Where was the land of Nod, where Cain went?

Question

Accepted Answer

No one knows: the Bible places the land of Nod only “on the east of Eden”, and Eden itself cannot be fixed on a map, so the map shows the verse rather than a point. Genesis says that “Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden”, and that there he built a city and named it Enoch after his son. No ancient text outside Genesis and its retellings names such a country, and no attempt to match it with a real region has won acceptance. Most commentators take the name as a play on words. Nod comes from the Hebrew verb for wandering, the same root as Cain's sentence a few verses earlier: “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth”, which Cain repeats in his complaint. The land of Nod is then the land of wandering, the condition of the exile put as a place. Eusebius, following the Greek Bible's Naid, notes only that it was the land where Cain dwelt and that the name means “restlessness”. Josephus retells the story differently: Cain, having travelled over many countries, built with his wife a city named Nod and settled there, so that in his account Nod is the name of a city. Attempts to place it somewhere east of Mesopotamia, in Iran or further into Asia, rest on guesses about Eden and have no evidence behind them. In English “the land of Nod” later became a jesting name for sleep, a pun that has nothing to do with Genesis.