The Family of Cain
“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
Wives of Lamech, listen to my speech!
For I have1 killed a man for wounding me,
Even a young man1 for hurting me.
Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.”
| << Genesis 4:16 | Genesis 4:18 >> |
What Does Genesis 4:17 Mean?
Genesis 4:16-17
Christ, our example, did not observe one of today's heresies, the lunar Sabbath (which counts the Sabbath from each new moon). As recorded in Luke 4:16-17 (HCSB), Christ “came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. As usual, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to Him. . . .”
The Jews, as Paul wrote in Romans 3:2, had received the “oracles” (that is, the revelation or the words) of God. The Torah contains many of those “oracles,” including the oracle of the seventh-day Sabbath. God deeply engrained the correct Sabbath day into the consciousness of the children of Israel during their wanderings in the wilderness of Zin, and, as a result of this weekly reminder by the absence of manna on the Sabbath, they came to enshrine that day into what has come to be called the Hebrew calendar.
During Christ's time on earth, the Jews continued to keep the correct weekly occasion. If Christ had kept the lunar Sabbath, chances are He would have been reading to an empty room that day in the synagogue. There would have been no one present there to hand Him the scroll of Isaiah. The Jews would have been elsewhere.
The Jews certainly took exception to the way Jesus kept the Sabbath. For instance, they expressed their dismay when His disciples plucked corn on the Sabbath or when He healed on the Sabbath. However, the Jewish leadership had no issue with the day He kept. If they had such an issue, we certainly would read about it in the Gospels. Yet, that issue never arose.
The absence of any dispute over the correct day is an “argument from absence” that Christ kept the same weekly Sabbath that the Jews did—the same day they still keep. He kept the same weekly occasion the church of God keeps today. It is the seventh-day Sabbath, the Sabbath described in Genesis 2:2-3 and in Exodus 20:8-11.
Charles Whitaker
The Lunar Sabbath or the Seventh-Day Sabbath: Which?
Genesis 4:17-22
This passage records the foundation of humanity's development of a more complex system of community living, including that of agriculture, art, and technology. God surely intended more complex human communal systems to arise, but since these are descendants of Cain, Scripture indicates that they were not working alongside God to produce these developments. Their planning and building are deliberately undertaken apart from God. The fruit of such development produced the evil society before the Flood.
John W. Ritenbaugh
Ecclesiastes and Christian Living (Part Fourteen): A Summary
Other Forerunner Commentary entries containing Genesis 4:17:
| << Genesis 4:16 | Genesis 4:18 >> |
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