Genesis 4:12
The sentence
A fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. The punishment is not a prison, it is the loss of a place to stand.
Places of the Bible
The land of Nod
A country named for wandering, east of the garden, where the first city was built.
Nod is where Cain goes after the sentence, and the name carries the sentence with it: it means wandering. The account gives it no rivers, no borders and no neighbours, only a direction, east of Eden. Then it records something that sits oddly against a name like that. The first man condemned to wander is the first man to build a city, and he names it after his son.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of The land of Nod
- 01
- 02
Genesis 4:16
Away from the presence
He goes out and settles east of Eden, and the account marks the direction as carefully as it marked the garden.
- 03
Genesis 4:17
The first city
The wanderer builds walls and gives them his son's name. Exile answers itself with architecture.
Why it matters
Nod is the Bible's first picture of exile as a place rather than an event, and the first hint that people answer exile by building. The city rising in the land of wandering is a pattern the rest of Scripture returns to, all the way to Babel and Babylon.
2 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
