1This is the book of the lineage of Adam: On the day God created the human, in the image of God He created him. 2Male and female He created them, and He blessed them and called their name humankind on the day they were created. 3And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years and he begot in his likeness by his image and called his name Seth. 4And the days of Adam after he begot Seth were eight hundred years, and he begot sons and daughters. 5And all the days Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years. Then he died. 6And Seth lived a hundred and five years and he begot Enosh. 7And Seth lived after he begot Enosh eight hundred and seven years, and he begot sons and daughters. 8And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years. Then he died. 9And Enosh lived ninety years and he begot Kenan. 10And Enosh lived after he begot Kenan eight hundred and fifteen years, and he begot sons and daughters. 11And all the days of Enosh were nine hundred and five years. Then he died. 12And Kenan lived seventy years and he begot Mahalalel. 13And Kenan lived after he begot Mahalalel eight hundred and forty years, and he begot sons and daughters. 14And all the days of Kenan were nine hundred and ten years. Then he died. 15And Mahalalel lived sixty-five years and he begot Jared. 16And Mahalalel lived after he begot Jared eight hundred and thirty years, and he begot sons and daughters. 17And all the days of Mahalalel were eight hundred and ninety-five years. Then he died. 18And Jared lived a hundred and sixty-two years and he begot Enoch. 19And Jared lived after he begot Enoch eight hundred years, and he begot sons and daughters. 20And all the days of Jared were nine hundred and sixty-two years. Then he died. 21And Enoch lived sixty-five years and he begot Methuselah. 22And Enoch walked with God after he begot Methuselah three hundred years, and he begot sons and daughters. 23And all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. 24And Enoch walked with God and he was no more, for God took him. 25And Methuselah lived a hundred and eighty-seven years and he begot Lamech. 26And Methuselah lived after he begot Lamech seven hundred and eighty-two years, and he begot sons and daughters. 27And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred and sixty-nine years. Then he died. 28And Lamech lived a hundred and eighty-two years and he begot a son. 29And he called his name Noah, as to say, “This one will console us for the pain of our hands’ work from the soil which the LORD cursed.” 30And Lamech lived after he begot Noah five hundred and ninety-five years, and he begot sons and daughters. 31And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred and seventy-seven years. Then he died. 32And Noah was five hundred years old and he begot Shem, Ham, and Japheth.
CHAPTER 5 NOTES
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Nothing reveals the difference of the biblical conception of literature from later Western ones more strikingly than the biblical use of genealogies as an intrinsic element of literary structure. As J. P. Fokkelman (1987) has noted, the genealogical lists or “begats” (toledot) in Genesis are carefully placed compositional units that mark off one large narrative segment from another: here, the story of Creation and the antediluvian founding figures from the Deluge story. As Fokkelman also observes, the begettings of the genealogical lists are linked thematically with the initial injunction to be fruitful and multiply and with all the subsequent stories of a threatened or thwarted procreative drive.
Repetition of formula dominates the genealogical list stylistically. Here the procreative act and life span of each figure are conveyed in identical language, and when there is a divergence from the formula, in the case of Enoch, it is very significant. Formulaic numbers as well are characteristically used by the biblical writer to give order and coherence to the narrated world. The seven generations from Adam to Noah of chapter 4 are here displaced by a different formulaic number, ten. (Some critics have argued that the two lists reflect competing versions that deploy the same group of fathers and sons in different patterns: some of the names are identical in both lists, others—like Cain-Kenan, Irad-Jared—may well be variants of each other.) This list incorporates both of the formulaic numbers: Lamech, the last of the antediluvians before Noah, lives 777 years; Noah, unlike his predecessors, becomes a begetter at the age of 500, halfway through a round millennium, which is the ten of the ten generations with two decimal places added. A millennium is the age most of the antediluvians come close to but never attain, as befits their mortality.
Surely part of the intention in using the genealogy is to give the history the look of authentically archaic documentation. If, as many assume, Priestly circles in the Second Temple period were ultimately responsible for the list here, they did not hesitate to include the fabulous ages of the antediluvians, which must have had their origins in hoary Semitic antiquity (as the old Mesopotamian parallels suggest), as well as the strange, evidently mythic fragment about Enoch, which could scarcely have been a late invention.
1. This is the book. The Hebrew sefer, which some render as “record,” is anything written down, presumably in the form of a scroll. In any case, the introductory formula clearly announces this as a separate document.
Adam. The lack of a definite article would seem to indicate that the term is being used as a proper name. But the two subsequent occurrences of ʾadam, here and in the next verse, equally lack the definite article and yet clearly refer to “the human creature” or “humankind.” God’s calling “them” by the name ʾadam (verse 2) is also an explicit indication that the term is not exclusively masculine, and so it is misleading to render it as “man.”
1–2. in the image of God . . . Male and female He created them. The pointed citation of the account in chapter 1 ties in the genealogical list with the initial story of human origins: creation is recapitulated, and continues.
3. in his likeness by his image. Adam, then, replicates God’s making of the human being (with the order of “likeness” and “image” reversed) in his own act of procreation.
22. And Enoch walked with God. This cryptic verse has generated mountains of speculative commentary, not to speak of two whole books of the Apocrypha. The reflexive form of the verb “to walk” that occurs here is the same form used for God’s walking about in the Garden. Instead of the flat report of death, as in the case of the other antediluvians, the euphemism “was no more” (literally “was not”), which is also applied to Joseph, merely supposed by his brothers to be dead, is used. “Walked with” surely implies some sort of special intimate relationship with God, but what that might be is anyone’s guess. This is one of several instances in the early chapters of Genesis of a teasing vestige of a tradition for which the context is lost. Enoch is the seventh generation from Adam, and some scholars have seen an instructive analogy in a Mesopotamian list of kings before the Deluge, in which the seventh antediluvian king, a certain Enmeduranki, is taken up to sit before the gods Shamash and Adad, and is granted preternatural wisdom. Shamash is the sun god, and the biblical Enoch lives as many years as the days of the solar year.
29. This one will console us. As usual, the sound-play on the name Noah, which lacks the final mem of the word for “console,” naḥem, is loose phonetic association. What the nature of the consolation might be is a cloudier issue. Rashi’s proposal that Noah was the inventor of the plow has scant support in the subsequent text. Others, more plausibly, have linked the consolation with Noah’s role as the first cultivator of the vine. The idea that wine provides the poor man respite from his drudgery (see Proverbs 31:6–7) is common enough in the biblical world. Wine, then, might have been thought of as a palliative to the curse of hard labor, which is also the curse of the soil: the language of Genesis 3:17–18 is explicitly echoed here.
the pain of our hands’ work. Most translations render this as “our toil, our work,” or something equivalent. But the second term, ʿitsavon, does not mean “labor” but rather “pain,” and is the crucial word at the heart of Adam’s curse, and Eve’s. Given that allusion, the two terms in the Hebrew—which reads literally, “our work and the pain of our hands”—are surely to be construed as a hendiadys, a pair of terms for a single concept indicating “painful labor.” It should be noted that the “work of our hands” is a common biblical collocation while “pain of our hands” occurs only here, evidently under the gravitational pull of “work” with which it is paired as a compound idiom. Equally noteworthy is that the word ʿitsavon appears only three times in the Bible (other nominal forms of the root being relatively common)—first for Eve, then for Adam, and now for Noah.