Canter Bridge

In the ‘account of Adam’s line’ that appears in Genesis chapter five, the genealogy’s structure assumes the very shape of the human situation.

The summary of each individual’s history begins with life and ends with death, this for a race that the narrative presents as deathless until they rebelled against the Creator who blessed them as soon as he had breathed life into them. An example establishes the pattern:

When Seth had lived 105 years, he became the father of Enosh. And after he became the father of Enosh, Seth lived 807 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Seth lived 912 years, and then he died. (Genesis 5:6–8 NIV)

Modern translations rightly tidy up the flow of things with a subordinate clause (‘When A had lived 105 years …). The Hebrew text itself develops the human rhythm to a more austere beat:

And A lived X years and he engendered B … And all the days of A were Y years, and he died.

Always, he lived. Always he played his role in the sustaining of the race by engendering children. Always, he died.

Against this background beat of hope and futility, two individuals provide a hopeful syncopation. Inexplicably, a certain Enoch ‘walks with God’. Whatever this laconic phrase implies about the intimacy this man enjoyed with his Maker, Enoch eluded the grim rhythm of death because of it. The text cries out for explanation but yields none. After registering a second time that Enoch ‘walked with God’, the text beguiles:

‘ … and he was no more, because God took him.’

Then the rhythm of futility resumes. Methusaleh, Enoch’s son, lives a very long time, yet he follows the step of his grandfather rather than his father. He dies without comment, as is the way with his glorious and doomed race.

A certain Lamech interrupts the beat, not by disappearing like Enoch but with a shout of hope. Of Lamech’s son, it is said …

… and (Lamech) called his son Noah (‘Rest’), saying ‘This one will comfort us from the labor and from the painful toil of our hands caused by the ground that YWHW has cursed!’

One wonders what Lamech knew of his fated son, regarding whom the text of Genesis would in time interrupt another drumbeat of darkness by observing with stunning resilience …

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord.

Lamech will not say. Having cried out his reason for hope, he dies in his time. Silenced, unexplaining, he is overtaken by the inevitable.

Yet in chronicling—however briefly—Enoch’s inscrutable stroll and recording Lamech’s cry of hope when a special child is born, the text allows one to anticipate that the percussive insistence of death and futility is but the tonal foundation from which a melody might at some unforeseen moment rise. And soar.