Genesis 4:18 - 5:32

Genesis — Steve Gregg

Next in this series

Genesis 6:1 - 6:8

00:00

Genesis 4:18 - 5:32

GenesisSteve Gregg

In this exposition of Genesis 4:18-5:32, Steve Gregg explores the genealogy of Adam and the significance of the individuals mentioned within. He discusses the murder of Abel by Cain and the subsequent appointment of Seth, who became the new male heir of Adam and Eve. The inclusion of multiple wives among some of the descendants of Cain is noted, but it is not presented in a negative light. The prophecy of Enoch and the significance of Methuselah's long life as an example of God's patience and mercy are also detailed.

Transcript

We're now again in Genesis chapter 4, where we have seen in the opening portion of that chapter the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, and God confronts Cain, and Cain is told that he's going to have to be a vagabond, a wanderer. He will no longer be able to be a farmer. I guess he'd be a hunter and gatherer, because it doesn't really say how he will survive.

He has been surviving up to this point as a farmer, but now God says he's going to have to wander around and not be able to do that anymore. So maybe Cain may have been one of the first hunter-gatherers. We don't know.

We do read that there were other people, however, on the planet at the time, because he is concerned about that. He's concerned that others will want to kill him because of his having murdered Abel, and he also is able to find a wife. And we did comment on this last time.

There were plenty of people in all likelihood to create the scenario that we read of here, because Adam and Eve had been reproducing, of course, all the years during which Cain and Abel had been growing up. It's a mistake to picture in our minds that Cain and Abel are these young boys, or teenagers. They're actually grown men, and all the while that they've been growing up and before this crime took place, Adam and Eve, of course, who have been told by God to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with their offspring, have no doubt been doing so, and therefore there were brothers and sisters, some of whom were probably almost as old as Cain and Abel, and of course there would be the full range going back to brand new kids in the family.

How long had Adam and Eve been having kids at this time? Well, we have some indication in Genesis 5 where we are told in verse 3 that Adam lived 130 years, and he got a son in his own likeness after his image named him Seth. This little bit of data just tells us that at the time Seth was born, Adam and Eve had been around for 130 years. In chapter 4 we will find that when Seth was born, and we do find the birth of Seth there in verse 25 of chapter 4, when he was born, Eve named him Seth, which means appointed, because she said, God has appointed me another son to replace Abel, whom Cain had slain, which indicates, of course, that Seth was the first male child that was born after Cain had slain Abel.

Her words seem to suggest that. She saw this boy, baby, as a replacement for a son she had just lost. Since Seth was born when Adam and Eve were 130 years old, we are fair in assuming that Cain killed Abel just shortly before that.

So Cain and Abel were probably around 125 to 128 years old when this crime took place, and that means Adam and Eve had been having children for all that time. Some people are confused because they say, wait, we only read about Cain and Abel, and then we read about Seth. Is that all that were on the earth at that time? But we have to remember that there are a lot of people on the earth that aren't mentioned in the Bible stories by name because they are not significant people, or their significance to the story is not considered to be adequate to mention them by name.

There were probably hundreds of people on the earth by this time. If Adam and Eve had been having children, maybe sometimes twins, they could have had over 100 children themselves in that period of time, and even grandchildren by then. So there could have been hundreds of people for Cain to be concerned about and from whom he could choose for himself a wife.

In verse 16, it says, Then Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod. Now, that term means wandering, and since he was a wanderer, one thinks, how convenient. He is a wanderer, he went to the land of Nod.

In all likelihood, the land of Nod was so named later because that was the place where he had wandered. So probably in retrospect, people spoke of it as the land of Nod. The book of Genesis is referring to it probably by the name that it was later known as, in all likelihood because of Cain's wandering there.

And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. And he built a city and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch. Now, he built a city.

I was just asked this morning by one of our students, what is referred to as a city in these early chapters? Even later on, in the book of Joshua, when the Levites were given 48 Levitical cities, and there were only twenty-something thousand of them or something, there were almost fifty cities for twenty thousand people, it became kind of a small city. And we have to assume that they were referring to a city as any kind of community of people that had sort of a common political arrangement among themselves. It could have been a very, very small group of people.

It could have been a village. And exactly how Cain would have established a city for his son, which is his first generation after himself, and he himself is separated from the rest of society, is not entirely clear. Probably what we are to understand is that he had his son, and where his son grew up, he established that as a city, and it was later called by the name of his son, Enoch.

