Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Genesis 4:7
Sin lieth at the door. Its desire is to thee, and thou shalt rule over it. The same crouching-word, and the same two words as 3:16.
Genesis 4:7, in every translation this tool compares.
The dog is lying by the door. Harmless. Now imagine the word for lying also names a predator waiting in ambush at a doorway in a neighboring language and culture. Lieth sounds passive in English; the word behind it does not.
Because the word for sin lying at the door is the same word Akkadian uses for a demon crouching at a threshold to ambush whoever comes through, and the verse then repeats, almost word for word, the marriage sentence just given to Eve four verses earlier, only now aimed at her son.
Every English version reads lieth, croucheth, or is crouching, all correctly neutral. Almost none of the popular translations use anything that suggests an ambush or a personified threat, though one modern academic version, the New English Bible, does render it demon.
רֹבֵץ rovets (רָבַץ ravats) · H7257 / תְּשׁוּקָה teshuqah, מָשַׁל mashal · H8669, H4910
Rovets is a participle of the common verb for an animal lying down, but this personified use of sin as the subject crouching at a door closely resembles the Akkadian rabisu, a demon that lurks at thresholds to attack. Whether the Hebrew word is a deliberate echo of that image or simply the ordinary verb applied metaphorically is debated, but the doorway setting matches the Akkadian pattern closely. The same verse then reuses teshuqah, desire, and the verb mashal, rule over, the identical pairing used of the woman and the man at Genesis 3:16, this time offered to Cain as a warning rather than a sentence.
English lieth or crouches names a posture; it carries none of the threshold-demon association some scholars hear behind the Hebrew word, and English has no way to signal that the sentence structure repeats 3:16's marriage language word for word, since a reader would need to notice both verses share teshuqah and mashal in Hebrew to catch it at all.
A common word placed in an unusual setting, here an animal-word applied to sin at a doorway, can carry connotations from the culture's wider vocabulary that a plain gloss will not show. And when a rare phrase repeats verbatim a few verses apart, as teshuqah plus mashal does here, treat the second occurrence as commentary on the first.
Lieth or crouches is the safe, literal rendering every version uses. Whether to import the Akkadian demon imagery is a judgment call resting on comparative Semitic philology rather than the Hebrew word by itself, which is exactly why mainstream translations have stayed with the neutral gloss.
- Akkadian rabisu as a threshold demon: standard Assyriology reference works on Mesopotamian demonology
- The same teshuqah-mashal pairing at Genesis 3:16
- E. A. Speiser's Anchor Bible commentary discusses the demonic-crouching reading
