Genesis 4–11

Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

Toledot

One of the peculiarities of that transitional period was the transformation of oral genealogies into written ones as in the selective list of Cain’s and Seth’s descendants (Genesis 4:17-19):

1. Adam
2. Cain 2. Seth
3. Enoch 3. Enosh
4. Irad 4. Kenan
5. Mehujael 5. Mahalalel
6. Methushael 6. Yered
7. Lamech 7. Enoch
(Lamech’s sons, with his wife 8. Methuselah
Adah: Jabal and Jubal; with 9. Lamech
Zillah: Tubalcain, 10. Noah
Nuamah) (Noah’s sons: Shem,
Ham, and Japhet)

The modern desire for verification inevitably checks the supposedly separate lists against one another, finding two names identical (Enoch and Lamech) and most others suspiciously similar (e.g., Cain/Kenan, Irad/Yered, Mehujael/Mahalalel, Methushael/Methuselah). Comparable to “Adam,” the father of Cain, Kenan’s father is “Enosh” signifying “human being” (Meeks et al. 12; for later use of such names, see, for instance, the Mandean Enosh in Reitzenstein 15). The Documentary Hypothesis enters to declare them both versions of the same list, slightly changed during transmission through two different dialects. A literate editor came across both, and (being an L4) s/he presumed that both must be absolutely accurate and so interpreted them as parallel lines of descent. An advocate of that hypothesis, Robert Wilson explains:

We noted that in societies that use oral genealogies, the form of the genealogy frequently changes when its function changes. Thus, in a given society at a particular time there may be several apparently contradictory versions of the same genealogy. These versions are not viewed as contradictory by the people who use them, however, for the people know that each version is correct in the particular context in which it is cited (166).

For him the differences are accidents.

Given the ancient love of numerology, however, an early reader would recognize the numerical structure of the lists (which are explicitly selective, reporting that not all children are mentioned). The two names identical on the two lists (Enoch and Lamech), both occupy the seventh position, one of the Bible’s favorite numbers. Further emphasizing these seventh entries, items two through six in each list lack moral descriptions, while Enoch and Lamech have contrasting characterization. Like Cain, Lamech is a murderer, who, totally devoid of remorse, claims protection comparable to what God gave to Cain, except that he wants even more. His opposite, Enoch, walks with God like Adam before the Fall, thereby acquiring such prestige that a later age presumed Enoch to have been an author and “scribe of righteousness” bearing documents to heaven (1 Enoch 12:3–4.).

How would ancient readers interpret the double Lamechs and Enochs? The custom was to name a baby after someone whom the infant was expected to resemble. What is surprising is that the godly Enoch is apparently called after the Cainite one, and the father of Noah after the infamous Lamech. There is oscillation between order and disorder, again representing the paradox of double natures, the virtuous Sethite Enoch and Lamech linked to evil eponyms. For readers aware of the other pairs of names as variants of each other, one response might be to see those couplings also as examples of the two poles pulling humanity apart.

After the emphatic seventh place in the Cainite line, it disperses into two pairs, born to Lamech’s bigamy. The narrator does not trace that line further toward the next important number, 10 (holy to Judaism, as in the Ten Commandments). The list of Cainite lineage ends before that of the Sethite because the representative of the tenth generation among the Sethites is Noah. Although both Noah and Enoch are said to walk with God, Noah is a patriarch who peoples a new world. Unparalleled in this except by Adam, Noah, appropriately, is not matched with a Cainite either as representative of the tenth generation or as Noah’s eponym.

According to Kikawada and Quinn, this whole double lineage pairs with an earlier one, Gen. 2.4, where the term toledot signifies a genealogy (59). These lineages accord in tone with the creations they follow. After the celebratory first account, the genealogy at 2.4 is of “the heavens and the earth,” a sublime coupling. After the sin and renewed loyalty of Adam and Eve come Cain’s motley progeny, linked by their names, nonetheless to the virtuous Sethites. Another parallel (discovered by pioneers of the Documentary Hypothesis), links Sethite genealogy to the first creation account (both mentioning humanity’s being made in the divine image). Similarly, Cainite descent resembles the second creation account (both involving a decline). As many have noted, the phrasing of the flood narrative repeats expressions from the creation accounts, particularly in descriptions of the animals. In addition to such parallels with other sections of Genesis, repeated descriptions of the animals proceeding two by two constitutes one of the most striking examples of coupling as a dominant of the style. There are even twin exceptions to the general parade, clean animals and fowls, both allowed seven pairs (even though God at first mentions no exceptions: “And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring …”). Simultaneously, the text is highly structured and pointedly self–contradictory—again giving the simpler first and then allowing for a greater complexity.