I don't think there would have been a city there in the lifetime of Enoch, because there weren't enough people. I mean, there were probably hardly a clan there, but eventually there was a city in the pre-flood period called Enoch in that location, named after Cain's son. And Enoch, to him, was born Irad, and Irad begot Mehujel, and Mehujel begot Methushael, and Methushael begot Lamech.

And Lamech took for himself two wives. The name of one was Ada, and the other was Zillah. And Ada bore Jabal.

He was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. Now, here we have the term father being used, obviously, in a non-literal sense. Moses, in writing this, is not trying to say that everybody in his day who lived in tents and had livestock had been descended from this man Jabal.

Actually, nobody in Moses' day had been descended from him, because the entire line of Cain would have been wiped out in the Flood, subsequently to this. So we're reading about a family line that ended at the Flood, and we're not talking about a literal father here when he says he's the father. Then we see, it's like we would say that George Washington is the father of this country.

Sometimes he's called that. The founder, or the first, or something like that is what is meant here. And we need to recognize that the word father in Scripture is going to be used sometimes otherwise than simply as a male parent.

And so all of the sons of Lamech that are named here are said to be the father of some guild or some group of laborers in some way. Or Jubal, for example. The next one, verse 21, his brother's name was Jubal, and he was the father of all those who play the harp and the flute.

And as for Zillah, she also bore Tubal-Cain, an instructor of every craftsman in bronze and iron. And the sister of Tubal-Cain was Naamah. Now, what we see here is that Lamech's sons seem to have been among the first to really start inventing things.

Not just inventing, but living in tents. Those who dwell in tents, certainly some of them must have figured out how to live in a tent before this seventh generation, from Adam or so. But, I don't know, maybe people lived in caves before that.

Maybe that's why we find their bones and stuff there. But the point is that at some point people began to move around and live in tents, and it seems like that as a lifestyle, at least as a nomadic shepherd tending livestock, was something that began with this man, Jabal. And then Tubal was the first to, apparently, make musical instruments.

I'm sure that people from the time of Adam and Eve on were musically inclined. No doubt they sang. But it looks like this was the first guy to think about coming up with some invention that would accompany their singing and play music.

We should be thankful for these guys. Some people say, well, you see, what this is telling us is that industry, like those who work in bronze and iron, you know, that's craftsmen. That industry and invention came from Cain's line, and that's, you know, the worldly culture, they say, is related to Cain's line, and it was Cain's line that originated worldly culture.

I think that's reading more into this than is intended. First of all, there's no reason to say that these boys were evil boys. I mean, we don't know anything about their character.

They might have been bad men. They might have been good men. The fact that they're descended from Cain shouldn't tell us anything.

In fact, I almost all commentators ever read on Genesis assume that because this line was from Cain, these were the bad guys in the world. But all we know is that Cain was a bad guy. We don't know that everyone descended from him was.

I mean, in the law, the Bible says you don't judge a son by his father's deeds. You don't judge a father by his son's deeds. That was forbidden in the law to condemn a son for what his father did.

And in Ezekiel, it says that if a father is evil, he does what's wrong in God's sight, but his son sees that evil and doesn't want to do that and does good instead, then the son will not be held accountable for his father's sins. Why is it that commentators assumed that because these people are descended from Cain and Cain did a bad act, that these were bad people? We are just given some basic history here. We're not really told anything editorially about the moral quality of this family.

Now, some people think they find something moral, immoral about the family in the next section, or even in this section, where it says that Lamech took two wives. Now, they say, you see the beginning of polygamy even in Cain's life. We don't know that.

This is many generations around that he might not have been the first polygamist. He's just the first guy that we've ever been told about. There's a place that might have been generations of polygamists before him.

There's no suggestion here that Lamech is an unusually bad man. Abraham was a polygamist too, and so was Jacob. And so it was David and so forth.

I mean, we're not saying that polygamy is good, but to say that a man is a polygamist isn't to mark him out as especially a bad man in the Bible. Some of the good men in the Bible were polygamists. So I would just warn us not to just jump to conclusions that the Bible does not make.

The Bible does not indicate that the one who made music, or the one who made iron and bronze tools, or whatever, was somehow a bad guy. And so the origins of these industries is that there are some, I know of some Christians, they're in the minority certainly, but they don't believe in the use of musical instruments. And one of them was telling me that the rationale was partly, not entirely, but partly due to the fact that musical instruments were invented by someone descended from Cain.

