Holy Moly: Generations

When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died.

And then there's more like this. We get the family tree, or rather a branch of it, stretching from the first man Adam to his distant relative Noah. And we skim the hell out of it, right?

This isn't a regularly-quoted part of the Bible.  In fact, I'd wager that most if not all of the generational charting in the Bible, Old and New Testament, isn't preached on much.  It's hard to do.  You've got these men who are clearly living way, way longer than they actually did, siring children who mean nothing to anyone, and proceeding to the good parts of the Bible where we actually get to hear something about what someone who was sired (in his father's 182nd year, no less) actually did for someone.

Which is why the Bible is tricky.  See, we don't care that Noah's father... well, let me let the book tell it:

When Lamech had lived 182 years, he had a son. He named him Noah and said, “He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.” After Noah was born, Lamech lived 595 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Lamech lived a total of 777 years, and then he died.

But for your average ancient Hebrew, genealogy was incredibly important.  How can we tell?  Well, for starters, they took the time to write it down.  We can also see parallels in other traditions such as the Norse, who were obsessed with genealogy to the point that, well, they wrote it down in their important books too.  We skim those parts as well, because as Monty Python has show us, it's damned hard to get an exciting Icelandic saga going if we get hung up on the fact that Thorgeir was son of Thorkel Braggart who took to wife Gudren, daughter of Helm the priest of Ljosawater... and so on and so on.

But they found this stuff fascinating.  Most ancient peoples thought that it was extremely important to your own character who your father (possibly mother, but rarely) was, and his character came from his father, and so on back to the beginning.  There are still cultures that believe strongly in these lineages, and your own last name is a vestige of this, albeit that for most people their last name only traces back to the time when their family became important or confused enough to warrant one.

So Noah being a descendant of Adam was very important, and to prove that he was the writers of the Bible set down his lineage because for them that was right back to the beginning.

Nowadays we'd be more likely to skip this stuff and go on to the next chapter, beginning with, "So there was this guy called Noah who..." and assume that people would get that he must be descended from Adam because everyone is.  But the Bible doesn't assume that, and probably because there were tales and legends of all of the people in Noah's line.  Seth might have been the first guy to realize that planting seeds in rows made it easier to harvest the crops.  We don't know.  Lamech might have been the first guy to decide that bathing was a good idea sometimes.  There are simply vast reams of legends, stories, and fables which the Bible doesn't record because it's a collection of some but not even most stories, written down thousands of years after those stories had passed into legend.

It's also important to note that genealogy was a powerful tool for bringing people together.  Maybe Seth was the primogenitor of a tribe that the original tellers of these genealogies wanted to name-drop, for whatever reason.  They picked him, of all of Adam's children, to be the sire of the line of Noah.  We'll probably never know exactly why.

Life back then was all about family and extended family.  We haven't even gotten to the origin of the tribes of Israel, but these would have been tribes too, small ones, family units and cousins and so forth.  Keeping track of to whom you were related was important.

But let's also look at what it says about Seth.  He was, "a son in [Adam's] own likeness, in his own image..."  And Adam was created in the image of God.  So the Bible is telling us that Seth too was created in the image of God, and so would be his sons, and their sons, and so on.

Then the Bible is careful to tell us that each of these men, after their firstborn who would be the inheritor, had other sons and daughters.  Why?  These people would have been keen on procreation, on being fruitful and multiplying, so all of our Biblical ancestors would have to have been fruitful.  They may have been living under God's curse, but they were blessed with many children and long lives.

And those lives.  Oy.  If only we could live half as long and remain so fruitful in our old age. The age numbers doubtless mean something too, because they're not just "a great many years," or "1000 years," (which, to the audience, would have meant "a great many years").  But as to what they mean, I can't guess.  Again, fact passes into story, story to myth, myth to legend, and then it gets written down much later when I'm not even sure the writers knew exactly what was meant.  The fact that they are said to have lived so long may be a way to show that these were truly legendary dudes, or to decry the decline of the "modern" audience who aren't so sainted, or perhaps to imply that these guys were special, unlike the unmentioned other people who perhaps didn't live as long.  But it's a legend.  Don't take it at face value.

We get to Enoch, who, "walked faithfully with God 300 years..."  There's a story here.  He lived 65 years before fathering Methuselah, where we're not told he walked faithfully with God, then after his firstborn son is born he does the faithful bit for 300 years, and then, "he was no more, because God took him away." Why Enoch gets this extra-special treatment I can't say.  But remember the phrasing there: "[Enoch] walked faithfully with God..."  That's an interesting way of saying it.  Not just, "he was faithful to God," but he walked with God. Maybe there's a missing travelogue of Enoch's journey with God.

And finally we come to Noah, who will be important later on as a sort of renewal, a rebirth of mankind.  It's the first of many.  His name sounds like the Hebrew for "comfort," which must not have been much comfort to him during his travails.  But that's next chapter.