With their usual doubleness, Genesis and Metamorphoses both blame the flood on giants and on ordinary mortals, but Ovid more clearly delineates the reasons for divine displeasure. The giants rebelled against Jupiter, piling mountains on one another to attack the heavens. In describing the wickedness of people, Ovid emphasizes the collapse of ties between formerly paired individuals: “friend was not safe from friend, nor father–in–law from son–in–law, and even between brothers affection was rare.” The story of those who survived in an ark so resembles the biblical one that the two were sometimes conflated as in “The Apocalypse of Adam,” tentatively dated to the second or first century C.E.: “Noah—whom the generations will call Deucalion” (Robinson 280).” As usual, slightly different stories are accepted as equivalent.

Narrated in great detail, Ovid’s flood ends when the boat of Deucalion and Pyrrha comes to rest on Mount Parnassus. There, humanity is re–created (probably a self–reflexive metaphor of literary creation, because of the association of the arts with that mountain). That re–creation comes only after the couple have solved a riddle concerning their mother’s bones.

In Genesis, however, much remains unanswered. One sign of humanity’s worsening may be intermarriage between “the daughters of men” and “the sons of God [or of the gods (the Hebrew being ambiguous)].” “Sons of the gods” is a Canaanite idiom for deities (Suggs et al. 16). Use of the Hebrew phrase in the Bible tends to refer to angels, the way the passage was traditionally interpreted (especially because of the obvious parallels between it and the ancient idea of gods’ mating with mortals, a major theme of Metamorphoses). Roman readers could have situated the episode within a long Greco–Roman tradition where “excessive contact between gods and humanity” led toward chaos (Sourvinou–Inwood 49). Even imagining mating with the divine was too disorderly a thought for later world views so a later theory (still popular among many L4s) identified the “sons of God [or the gods]” as descendants of Seth (Genesis Rabba 222 (compiled fifth century C.E.); Graves and Patai 102–103). The Noah story is as dynamic as the flood itself, a chaos preparatory almost to a new creation. In its Genesis version, the word for God’s “blotting out” (machah) connotes the erasure of writing (Cf., Exod. 17:14, 32:32, Num. 5:23, Deut. 9:14, 25:6, 29:20). By metaphor, the world is His scripture and He wipes the moist clay sheet clean in revision. Viewed metaphorically as like a change of language, the flood parallels Babel, His next infliction of chaos.

“And they [all humanity] said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth’” (11.4). Is the reader to imagine that the speakers each said exactly these words either serially or in unison? As with any decidedly un–naturalistic convention, an audience on one level accepts this chorus unthinkingly, but on another experiences strangeness. Here, as often in the Bible, when a group has a single speech assigned to it (e.g., Gen 19.5, 19.19, 19.32, 37.8), there is something suspicious about their activity, as if the very artifice of their united speech contained within it a hint of its instability. The crime of the Babelites is their using architecture as a kind of writing, a giving of name (qara).

This prerogative was extended to Adam, then he was condemned for trying to be godlike. Again, humanity’s godlike quality is glimpsed then withdrawn. “And the LORD said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible to them” (11.6). Without further explanation, God scatters them.

In one non–biblical version of the story, people erect the tower to attack God, as in Ovid’s tale of the giants’ building their way toward heaven (Sepher Hayashar 22–31; Tanhuma Noah 18, 19. Graves and Patai, 126–27). In another, the Babelites’ apostasy was to write their names on bricks to immortalize them—an activity denounced by Abraham as idolatrous (Pseudo-Philo’s Book of Biblical Antiquities, estimated to be from the first century C.E. by Kugel and Greer 88). Genesis, however, does not emphasize any rebelliousness on the part of the builders but only a desire for an enduring name. The Bible has permanently associated with chaos Babel, the word by which they are remembered. “Babel … which for the Babylonians meant “the gate of the gods,” is punned on through the verb balal, “to confuse,” “make babble” (Suggs et al. 200. More precisely, balal means “to mix [with oil]” (van den Born 183). Wanting an eternal name, humanity mortars together bricks for a city and a tower. Undoing that fixity, God makes words slippery (as with oil), mixing them, proliferating languages and spreading humanity throughout the earth, the old names forgotten. Even “Babel” itself is a slippage, a pun between languages.

The theme of slickness began in Eden, in the famous play on the word arum (smooth, naked, subtle). The term refers both to the nudity of Adam and Eve (good or evil depending on whether they were fallen or not) and the subtlety/hairlessness of the serpent, which makes its skin more like human than feathered birds or shaggy mammals. Then its slickness, in another sense, causes it to be demeaned below any other beast. Is the slipperiness brought to words by Babel a curse or a blessing? Those who would like language written in stone would presume the former. That negative connotation comes through in the Septuagint, which renders “Babel” as “Sugkhusis,” a mixture, confusion, or breach of a contract. But what will become of any covenant between God and man in this slick new linguistic dispensation?

Continue to Gen12-36

OPEN THE JOURNAL OF HUMAN THRESHOLD SYSTEMS MAIN PAGE IN A NEW WIHNDOW