For good heavens, everything I've ever seen is invented by someone who's descended from Adam, and Adam did something really bad, worse than what Cain did, in a way. I think it affected us all. Cain's didn't, in the same way.

But we are not necessarily encouraged by the text to view Cain's descendants as particularly bad people. Polygamy, of course, is not what God intended for marriage, but Lamech might not have been at all the first one to do it. It's many generations from Adam here, and the Bible does not necessarily mention his polygamy in any way that would suggest, oh, you see, the line of Cain is getting worse and worse, and that's what people sometimes say.

And they did the same thing with this little speech that Lamech gives to his wives in verse 23. Lamech said to his wives, Ada and Zillah, hear my voice, O wives of Lamech, listen to my speech, for I have killed a man for wounding me, even a young man for hurting me. If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.

Now, every preacher and commentator I've ever heard pictures Lamech as sort of arrogantly and defiantly and proudly saying, I killed a man who displeased me, and I should be avenged if someone hurts me. Seventy-four, if Cain was sinful. They usually refer to it as some kind of boastful claim of Lamech.

It might have been, but I don't really see enough evidence to say so. What he's saying is to his wives, I got in a fight. A man wounded me, but I killed him.

Now, that's not a very good thing. You shouldn't kill a man in a fight, but he does seem to indicate it was a kind of a self-defense thing. And that's why he says, if Cain would be avenged sevenfold, then I should be avenged seventy-sevenfold.

What he's saying is, Cain killed a man in cold blood, unprovoked. And yet God said that if anyone killed Cain, that God would avenge him sevenfold. In other words, nobody should kill Cain or else God will see to it that seven of their relatives will be killed in their place.

And all that this man is saying is, and this might indeed be the second case of a man killing a man. In all the generations since Adam and Eve, it may be that there had not been any other murders take place. And so Lamech is trying to sort out exactly where he stands here.

He's like Cain in a way that he killed a man. But it wasn't like Cain either, because Cain just killed an innocent man in cold blood where he says, this man had wounded me, this man was hurting me, and I retaliated and killed him. And he seems to realize that that's a provocative and controversial thing, and that that might raise the ire of the community against him.

But he says, you know, if God would avenge Cain, who is a cold-blooded murderer, sevenfold, then I, who am not a cold-blooded murderer, I'm just killed in self-defense, then I should even be more avenged. That is to say, if anyone kills me for that, it's even more unjustifiable for them to do that. He's saying I'm more justified in this act than Cain was in his.

Now, that doesn't mean that he was saying it was a good thing that he did. He might have thought so. He could have been proud.

He could have been arrogant. He could have been defiant. Many people read this into him, but I don't see that his words necessarily tell me that.

What he says is now there's been a second murder. And, you know, murderers, people are going to want to do something to murderers, going to want to stop them, going to want to kill them or something. But my murder, my committing a murder, was not as heinous as Cain's.

And therefore, I should, if Cain is protected from vengeance, then I should be even more so, is really what his words mean. Now, verse 25, Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth. For God has appointed another seed for me instead of Abel, whom Cain killed.

And as for Seth, to him also a son was born, and he named him Enosh. Then men began to call on the name of Yahweh. Now, this last line, no one is quite sure what it means.

We know that the name Yahweh was used on the lips of people before this. At least in the narrative, it's used prior to this. From chapter 2, verse 4 on, we find the name Yahweh frequently used.

But what does it mean from his time men began to call on Yahweh? It kind of sounds like, now certainly calling on Yahweh is a good thing. You know, in the book of Joel, it says, whosoever shall call on the name of Yahweh shall be saved. Calling on him would mean that they are making their petitions to him.

They're perhaps even crying out for mercy to him. They're worshipping him. They're turning to God.

And to say it happened in the days of Enosh, which is two generations from Adam, means that there seemed to be at least something of a revival of Yahwehism, of what we call Christianity today, just two generations after Adam had fallen. So while we have read that Cain's family was doing a certain thing over in the land of Nod, and we've covered several generations of that, meanwhile back in the farm, we've got Adam and Eve having their own other children of significance, Seth being the most important and the only one whose lineage we're going to follow. And his son, we don't know if Enosh was instrumental in people turning to Yahweh, or if it's just a comment that in his generation that's what people were doing.

