- mark of Cain -


In Christianity and Judaism, the mark of Cain refer to the passages in the Biblical Book of Genesis where God declared that Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, was cursed for murdering his brother, and placed a mark upon him to warn others that killing Cain would provoke the vengeance of God.


There is no clear consensus as to what Cain's mark would be. The word translated as "mark" in Gen. 4:15 is 'owth, which could mean a sign, an omen, a warning, or a remembrance. In the Torah, the same word is used to describe the stars as signs or omens, the rainbow as the sign of the flood (Gen. 9:12), circumcision as a token of God's covenant with Abraham, and the miracles performed by Moses before the Pharaoh. Thus, the text of the Bible only explicitly describes how the mark was to function as a sign or warning, not what form the mark took.

Cain's mark has been interpreted in several ways. Following the literal Biblical text, most scholars interpret the "mark" as a warning to others, but are unable to determine the form of the mark from the Biblical text.

In 18th century America and Europe, it was commonly assumed that Cain's "mark" was black skin, and that Cain's descendants were black and still under Cain's curse. However, it is now widely considered to be a justification of racism.

The Zohar, a Kabbalistic text, states that the mark of Cain was one of the twenty-two Hebrew letters of the Torah, although the Zohar's native Aramaic doesn't actually tell us which of the letters it was. Some commentators, such as Rabbi Michael Bergin in his English commentary on the Zohar, suggest that the mark of Cain was the letter vav.