A Rejection of Repentance

It’s interesting to see that God is seemingly providing a path of repentance for Cain in this exile — namely, he’s asked to live his brother’s life in the sense of becoming a wanderer in a land that doesn’t yield for him. He’s most likely going to become a shepherd of sorts, at least in parallel in terms of going out to the wilderness. It’s almost as if Cain is now supposed to empathically walk in his dead brother’s shoes and in that, working out his repentance in the wilderness — perhaps his supposed exit and his great mercy. But Cain rather builds a city, almost as if a rejection of the path God had intended for him.