But the way it's worded has led many to believe that Enosh perhaps was a prophet, or what today we would refer to as an evangelist, or someone who actually began to harangue and to preach and to tell people that they needed to repent and turn back to Yahweh, and that they did so through his influence. I don't know if that's reading too much into it, though it's not impossible, but that's what Moses is suggesting here in writing this. That Enosh, while Cain's family was developing their own way off somewhere else, there was one of the other children of Adam was giving rise to a more godly line.

Now, we don't know that Seth's line was a godly line, but there are certain things about Seth's line that stand out as positive things. We shall see in the next chapter, which follows Seth's genealogy from Seth to Noah, that there were at least some exceptionally good men from that family. Seth himself might have been a good man, as Abel was a good man.

We don't know. Eve thought that Seth was a replacement for Abel, and she might have even been prophetic in that. Lots of times in the Bible, when people name their kids, it seems like God gave them a prophetic word, and they gave a name for their child that actually resembled something that would be true.

And if indeed God gave Seth to be a replacement for Abel, as Eve believes was the case, then he might have been a godly man like Abel, might have even been a prophet like Abel was. And then we've got Enosh, his son, and perhaps he was involved in this revival of turning to Yahweh on men's parts. We don't know that he was, but certainly the two names are linked.

People turn to Yahweh and Enosh are linked in the same verse, as if there might be some connection. And as you go through the lineage in chapter 5, you'll find, of course, you've got Enoch there. Enoch is the one man who is so godly that he never apparently died.

He walked with God, God took him to heaven. And then further down, you've got Noah. And Noah was the only righteous man in his generation.

Now, that's only a few names in really what we know to be 10 generations from Adam to Noah through the line of Seth. But of the 10, there are, let's say, four that we know a little something about, maybe. And the things we know are positive things rather than negative things.

And two of those guys, Enoch and Noah, were exceptionally righteous. And so, some have felt that the lineage of Seth was a godly lineage. We can't really establish that from the amount of information we have in the scripture, but what little we have suggests that there was some promising spirituality in some members of this family.

And it might be that the family itself was one that continued to perpetuate a faithfulness to Yahweh in a world that was becoming more corrupt and more away from him. And in chapter 5, we have the first of the genealogies, the longer genealogies. We already had a shorter one that came, but the genealogies which give us sort of the chronology of when this all took place, because we have the number of years that is given between Adam and Noah, and then we got later a genealogy that tells us the number of years from Noah to Abraham.

And Abraham's date can be ascertained from other factors. And so, it's from these genealogies in chapter 5, and there's another one in chapter 11, that it has been calculated that Adam and Eve were created around 4000 years B.C. The exact year, if you follow the genealogies exactly, is 4004 B.C. Some people think it's very important to know the exact year, others do not. Just know that the indication would be that around the year 4000 B.C. is what the Bible gives as the time for the creation.

And we have this genealogy which follows a certain paradigm. We've got 10 generations, and they're all kind of described just alike. It tells how long a man lived before his first son was born, or at least a son.

It doesn't say it was his first son, but in general, the Bible places a focus, or biblical culture places a focus on firstborns, and so it might be concluded that these were the firstborn sons of these men. It tells how old he was when his son was born, and how many years he lived after his son was born. And then it says he had sons and daughters, and then it says how old he was when he died.

And so let's look through this. It says, this is the book of the genealogy of Adam. So this is the second time we find the Toledoth mentioned, the generations.

This is the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female, and blessed them, and called them mankind.

Actually, in Hebrew, it's the word Adam, and that's a significant thing I'll comment on. In the day that they were created. And Adam lived 130 years, and begot a son in his own likeness after his image, and named him Seth.

After he begot Seth, the days of Adam were 800 years, and he begot sons and daughters. So all the days of Adam that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died. Now, there's a couple of things I'd like to point out.

Verse 2, in the New King James, it says that God called their name, called them mankind. In the Hebrews, he called them Adam, because the word Adam means man. There are different words in Hebrew for man.

Adam is the word for man as a race, whereas ish is the word for a man as distinct from a woman. Ish is man, and ishi is woman. But the word for man as a general species is Adam.

And so in the Hebrew, it says God made male and female, and named them Adam. Now, the New King James has translated that as mankind, which is fair enough, of course. But it obscures something, and that is that God named a man Adam, originally.

And Adam named his wife Eve, and called her woman. It was Adam that made those designations. But in God's sight, they were both Adam.

They both shared the same identity. They shared the same name. They were one flesh, remember? And so we have the custom throughout history that a woman marries and takes her husband's name because she becomes part of a solidarity.

