Genesis 4:1

Summary

Genesis 4:1 records that ha'adam ("the man", H0120H) had sexual relations with Chavah ("Eve", H2332), his ishto ("his wife", H0802H), who conceived and gave birth to Qayin ("Cain", H7014B). Eve then explains the birth with a statement using the verb qaniti ("I have acquired", H7069).

Key words

• yada' ("he knew", H3045) — qal perfect, third person masculine singular; the completed-action verb used here for the man's relation with his wife.
• 'et (H0853) — the direct object marker, appearing twice (before Chavah and before Qayin) to signal the grammatical object of the verbs yada' and teled; it has no independent meaning of its own.
• tahar ("she conceived", H2029) and teled ("she bore", H3205) — both qal narrative (vav-consecutive) forms, chaining the sequence of events: knowing → conceiving → bearing.
• qaniti ("I have acquired", H7069) — qal perfect, first person singular; Eve's own verb describing the acquisition/production of the child, phonetically close to the name Qayin.
• 'et (H0854) — a preposition meaning "with," distinct in form from the object marker (H0853) though written identically, introducing Yehovah at the end of Eve's statement.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of four narrative clauses linked by the vav-narrative construction: the man "knew" his wife (perfect tense, marking a completed event that sets up the sequence), then "she conceived," "she bore," and "she said" (each in the narrative/vav-consecutive form that Hebrew uses to move a story forward step by step). The object marker 'et (H0853) appears twice, marking Chavah as the object of yada' and Qayin as the object of teled, with no semantic content of its own—it simply flags the grammatical object.

The final clause, Eve's speech, contains a grammatical ambiguity: the sequence 'et-Yehovah uses the preposition 'et (H0854, "with"), which is spelled the same as the object marker but functions differently. Read as "with Yehovah," the sense would be that Eve acquired a man "with," i.e., in the company of or with the help of, Yehovah — though the data here only shows the preposition's basic gloss "with," not a caused or instrumental sense. The name Qayin ("Cain") and the verb qaniti ("I have acquired") in Eve's speech both stem from the same root, so her explanatory sentence phonetically echoes the child's name.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew 'et-Yehovah (preposition "with," H0854) is rendered by the LXX as dia tou theou ("through/because of God") and by the Vulgate as per Deum ("through/by God"), both shifting from a simple "with" relation to a causal or instrumental one. The BSB reflects this same instrumental reading ("with the help of the LORD"), while the Hebrew word-by-word data itself only supports the base gloss "with," without specifying help, agency, or cause.