') and has slipped into some English translations, e.g. ESV 'Not so!' The KJV has none of this, and says 'therefore.' Who is right? Perhaps it doesn't matter a great deal, but some of the translations around make some curious choices (perhaps because the translators suspected the MT might be corrupt but didn't have the courage to challenge it?), so for example Fox here has 'no, therefore', which (apart from being excruciatingly unidiomatic) is having your cake and eating it but unsupported by the text: consonantal LKN might be for lakhen 'therefore' or for lo khen 'not so' but can hardly represent 'no therefore', however you cut it. JPS escapes involvement by doing it's own original thing, and says 'I promise' (which is neither lakhen nor lo khen).
shiv‛atáyim yuqqam
The form yuqqam is not from the verb q-w-m 'rise' but a passive of n-q-m 'to avenge'. shiv‛atáyim 'seven times, sevenfold' may or may not have had a strictly literal, legal sense once, but it seems fair to say that eventually at least this came to be understood, and still is, as a hyperbolic expression.
ot
There is no end to fruitless speculation about what kind of a sign was placed on Cain. The text makes it clear that the "mark of Cain" was not meant to identify him as a murderer, but to afford him protection. All commentators agree that Cain's punishment was exile, not this sign. Beyond that we may only guess. It has been suggested that perhaps the Kenites, who were metonymically identified with Cain (see note on 4:1), bore some mark or other on their bodies (as others were circumcised?), for which unknown mark this story would have functioned as an etiology.
4:16 millifne YHWH
See note on umippanékha essater in 4:14.
b'éretz nod qidmat ‛éden
No one has any idea where the land of Nod is (except of course that it's "east of Eden", see below). In the LXX it is vocalized naid. Nod (or Naid) is obviously connected, by folk etymology at the very least, to the nad of na‛ wanad (see v. 12 above), so we have a name game going on, but usually these explain extant names, not made-up ones. Some translations actually read nod (however they vocalized it in their reading) as a form of the verb rather than as a name of a place, and so we find, for instance, this rather elaborate paraphrase in Onk.: un'faq qáyin 'and Cain left' min qadam YY 'from before the Lord' witev b'ar'a 'and resided in a land' gale umTulTal (this is the same phrase used in 4:14 to translate na‛ wanad, except the order has been reversed, there it was m'TulTal w'gale) d'hawat ‛avida ‛alóhi 'which was made for his sake' mill'qadmin k'ginn'ta d'‛éden 'to the east of the garden of Eden.' "And Cain left the Lord and lived in a land as a wanderer (?) which was created for him to the east of the garden of Eden." This amounts to the same thing said (more succinctly) in the Vulg.: egressusque Cain a facie Domini habitavit in terra profugus ad orientalem plagam Eden. No land of Nod! But most modern translations, starting with KJV, have reinstated the land of Nod. And this land is located, like everything else now seems to be, to the east of Eden. Which may be a nod (ouch!) back to the preceding passage and to continuity in this parasha; if you notice, there has been no other allusion at all to the Eden story in this passage, except indirectly in v. 1 through the mention of Adam and Eve. And with this passing allusion to Eden, the history of the world is now fast-forwarded as we move on to the tol'dot ("generations") section.
4:17 ishto
If we knew who were the kol motz'i in v. 14, i.e. the mysterious people who were going to find Cain after his expulsion, we might now also guess where ishto, his wife, is supposed to have come from.
xanokh
This is the English Enoch, cf. LXX enôkh, Vulg. enoch. Acc. to the text, the town was named after its builder. Knowing what we do about name games in G, it is easy to guess that if there were a city called xanokh, this is probably intended to account for its name. There are several candidates, none of them certain, for identifications of such a place.
4:18 metushael
See my observation in the introductory comments. Acc. to EAS, "the name Methusael is transparently Akk., at least in its components and formation; it reflects mutu-ša-ili, apparently 'Man of God'."
4:20-22 yaval, yuval, tuval qáyin
The qáyin in tuval qáyin 'Tubal-cain' is a H common noun meaning 'smith', which is the profession attributed to this character, so maybe his name was really just tuval. It has been pointed out (CB p. 121) that the three brothers' names together almost seem to make a jingle: the three brothers, yaval, yuval and tuval. Note also, for what it's worth, the partial similarity of these names with hável or hével, Eng. 'Abel', who is the brother of another Cain (qáyin). See 4:2 above.
4:23-24 wayyómer lémekh l'nashaw...
Concerning Lamech himself, see my observations in the general comments and also in those on the next passage. I will quote a paragraph from CB concerning these verses (p. 123):
These verses are a short poem, much older than the genealogy in which they stand. They are, no doubt, one of the oldest portions of the material out of which the Primitive Document was compiled, and indeed of extant Hebrew literature. Note the 'parallelism' which is the characteristic form of Hebrew poetry. There are six short lines, the second repeats in a slightly different form the sense of the first; the forth that of the third; and the sixth expresses an idea corresponding to that of the fifth.To expand on this, let me also quote a few lines from the notes in EH (p. 29):
This is a representative example of biblial Hebrew poetic style. Although it displays neither meter nor rhyme in the present sense of these terms, it does have a notable rhythm. Its formal structure is known as "parallelism," a feature of biblical and Canaanite poetry. The second line of a couplet restates the thought of the first line in different words, as here. The second line could also supplement the first, be antithetical to it, or be the climax of the poem.It adds: "The poem itself perhaps explains the origin of the nomadic institution of blood vengeance. [23. I have slain a man] Lamech's taunts, threats and boasts are of the kind customarily uttered in ancient times by those about to engage in combat."
4:26 enosh
This word, here treated as a proper name (wayyiqra et sh'mo enosh 'and he called him [lit. his name] Enosh'), is generally a common noun meaning 'human being'; it is practically a synonym, therefore, of adam. This circumstance has given rise to certain conjectures, such as that perhaps there was another tradition (besides the Adam tradition) in which the first human was called Enosh. Concerning the etymological root ('-n-sh), cf. the very common plural anashim 'men', which is used as the suppletive plural of ish 'man'.
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