They become one flesh, and they are a team, and they bear his identity and work together to start their own family, their own solidarity. A man leaves his father and mother, which is the solidarity he grew up in, his father's home, and he goes out and leaves his wife, and they become one flesh, and there's a new solidarity, a new home under his name. Now, the reason I bring this up is because it's fairly common these days for women to not take their husband's names.

And I think one of the reasons for this might be that divorce is so common that they hear, what's the point? This husband's name isn't going to be mine forever anyway. When he leaves, I'll just go back to my maiden name anyway. I don't know if people think like that clearly and distinctly, but that may be one reason that some women don't bother to change their names when they marry.

Others just have an attitude that they say, well, why should I take a man's name? Because they don't understand what marriage is. They don't know what God's plan is. But the irony of that is that women who won't take their husband's name because they won't take a man's name, they have to realize that if they keep their maiden name, they've got a man's name too, their father's, not their mother's maiden name, their father's maiden name.

If they want to go back and take their mother's maiden name, well, that's their mother's father's name. It's a man's name. There's no getting away from it.

Families are named after the male. That's how God made things. He made Adam and Eve.

He called them Adam and they were both mankind. They were one flesh and therefore it was the family of Adam. It was Adam and Eve, but both of them had the same shared identity.

And this is something we actually should, men and women, should rejoice in because of what it tells us in the paradigm of the marriage being a picture of Christ and the church. It means that the church has Christ's name. When we get saved, we take on his name.

We have his name, his authority. We can speak in his name. We can pray in his name.

We can command demons in his name. His name belongs to us because we are his wife. We are in covenant with him in a role similar to that of a wife with her husband.

We had an identity as children of Adam. That was our maiden name, Adam. And having come into relation with Christ, we now have his name and we're his body and his flesh and his bone.

Like when Adam saw the woman, he said, this is now flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones. Paul says in Ephesians 5, the church is Christ's flesh and his bones. We're the members of his body and we have his name.

So it's like one organism is formed by the marriage. And we see this in God referring to the man and his wife as Adam here, as the Hebrew text would read it. And they were blessed by God and they had children.

Now this doesn't mention Cain and Abel. It doesn't mention any of the other children because this particular place, this chapter wants to follow the lineage of Seth. And the reason for that is because Seth is the ancestor of us all.

Yes, Adam and Eve had probably hundreds of other children, but we're all descended from Seth. Why? Because Noah was descended from Seth and we're all descended from Noah. And so no one but Noah's family made it through the flood.

And so all humanity has come through this line that we're reading here. Even though Seth had lots of brothers and sisters, they become insignificant after the time of the flood. The human race is narrowed down to a single family again, as the one we're reading about here.

So we find that Adam was 130 when Seth was born. That's not at all suggesting that Adam waited 130 years to have more children after Cain and Abel. It's just focusing on this one man.

And he lived 800 years after that, and it says he had sons and daughters. And that doesn't mean only after he had Seth did he have sons and daughters, but that's sort of a summary statement of his life. And then he died.

And then it says after 930 years, he died. Verse 6 says, Seth lived 100 and 5 years and begot Enosh. After he begot Enosh, Seth lived 807 years and begot sons and daughters.

So all the days of Seth were 912 years, and he died. Enosh lived 90 years and begot Canaan or Cainan. After he begot Cainan, Enosh lived 850 years, 15 years, excuse me, and begot sons and daughters.

So all the days of Enosh were 905 years, and he died. Cainan lived 70 years and begot Mahalaleel. After he begot Mahalaleel, Cainan lived 840 years and begot sons and daughters.

So all the days of Cainan were 910 years, and he died. Mahalaleel lived 65 years and begot Jared. After he got Jared, Mahalaleel lived 830 years and begot sons and daughters.

So all the days of Mahalaleel were 895 years, and he died. And Jared lived 162 years and begot Enoch. After he begot Enoch, Jared lived 800 years and begot sons and daughters.

And all the days of Jared were 962 years, and he died. Enoch lived 65 years and begot Methuselah. That should be a familiar name, famous for only one thing.

We know nothing about Methuselah. We don't know if he was a good man or a bad man. We don't know what he did for a living.

We don't know anything about the man, but he's famous, because if someone's old, they're said to be as old as Methuselah. And of course, Methuselah is famous for being the oldest man on record whose lifespan is recorded. But he was the son of Enoch, and Enoch should be even more famous to us because he was a good man, an exceptional man, a prophet, according to the New Testament, and also one who didn't die, and maybe the only man who didn't die.

