Kommentar zu Bereschit 4:10

דמי אחיך THY BROTHERS BLOOD — דמי is plural — bloods” — his blood and the blood of his possible descendants (Genesis Rabbah 22:9). Another explanation of why the plural is used: he inflicted upon him many wounds, because he knew not whence his soul would depart (i. e. which blow would prove fatal) (Sanhedrin 37b).

ויאמר...דמי אחיך, He said: “the blood of your brother whom you have slain cries out to Me from the very earth, and the sound of its cry is what I have heard and what caused Me to confront you.” This was, of course, a figure of speech. מן האדמה, upon which you spilled his blood. The fact that the Torah uses the plural mode when referring to blood, writing דמי instead of דם, is not especially significant, as the word דם occurs frequently in the singular mode and also in the plural mode. (Compare Leviticus 20,9 and Leviticus 20,11 to mention just as few examples.) Actually, the justification for treating the word דם as both singular and plural is the fact that on the one hand it is an entity, but at the same time it contains 4 different categories of moisture. Onkelos explains that the reason why here in particular the use of the plural mode is appropriate is the fact that by killing Hevel who had not yet been married and sired children, spilling his blood also meant spilling the blood of the children he would now never have. He may not even have had marital relations with his wife as yet, just as his brother Kayin had also not yet had marital relations with his wife until after he had murdered Hevel (comparer 4,17).

קול דמי אחיך, “the sound of your brother’s blood, etc.” Our sages (Sanhedrin 37) understand the reason the word דמי, “blood of” is in the plural as reminding us that not only Hevel’s blood was spilled when he was murdered but also that of the offspring which he never had on account of being murdered so early in his life. This Midrash is actually to be viewed as an allusion to the time of the resurrection. After all, seeing that his offspring at the time of his death had only been something potential, how could the Torah speak of actual blood of his unborn children and grandchildren? The answer therefore must be that it refers to human beings that should have been brought back to life at the time of resurrection. Kabbalists, on the other hand, see in the plural of the word דמי here an allusion to the reincarnation of souls in other bodies. In the case of Hevel, he was “reborn” in the body of Sheth as the Torah adds the words תחת הבל “in place of Hevel,” when Sheth’s birth is reported for the first time in 4,25. Kayin’s punishment was another example of מדה כנגד מדה, the punishment fitting the crime, as all his descendants perished at the time of the deluge. He who had tried to deny his brother Hevel a place on earth forfeited his own place on earth. [according to the view that Naamah the wife of Noach was descended from Kayin, this latter statement is hard to reconcile with that view. Ed.]

What have you done. Hashem informed him: 1) that he had free will and that his deeds were therefore attributable to him, and 2) that while crimes against Divine law are punished by special acts of Providence, crimes against natural law, such as murder, are punished by nature itself.

For he did not know... This is from Sanhedrin 37b, which goes on to say: “Until he reached his neck.”

Auf קול steht ein trennender Akzent. Es ist so viel als: Horch! (הרכסי לבקעה v3n דם .דמי אחיך - (ר׳ ליב פ"פ ז"ל von דמה, ähnlich sein, gleichen, ist der dem organischen Leibe assimilierte Stoff; es ist der menschliche Leib im Fluß, der zerstreut diesen von der Persönlichkeit des lebendigen Organismus erfassten Stoff, daher: רמים, .plur