Abraham Settled in the Land of Cain

 

Dr. Alice C. Linsley

The Bible speaks about this dispersion of the early Hebrew. Cain left his homeland and settled “east of Eden” (Gen. 4:15) in the land of Canaan. There Cain built a city that he named for Enoch, one of his sons. Canaan is where we later meet Cain's descendants, the Kenites. 

Some of Noah’s descendants, the Hittites, settled in Canaan and Anatolia. The Hittites were descendants of Heth (Gen. 10). Heth was the second son of Canaan (or Cain the Younger) and the ancestor of the Hittites ("sons of Heth").

Nimrod left the Nile Valley and settled in Mesopotamia where he became famous as a city builder (Gen. 10). He married a Mesopotamian princess.

Abraham left Haran in what is today Turkey and settled in Canaan, the land of one of his early ancestors. There he became established in ancient Edom or Idumea, the "Land of Red People". His territory extended on a north-south axis between the settlements of his two wives, Sarah in Hebron and Keturah in Beersheba. His wives' settlements marked the boundaries of his territory.

The Hebrew practice of sending away non-ascendant sons drove the dispersion of the early Hebrew out of Africa into Arabia, Canaan, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. The first example of that in the Bible is Cain, a Hebrew, who was driven away from his homeland west of Canaan. This fits with the archaeological evidence that locates the oldest known site of Hebrew worship at Nekhen in the Nile Valley.

Canaan is where we find some of Cain's descendants, the Kenites (Gen. 15:18–21; Ex. 3:1; Num. 24:20; Jg. 1:16; Jg. 4:11). The word Kenite and the name Cain/Kain are related to the land of Canaan, which is כנען, pronounced kena'an. The Kenites were descendants of Tubal Cain who is identified as an early blacksmith in Genesis 4. The Kenite smiths often camped outside of cities where they did their metal work. When Saul came to attack Amalek’s city, he warned the Kenites to move away, saying, “Go, depart, get you down from among the Amalekites, lest I destroy you with them: for ye shewed kindness to all the children of Israel, when they came up out of Egypt. So the Kenites departed from among the Amalekites.” (1 Sam. 15:5-6)

Related reading: Cain as Ruler; The Shrine City of Nekhen; Hebrew Priests in Aram, Edom, Judah, and Moab; Hebrew Sent-Away Sons; The Wives' Settlements Mark the Boundaries; Nimrod's Mesopotamian Wife