Elijah is also thought to have not died, though the Bible doesn't say it quite in so many words as it does about Enoch. Elijah was taken up in a whirlwind, and no one saw him again. The assumption is he did not die, but I don't believe the Bible ever mentions that he didn't die.

Enoch, as we're specifically told in Hebrews, did not die, as we shall see. It says, Enoch lived 65 years and begot Methuselah, and after he begot Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years, and begot sons and daughters. And all the days of Enoch were 365 years.

And this is what we expect to read, and he died. But instead we read, and Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him. Now here, I'm going to talk about Enoch separately in a little bit.

I want to finish reading this chapter first, but it is in the book of Hebrews that says that he didn't taste death, so that he didn't die. And that is an amazing thing. But verse 25 says, Methuselah lived 187 years and begot Lamech.

After he begot Lamech, Methuselah lived 782 years and begot sons and daughters. So all the days of Methuselah were 969 years, and he died. So that's the longest age span of anyone that we know of who ever lived on the earth, and that's 969 years.

Notice that all of these, although they live exceptionally long, none of them lives to be a thousand years old. As far as we know, no man has ever lived to be a thousand years old. Some people, I don't think this is necessarily valid, but it's interesting enough to mention, some people think that this is what God meant when he said to Adam, in the day you eat of it, you will die.

They said, well a day is like a thousand years. And every human being, every sinner, including Adam, died that day, if you take a day to be a thousand years. None of them lived more than a thousand, though some came awfully close.

They pushed a thousand from the bottom side, but they never got above it. Anyway, I don't think that's a correct way of looking at it, but it's an interesting suggestion, and Methuselah would be the one who got the closest to a thousand before he died. Then Lamech lived, verse 28, 182 years and begot a son, and he called his name Noah, saying, This one will comfort us concerning our work and the toil of our hands because of the ground which the Lord has cursed.

That's not at all clear exactly what that prophecy means. Noah means comfort or rest, and this man, when he had his son, he said, This one will comfort us from the toil. Apparently referring to the fact that from the time of the fall, man has had to toil and sweat and till the ground to get their food.

That's what it sounds like it's talking about. And yet, did Noah do that? I mean, I don't know that he did that. He didn't actually give his generation rest.

He outlived them by going through the flood. They all died. If Lamech means that he will give rest to the human race, meaning the race that would live after Noah, even that is not necessarily true.

It's almost like this guy missed it. I don't know. If his prophecy is true, I'm not really sure what it means.

But the Bible doesn't say this man was a prophet. It doesn't even say he was right. It just tells us why he named his son Noah.

He named him Noah because he said this. And I don't know if this, maybe this means that Lamech said, My son will take over the farm for me and I'll be able to rest from the toil that I've been. But I don't really know.

And I've never really read a really sensible explanation of what that means and if it was fulfilled in some sense. Now, after he got Noah, Lamech lived 595 years and begot sons and daughters. So all the days of Lamech were 777 years.

And he died. And Noah was 500 years old and Noah begot Shem, Ham and Japheth. Now, I'll have something to say about some of these characters more specifically, but let me just say at the very beginning here.

There have been some critics who thought that these genealogies are somewhat fabrications and not real because they say, look, there's so many duplicate names. There's a Lamech in the lineage of Cain and there's a Lamech in the lineage of Seth's offspring. There's an Enoch in both of those lines.

And there's some similar sounding names, like in Cain's line in verse 18 of chapter 4, there's a man named Methujel and one named Methuselah. And especially Methuselah, they say sounds a lot like Methuselah. Well, it may sound like Methuselah, like, you know, maybe some other names sound similar to each other.

Susanna sounds like Susan or Carolyn sounds like Carol. I mean, but they're not the same name. And so I really don't see that this is a very valid objection.

Yes, there's an Enoch in both lists. There's a Lamech in both lists. But is that really strange? I mean, in a day when there's not really very many people, I'm sure they were borrowing names from family members and things just like they do now.

Lots of people are named after cousins or ancestors of theirs. And for that matter, if you look at the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter 1, there's something like four Jacobs in that genealogy. There's several Josephs.

And, you know, there's quite a few names in the genealogy of Jesus that you read in Matthew 1 that are duplicates and sometimes there's three and four of them of the same name. So I really don't understand the complaint, but I have read this as one of the complaints against the authenticity of these records that it seems like some of these names got mixed up because there's a someone thought there was an Enoch in Cain's lineage and there's one in Seth. Well, there was.

