Genesis 4:17

Summary

The verse reports that Cain had sexual relations with his wife, who conceived and bore a son named Enoch. It further states that a city was being built, which was named after this son, Enoch.

Key words

• yeda' ("he knew", H3045) — qal narrative form of the verb "to know," used here as an idiom for sexual intercourse; the narrative vav marks it as the next event in the story sequence.
• tahar ("she conceived", H2029) — qal narrative, third person feminine, continuing the chain of consecutive actions begun with yeda'.
• boneh ("building", H1129) — a qal participle, not a finite verb. It combines with the preceding yehi ("he was", H1961) to form a periphrastic construction, "he was building," expressing an ongoing or durative action rather than a single completed act.
• yiqra ("he called", H7121) — qal narrative, introducing the naming act that closes the sentence.
• shem ("name of", H8034) — a masculine singular noun in construct form, used twice: once for "the name of the city" and once for "the name of his son," linking the two through shared vocabulary rather than repeating "Enoch" needlessly.

What the text says

The verse is built as a chain of narrative (vav-consecutive) verbs — yeda', tahar, teled, yiqra — each introduced by the narrative vav, which strings the events together as a sequence: knowing, conceiving, bearing, and naming. This chain is interrupted once, at yehi boneh ("he was building"), where a finite verb plus participle replaces the expected narrative verb form. This periphrastic construction marks the building of the city as a background or ongoing process, distinct in aspect from the punctual actions surrounding it.

A grammatical ambiguity worth noting is the subject of yehi boneh ("he was building") and yiqra ("he called"). Both verbs carry only a third-person masculine singular subject marker, with no explicit noun given. The nearest named male antecedent is Chanokh ("Enoch", H2585G), the son, though Cain remains the main subject of the surrounding narrative chain. The Hebrew text itself does not resolve which of the two performed the building and naming.

Differences between versions

The LXX preserves the periphrastic aspect with ἦν οἰκοδομῶν ("was building"), mirroring the Hebrew yehi boneh construction. The Vulgate instead renders this as a simple perfect, aedificavit ("he built"), collapsing the durative nuance of the Hebrew participle into a single completed action. Both LXX and Vulgate retain the same grammatical ambiguity as the Hebrew regarding who performs the building and naming, since neither supplies an explicit subject noun at that point.