An interesting tangent to the language discussion is the Epic of Gilgamesh => https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-epic-o...
Gilgamesh deserves that. I'm only a beginner but the refinement of the poetry is already obvious even as someone who doesn't know the language.
Euphony was very important to the Mesopotamian poets. They liked rhythms and alliteration and assonance. And the late editions of Gilgamesh reflect about two thousand years of iterative improvement:
> ilū işinu iriša. ilū kima zūmbē eli bēl niqi iptaḫru. ("The gods could smell the fragrance. They gathered around the sacrificiant like flies.")
The ş is probably an affricate like ts, š is sh, q like in Arabic, ḫ like German ch. Vowels like in Spanish or the phonetic alphabet. Macron means a long vowel. Stress on the penultimate. (Edit: fixed ş / š)
It really rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
> ibri kudanu ťardu akkannu ša šadi nimru ša şēri ("my friend the swift driven mule, wild ass of the mountains, panther of the wild")
> ibri ša arammušu danniš ittīa ittallaku kalu marşāti ("my friend, whom I loved greatly, who journeyed with me through every hardship")
> ikšudāššu šimat ("fate overtook [him...]" the tablet breaks off here)
The very moral in Gilgamesh deserves that. "I went in a quest for immortality; I did not achieve it and came back, and while returning I saw in the distance the City I built, and I understood what my immortality was...".
(A "must" of an insight for engineers, architects, builders...)
In the Bible the city builder was Cain, and he built it because he was a criminal and needed protection from the world when he lost God's grace.
I.e., the message is that a city is a kind of protective exoskeleton or "safe space" when man becomes estranged from God (the Universe).
It's a story about man's fragility and ultimate futility.
A more orthodox interpretation is that Cain's line is the urban, civilization-creating line, you have metallurgy, music, cities, trade, all coming from that line. This is because Cain represented agriculture, whereas Abel represented cattle herding, thus nomadic, not rooted lifestyles.
After Cain killed Abel (e.g. sedentary agriculture replaced nomadism in most places), it was natural for Cain to build a city as he was not nomadic. It was not for "protection" from his fellow man, but merely the continuation of his choice to be a tiller of the soil rather than a wandering nomad. God's demand for Cain to be a "wanderer" in the land of "nod" ("literally 'land of wandering' in Hebrew") is thus the opposite of what Cain did -- he settled down and built a city. This creates a nice picture: Cain choose not to be a wanderer (nomadic cattle herder) but to be a farmer (settle in one place). God told him "You will be a wanderer" but then it says that Cain built a city. So is the message -- those who are rooted in one place on earth are spiritual wanderers, and those who wander are the rooted ones?
Of course everyone is free to read Genesis and get all sorts of meanings out of it, it is ultimately a personal exercise according to your own conscience, but when you say that your reading is the correct one and other people are "mistaken", then you better be able to back it up with some kind of consensus view.
FYI, more modern scholarship has noticed that the seven generations of Cain line up with the 7 "sages" in Sumerian accounts, these were the sages that came from the deep and taught the Sumerians agriculture, metallurgy, etc, and people have been exploring associations between the names of these sages and the names in the line of Cain.
Another interesting area of the study is that the lines of Shem are basically the same names as that of Cain, but Shem has three more figures. That certainly isn't an accident - the documentary hypothesis people say it is the same line, just copied over from different places, but that is an old view and I think a minority one. There are all sorts of discussions about that similarity.
No, it's the standard Christian exegesis.
That's not even Biblical, as God provides Cain with protection via the mark that he placed on Cain. The building of the city has, as I pointed out, nothing to do with self-protection from "loss of God's grace" (nowhere in the Bible does it say that Cain lost God's grace, and the mark itself as in act of grace to save Cain from being killed).
Let's look at standard Christian exegesis:
* Augustine provides the definitive patristic interpretation. According to Augustine, Cain building a city was an expression of his desire to remain tied to the land (a tiller of the soil) rather than a wanderer (cattle herding, as Abel). See The City of God (Book XV, Chapters 1 and 20). Augustine picks up on this as it is his own theme of the two cities: the earthly city (civitas terrena) and the heavenly city (civitas dei). Augustine says that Cain, as the first murderer, founded the earthly city, whereas Abel was a pilgrim and stranger who founded nothing on earth, but entered into the heavenly city.
* Later medieval commentators, such as Nicholas of Lyra and the Glossators, reinforced Augustine's interpretation, contrasting Cain's urbanization with the nomadic, tent-dwelling lifestyle of the patriarchs, accusing Cain of being worldly in his desires. E.g. it was an expression of Cain's desire, his teleos, and not a defense mechanism.
* Moving onto the reformation, in Lectures on Genesis, Luther views Cain as the archetype of the secular, worldly church opposed to the suffering church of Abel. Luther notes that while those who look for the heavenly city choose to dwell in tents as pilgrims, Cain builds a permanent habitation. Constructing a city represents an attempt to find rest, satisfaction, and permanence in the earthly sphere precisely because he is cut off from God.
* Looking at John Calvin, in Commentary on Genesis he also agrees with Augustine, arguing that Cain's establishment of a city marks the entrenchment of a society organized around immanent, earthly flourishing rather than faith.
Interestingly, some rabbinical commentators argue that in Lamech's grisly song "I have killed a man", that Lamech is talking about Cain -- e.g that Cain was murdered, accidentally, by Lamech, his descendant. The midrash in Genesis Rabbah is that the mark of Cain was a horn that grew out of Cain's head, and Lamech was a blind hunter who was guided by his son. The son saw a movement in the bushes and the horn, mistaking it for a wild animal, and Lamech fired his arrow, killing Cain. Thus God's grace extended only to seven generations. But Christian commentators do not argue for a seven generation time limit on God's protection, and assume Cain died of natural causes.
Exactly, and yet he still built a walled city. Why? For the same reason why Adam and Eve suddenly realized they were naked after falling from grace.
P.S. Neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants have anything approaching a standard Christian exegesis. Both traditions are way out there and are diverging significantly from Christianity.
That's not correct, in transcriptions of Akkadian š is pronounced sh (Heb. shin), ṣ (not ş) is pronounced ts (Heb. tsade), and there's also s, pronounced as regular s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory#Pronunciation
I guess it's quite an imperfect analogy, because we have Akkadian writing (by people who actually spoke the language) and we have no equivalent at all for PIE.