They were in both. Same thing with Lamech. So that's not really a problem.

I did hear a story which was represented to me as a true story from a friend. I don't know that it's true. I can't swear by it.

I wouldn't swear on the Bible about it. But someone said they knew someone who got saved reading Genesis 5, which, you know, Genesis 5 genealogy is usually considered to be some of the driest material in the Bible. You know, not the most inspiring, but he said someone he knew had been decided to read the Bible.

So reading Genesis and got to Genesis 5 and read through and said, and he saw again and again this phrase and he died and he died and he died. The light went on. The penny dropped.

He said, I'm going to die. All these people live this long and then they died. And he lived that long.

He died. He died. He died.

I'm going to die. And when he realized he was going to die, he decided he should get right with God. And that he said reading that chapter was the thing that influenced him.

So that's an amazing thing. I would have thought this chapter would have been one of the chapters that would be most happily skipped over for most people. But even a genealogy can have interesting things about it.

In fact, one of the interesting things about this genealogy that has been mentioned by a number of preachers is that the names of the persons that are named in it, of course, have meanings. Virtually all names have meanings. Even our English names.

A lot of us may not even know what the meaning is of our names, but our English names come from usually Latin or Greek or some other words that have a meaning. And in biblical times, people knew what the meanings of their names were because their names were often simply a word like Noah means rest or comfort. Everyone who knew Noah knew what that meant because that was a word in their vocabulary.

Adam means man and Seth means appointed. So these names, they all had meanings that everybody would know at a glance, if you read Hebrew at least, and knew the language. I first heard what I'm about to share from a preacher, Ray Stedman from Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, California, a respected evangelical Bible teacher.

He shared it when he taught on this some years ago, and I wasn't sure if he was right. I had never heard it before, what he shared, and so I researched it and I found some confirmation, but not complete confirmation. So I'm going to present you what he said.

He said that he had found in his research into the Hebrew, he had found confirmation for everything he was going to point out here. He said he had to sometimes look at several different sources. I have looked at several different sources, including an online etymology of biblical names to get the meanings of these.

He said that when you take the meanings of these names, or at least one, maybe more than one alternative meaning of the names, that they actually give a message. That if you say the names in their sequence, their Hebrew meanings would actually make sort of a message. It's not an actual sentence with grammar, but just ideas that are, when you add them up, they're rather interesting and significant if this is true.

For example, the word Adam means man, we know that. And the word Seth means appointed, we know that. Now, Enosh, the next name, which is in verse 9, that means mortal, or mortal man.

The online etymology said man, frail, and miserable, is the meaning of Enosh. But Ray Sedman said mortal man for the meaning of that. Now, Kynan, I have to say this is probably the one name in the list that I have not been able to find any confirmation for what Ray Sedman said.

And so I give it to you from him and from no one else. Kynan, when you look that up, the etymology says it's uncertain. And several different suggestions are made in the dictionaries.

But Ray Sedman said that Kynan, he found one source that it means he shall suffer, or shall suffer. Now, I cannot confirm that, but that's what he said. And then Mahalaleel, he said means blessed God.

It can also mean praise of God, but he gave it the word blessed God. Now, I want to say this, that I think what happens here is the names actually have a meaning. And what Ray Sedman did is he took the liberty of maybe molding that a little bit to make it a different... Well, for example, here's an example.

Jared means descent, like coming down. And Ray Sedman said it means came down. Okay, so he's obviously putting it in a tense that's going to help make some kind of a sentence when you add this stuff up, you know.

But descent is the meaning of the word Jared. Enoch means teaching or initiating or initiated. That's what Enoch means.

And Methuselah, many scholars have said, and this can be documented from various places, it means his death shall bring it, or when he is dead, it will be sent. It's related to the word send and dead, and that is the particles of the name Methuselah come from the word for death or dead and send or sent. And so many scholars have said that the name Methuselah means when he is dead, it shall be sent.

Or as Ray said, his death shall bring. Now, in pausing here a moment, it is interesting that Methuselah died in the year of the flood. And so his death seemed to actually bring the flood.

And his father, Enoch, the New Testament says his father Enoch was a prophet, and it was his father who named him this, which seems to indicate that Enoch had foreknowledge of the fact that a judgment would come, albeit almost a thousand years. From that time. And he prophesied that his son would die in the year that it would come.

