A Chinese cook in the Salinas Valley cannot settle an argument about an English sentence, so he takes it to the elders of his family association in San Francisco. The old men listen. They decide the sentence cannot be judged in English at all. They hire a rabbi and spend two years learning Hebrew. Then they send back their answer, which is one word long.
This happens in chapter 24 of John Steinbeck's East of Eden, published by Viking in September 1952, and it is the hinge of the book. The cook is Lee, servant of the Trask household and, by this point in the book, closer to family. The sentence under dispute is the last clause of Genesis 4:7 — God speaking to Cain, before the murder, about the sin waiting at his door.
"If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him."
Three Ways to End a Sentence
Lee lays the versions side by side. The King James, which you have just read, says thou shalt rule over him. That is a promise: sin will be beaten, and the beating is guaranteed. The American Standard of 1901 renders the same clause do thou rule over him. That is an order: beat it, because you have been told to.
The two readings cannot both be right, and Lee cannot see how either one describes the world he lives in. A promise makes Cain's failure impossible. An order makes it inevitable and unforgivable. The verse in between — the one that would describe a man who might go either way — does not appear in any English Bible on his shelf.
The elders find it in the Hebrew. The verb is timshel, and they render it thou mayest rule over him. Not a guarantee. Not a command. A permission, with the outcome left open.
What the Word Does to the Novel
East of Eden runs to some six hundred pages and retells Cain and Abel twice, across two generations of one family in the Salinas Valley. Every character in it is trying to work out whether they are the accepted brother or the rejected one, and whether that assignment is fixed at birth. Steinbeck stakes the whole design on the third reading. If timshel means thou mayest, then no one in the book is a type. Everyone is a decision that has not been made yet.
The novel closes on that word. Adam Trask, dying after a stroke, is asked by Lee to release his surviving son from the guilt of his brother's death. He does not deliver a speech. He whispers one word — Timshel — and then he sleeps. The word Lee sent to San Francisco for is the word he asks a dying man to say.
It is worth saying plainly that Steinbeck's reading is a reading. The Hebrew verb is an imperfect, which in that language covers ground English splits between will, shall, and may. Translators have gone all three ways in good faith, and Hebraists still do. Steinbeck did not discover a mistranslation. He found an ambiguity that was always there and refused to let it be settled.
The Bibles on This Page
Every article here quotes its verse in seven translations. Genesis 4:7 is the one verse where that arrangement stops being a convenience and becomes the argument itself.
The English above promises. The Spanish promises too — te enseñorearás de él, a plain future. The French and the German both command: domine sur lui, herrsche über sie, straight imperatives, Cain given an instruction. Korean, Portuguese, and Tagalog land somewhere else again, on obligation — a duty laid on the reader rather than a promise made or an order barked.
Seven translations, three different verbs, and not one of them says thou mayest. The reading the novel is built on was in none of them; Lee had to go past every Bible in the house to reach it. A reader who copies this verse out in more than one language will run into the same wall he did.
Write It Out
Copy Genesis 4:7 out for yourself — or just the last clause, and thou shalt rule over him. By the time you finish it, you have written down a promise. English hands you a guaranteed victory over the thing crouching at the door, which is the one reading Steinbeck could not use.
The verse ends in a verb. Whether it is a promise, an order, or a permission was decided by a translator, not by the text.