The Gift of Prophecy

Genesis 4:1: The Expectation of Adam and Eve That Cain Would Be the Messiah

Another example of the correlation between Scripture in the original language and Ellen White’s insights is found in her comments on the thinking of Adam and Eve when their first child, Cain, was born. White writes: “The Savior’s coming was foretold in Eden. When Adam and Eve first heard the promise, they looked for its speedy fulfillment. They joyfully welcomed their firstborn son, hoping that he might be the Deliverer. But the fulfillment of the promise tarried.” ²¹ Can this thinking of Adam and Eve be substantiated from Scripture? Some years ago I was reading Genesis 4 in my Hebrew Bible and serendipitously came across something I had never noticed before in verse 1: “Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, and said, ‘I have acquired a man [child]’ ”— and then most English versions translate— “with the help of the Lord.” But as is apparent in modern versions of the Bible that place the supplied words in italics (e.g., KJV, NKJV, NASB), the phrase “the help of’ is not present in the Hebrew original. GOP 160.2

In the Hebrew of this verse, immediately after the word “man [child, Heb. ’ish]” comes the particle ’et, which can either represent the preposition “with” or be an indicator that the next word is a direct object in the sentence. Translating simply as a preposition, “with the Lord,” does not really make any sense in the immediate context. ²² One must add “the help of” as many modern translations do, but an examination of other passages in Scripture using this particle as the preposition “with” reveals no clear examples where it can mean “with the help of.” Thus the addition of “the help of’ seems unlikely as the best translation. GOP 160.3

The alternative that remains is to take the particle ’et as the sign of the direct object, which in English can be represented by a one-em dash. So the translation of this verse would be: “I have gotten a Man Child—the Lord!” This translation makes good sense, and the grammatical construction is paralleled elsewhere in Scripture. ²³ Thus I conclude that translating ’et as a direct object is the best choice in this verse. This is the translation represented, for example, in the New American Standard Bible in the margin. Evangelical scholars such as Walter Kaiser have carefully analyzed this passage and have come to the same conclusion. ²⁴ This text implies that when Adam and Eve were naming Cain, they were thinking He might be the promised messianic Seed, Yahweh Himself. They hoped that the Messiah had come, only to find out that Cain was not the Messiah but a murderer. GOP 161.1

Ellen White under inspiration wrote what was consistent with the biblical data, as revealed in the Hebrew original. GOP 161.2