Genesis 4:8

Summary

Cain speaks to his brother Abel, proposing they go to the field; once there, Cain rises against Abel and kills him. The Hebrew narrative uses a chain of consecutive verb forms to move rapidly from speech to violence, marking Cain as the sole grammatical subject throughout.

Key words

• nelkhah ("let us go", H1980G) — qal cohortative/imperfect, first-person plural: an invitation or proposal ("let us go"), the content of what Cain says to Abel.
• vayyaqom ("he rose up", H6965B) — qal narrative (vayyiqtol) form, third-person masculine singular: continues the story's timeline, "and then he rose."
• 'achiv ("his brother", H0251G) — construct noun + pronominal suffix, appearing twice (once after the invitation, once before the killing), each time identifying Abel by his relation to Cain.
• vayyahargehu ("and he killed him", H2026) — qal narrative verb with third-person object suffix hu ("him", H9033), fusing verb and object into a single word.
• 'el ("to"/"against", H0413) — the same preposition used first for speech directed to Abel (line 4) and later for the action taken against Abel (line 21).

What the text says

The verse is built entirely on narrative (vayyiqtol) verb forms — vayyomer ("he said"), vayehi ("it was"), vayyaqom ("he rose"), vayyahargehu ("he killed him") — which in Biblical Hebrew signal sequential action: one event follows directly on the last. Cain is the grammatical subject of every verb; Abel appears only as the addressee or object, marked by the preposition 'el and the possessive phrase 'achiv ("his brother"), repeated in both the speech and the killing scene. This repetition of 'achiv ties the two moments together verbally, framing the killing explicitly in terms of the brother relationship each time Abel is named.

The clause nelkhah ha-sadeh ("let us go [into] the field", H1980G + H7704G) is formed with a cohortative verb, expressing a proposal or suggestion rather than a plain future statement. The temporal clause bihyotam ba-sadeh ("when/in their being in the field") uses an infinitive construct with pronominal suffix (-am, "they/their") plus the preposition bi- ("in/when"), a common Hebrew construction for marking simultaneity ("while they were...").

Differences between versions

The Hebrew text given here contains the words nelkhah ha-sadeh ("let us go [into] the field") as the content of what Cain says to Abel. The LXX renders this as Διέλθωμεν εἰς τὸ πεδίον ("let us go through/across into the plain/field"), matching the Hebrew in content. The Vulgate instead reads Egrediamur foras ("let us go out/outside"), omitting mention of "the field" at this point, though it retains "in agro" ("in the field") in the following clause.