Genesis 4:6

Summary

Yehovah addresses Cain directly with two parallel questions built on physical/bodily idioms: one asking why something "burns" toward him, and another asking why his "face" has "fallen." Both are conventional Hebrew expressions for emotional distress, rendered by later versions as "anger" and a "downcast/fallen countenance."

Key words

• va-yomer ("and he said", H0559) — qal verb with narrative vav, the standard formula introducing direct speech in the sequence of events.
• charah ("does it burn", H2734) — qal perfect, third person; describes a completed state of "burning," idiomatically used for strong emotion, here without an explicit subject noun.
• lamah ("why?", H4100) — interrogative pronoun, repeated twice (line 7 and 13), structuring the verse as two matched rhetorical questions joined by ve- ("and", H9002).
• naflu ("have they fallen", H5307G) — qal perfect, third person plural; the plural verb agrees with the plural noun panekha.
• panekha ("your face", H6440H + H9021) — noun panim ("face") in construct plural form with the second-person masculine suffix "your"; grammatically plural in Hebrew even though it refers to a single face.

What the text says

The verse is built as two symmetrical clauses, each opened by the interrogative lamah ("why?", H4100) and each using a qal perfect verb describing a bodily/emotional state rather than a direct statement of feeling. In the first clause, charah ("does it burn", H2734) has no explicit grammatical subject in the words given; the construction lecha ("to/for you") with the preposition and suffix (words 9–10) indicates that the "burning" happens to or for Cain, an impersonal construction typical of Hebrew descriptions of emotion, where the emotion itself is treated as an active force affecting the person rather than a state the person possesses.

The second clause uses naflu ("have they fallen", H5307G), a plural verb, matched with the grammatically plural noun panekha ("your face", H6440H+H9021). In Hebrew, panim ("face") is grammatically plural even when referring to a single face, so the plural verb agrees with the plural noun rather than indicating multiple faces. The two clauses together use parallel structure — interrogative + perfect verb + prepositional phrase with second-person suffix — to frame two related but distinct physical images: something "burning" toward Cain, and his "face" having "fallen."

Differences between versions

The LXX renders the first clause with perílypos egénou ("you became very sorrowful"), a Greek adjectival construction describing a state of grief, where the Hebrew charah ("does it burn", H2734) uses the "burning" idiom without specifying the exact emotion named. The Vulgate uses iratus es ("you are angry"), explicitly naming anger, whereas the Hebrew verb itself does not contain a word specifically meaning "anger." For the second clause, the LXX has synépesen to prósōpón sou ("your face collapsed/fell together"), and the Vulgate concidit facies tua ("your face has fallen"), both matching the Hebrew image of the face "falling" (naflu panekha, H5307G + H6440H) more closely than the first clause's rendering of charah.