Fernand-Anne Piestre Cormon's painting titled "Cain flying before Jehovah's Curse", c. 1880, Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
The Land of Nod (’eretz-Nod) is a place in the Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible, located "ON the east of Eden" (qidmet-‘Eden), to which Cain chose to flee after murdering his brother Abel. The Hebrew word nod means "wandering".
- "And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod,on the east of Eden." (Genesis 4:16, King James Version)
"Nod" (נוד) is the Hebrew root of the verb "to wander" (לנדוד) and is possibly an etymological etiology intended to explain the nomadic lifestyle of Cain and his descendants, the Cainites. One interpretation of Genesis 4:16 is that Cain was cursed to wander the land forever, not that he was exiled to a "Land of Wanderers", otherwise absent from the Old Testament.
Genesis 4:17 relates that after arriving in the land of Nod, Cain's wife bore him a son, Enoch, in whose name he built the first city.
| This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors). |