Genesis 4:15

Summary

Yehovah responds to Cain, declaring that whoever kills him will suffer sevenfold vengeance, and then places a sign on Cain so that no one who finds him will strike him down. The verse combines a divine pronouncement (protecting Cain from being killed) with a concrete protective sign.

Key words

• lakhen ("therefore", H3651C) — an adverb introducing Yehovah's ruling; it links the statement to what precedes as a consequence or decree.
• horeg ("[one who] kills", H2026) — a qal participle in construct form, describing a generic, ongoing category of person ("anyone who kills," not a single completed act).
• shiv'atayim ("sevenfold", H7659) — a dual form of the number seven, expressing multiplication ("seven times over") rather than a simple count of seven.
• yuqam ("he will be avenged", H5358) — a hophal (causative-passive) imperfect: the subject undergoes the action of being avenged, with the imperfect aspect leaving it open as future or general.
• 'ot ("a sign", H0226H) — feminine singular noun, the object Yehovah "sets" (vayyasem) for Cain; grammatically it is simply "a sign," without further specification of its nature in the text.

What the text says

The verse is built from two narrative clauses joined by the vav-consecutive construction (va-yomer … va-yasem, "and he said… and he set…"), typical of Hebrew narrative sequencing. In the first clause, Yehovah's speech is introduced by lakhen ("therefore"), followed by a construct chain: kol-horeg Qayin ("any killer of Cain"), where the participle horeg functions as a generic agent noun in construct with the proper name Qayin. This construction does not specify a single event but a category of potential act. The verb yuqam, in the hophal, marks the one who kills Cain as the passive recipient of avenging action — the grammar itself expresses reciprocity without naming who performs the avenging.

The second clause shifts to Yehovah's action: vayyasem … 'ot ("and he set … a sign"). The purpose clause lebilti hakot 'oto uses the negative particle bilti with the hiphil infinitive hakot ("to strike"), producing "so as not to strike him" — a causative infinitive construction indicating intended prevention of harm, tied to kol-motze'o ("anyone who finds him"), another participle in construct expressing a general class of persons.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew lakhen ("therefore") is rendered in the LXX as "Οὐχ οὕτως" ("Not so") and in the Vulgate as "Nequaquam ita fiet" ("It shall by no means be so") — both versions introduce a negation absent from the Hebrew adverb, altering the logical connective from consequence to contradiction. Additionally, the LXX's participle "ὁ ἀποκτείνας" (aorist, "the one who killed") frames the act as completed, whereas the Hebrew horeg is a present/generic participle ("the one who kills"), a nuance not preserved identically across the Greek rendering.