Wickedness its own punishment

Genesis 5 opens with another list of descendants of Adam. (Adam is now used as a proper name for the first time, so say the Notes.) This genealogy is close to the one in 4 – they are speculated to be oral variants. Recurring or similar names are in bold; the age of death is in brackets:

First genealogy		Second genealogy
Father	Firstborn	Father	Firstborn
Adam	Cain	Adam (930)	Seth
Cain	Enoch	Seth (912)	Enosh
Enoch	Irad	Enosh (905)	Kenan
Irad	Mehujael	Kenan (910)	Mahalalel
Mehujael	Methushael	Mahalalel (895)	Jared
Methushael	Lamech	Jared (962)	Enoch
Lamech	Jabal, Jubal, Tubal-cain	Enoch (365)	Methuselah
		Methuselah (969)	Lamech
		Lamech (777)	Noah
		Noah (950)	Shem, Ham, Japheth

So in the first, the line ending in Lamech springs from the criminal Cain, and in the other, from Seth, the replacement of Able. (The second doesn’t mention Cain and Able at all.) And in the first Lamech is a criminal himself; in the second he fathers the hero Noah. Enoch is singled out in Genesis 5 by the line “Enoch walked with God” (like Noah later),and unlike the others, who just die, it is said that “God took him”. As he had for Able, God obviously had “regard” for the pious Enoch.

Noah gets his name (derived from the word “relief”) because father Lamech says:

Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.

In Genesis 6 it is the turn of the divine beings to commit sin. The “sons of God” take mortal wives, adding to the multiplying humans. In response God shortens the lifespan of humans to 120 years. The Nephilim, the offspring of the sons of God and human women, are on the one hand “fallen ones” (the literal meaning of their name), and on the other “heroes … of old, warriors of renown”. (What they actually did “of old” is not elaborated on.)

God has now finally had enough of the “wicked” humans: “every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually”.

I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created – people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.

It began with disobedience, progressed to lying and murder, and now the earth is described as “corrupt”, because “all flesh had corrupted its ways on it”, and it is “filled with violence”. It is a pretty terrible picture altogether, especially compared to Eden only a few chapters before. Only Noah is “righteous” and “blameless”, having “walked with God”, and for this reason God establishes a covenant with him. (The covenant is not detailed here.) So Noah is given instructions to build an ark for himself, his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law, and for a male and female of every kind of bird, animal, and “creeping thing”.

Description of the Ark:

• Made of cypress wood
• Has rooms
• Covered inside and outside with pitch
• Length: 300 cubits (450 feet)
• Width: 50 cubits (75 feet)
• Height: 30 cubits (45 feet)
• Has a roof
• Has a door in the side
• Has 3 decks

In effect, God wants to start over, with a near clean sweep. The initial creation of humans, or perhaps the initial humans he created, turned out to be a failure, with a few exceptions. The enormity of the wickedness of all flesh justifies the drastic step to “blot it out” from the earth.

Notes:

• According to the Notes “[t]he long lives of the patriarchs before the flood (ten generations) are a sign of the greatness of the ancestors and their distance from the present era.” And here I was thinking they did that to fill up gaps in the genealogy.
• Also in the Notes it is posited that Lamech’s conspicuously “short” lifespan of 365 years may be related to the calendar.
• In this account, originating in the P text, “the animals go in two by two”. In the J text (Genesis 7), Noah takes 7 pairs of all clean and 1 pair of all unclean animals.
• Apparently the word “ark” (tebah) only occurs once more in the Bible; the baby Moses is put into a tebah (which there is translated as “basket”).

Point to ponder: it must take quite a lot of mental agility and ingenuity to believe in the literal truth of the OT, given the conflicting accounts of the same event one encounters in it …

Image: The Animals Board Noah’s Ark by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568 – 1625)

~ by tamfuwing on May 7, 2008.