And that happened. But nonetheless, Methuselah is said to mean his death shall bring. Lamech, now this one, there's a variety of meanings that have been offered.

Ray Steadman gave the word despairing. I've also found depressed or humiliated. Sort of similar ideas as the meaning of the name Lamech.

And then Noah means comfort or rest. Now, if you've been jotting those things down, you might be able to kind of run your finger down and see where this is going. Because if given the meanings that Ray Steadman suggested, which are possible meanings, but there are alternative meanings to some of them.

If you would simply read these names in sequence by their meanings, you'd get a message that goes like this. Man appointed that mortal man shall suffer. Blessed God came down teaching his death shall bring despairing comfort.

And again, you've got to add. You've got to make some of those into past tense and things like that, which the names themselves may not contain. But it's I give it as an interesting point, because it sounds as if it's saying it sounds like it's getting the gospel in a way, you know, his death shall bring the despairing comfort.

And man appointed that mortal man shall suffer. But the blessed God came down teaching that his death shall bring the despairing comfort. It's kind of a it's almost too neat to be true.

You know, it kind of raises questions in your mind whether this is really true. But and I was suspicious. But when I looked up the meanings of the names, it did seem that almost all of them, I could I could confirm from various sources the meanings exactly or extremely close to what he claimed they meant.

And so we have it may be like a hidden message here just in this genealogy. And it wouldn't even be so hidden to someone who knew Hebrew, the original readers. So it might be more or less on the surface.

Now, we need to say something about Enoch, because the New Testament says something about Enoch, a very important individual. He is mentioned a couple of times significantly in the New Testament. And he was chapter 11, which gives us a sort of a catalog of men of faith from the Old Testament.

Enoch is mentioned in ways where the writer of Hebrews deduces things about him that we wouldn't necessarily know just by reading Genesis, although we might deduce it. Hebrews 11, verses five and six, it says, by faith, Enoch was translated so that he did not see death. So here's here's where we do this.

He didn't die. It you might have deduced that from the way it's worded in Genesis, which simply says the Lord took him. But obviously, the Lord took him, couldn't he killed him? But he just says, no, he didn't die.

He was translated. That means he was carried up. That's the same thing as like the church will be caught up to meet the Lord.

That's the translating of the church. So Enoch, it says he was translated by faith that he should not see death and was not found because God had translated him. Now, that's a quotation from Genesis, although the writer of Hebrews is using the word translated where we read took in the Old Testament.

It says for before his translation, as before he was taken, he had this testimony that he pleased God. Now, see, I don't really see the Old Testament evidence here. I'm not sure whether the writer of Hebrews is getting this, but could have gotten by revelation.

But he said that Enoch, before he was taken up, had a testimony. People knew that he pleased God. And probably that's deduced from the fact that it says he walked with God.

I think that's probably that's probably what he's getting at, because it says in Genesis 5, 22, after he got Methuselah, Enoch walked with God 300 years. Well, I guess the assumption is you can't really walk with God if you're not pleasing to God. God's not going to come down and walk with you unless he's pleased with you.

And so the writer of Hebrews says he had this testimony. This was testified of him in Genesis 5 that he pleased God. But without faith for success, it's impossible to please him.

For he who comes to God must believe that he is and that he's the rewarder of those who diligently seek him. Now, almost all Christians know verse six. You might not have known it was it was given in the context of Enoch.

Enoch pleased God. Well, how do we know that? Well, because he walked with God. And he was a man of faith.

How do we know that? Because he pleased God. And you can't please God unless you have faith. That's what the writer of Hebrews deduces.

So you can't please God unless you have faith. Enoch pleased God because he walked with God. Therefore, Enoch had faith.

That's how the writer of Hebrews is working backward from this. And so Enoch is seen to be a man of faith. And we're told that he didn't die.

Now, the other reference to Enoch in the New Testament is really peculiar. It's in the book of Jude. And the reason it's peculiar is because Jude is quoting a prophecy that he says was made by Enoch, the seventh from Adam.

Now, Enoch was, in fact, seven generations from Adam. So clearly, it's the same Enoch that is in view here. And in Jude, verse 14 and following, Jude says, Now Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men.

Jude has been talking about false teachers and evil men that are corrupting the church and corrupting the gospel. So Enoch prophesied about these men, also saying, Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his saints to execute judgment on all, to convict all who are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him. Now, Enoch is said to have prophesied this.

Now, interestingly, Jude says that Enoch, when he prophesied this, was talking about the men living in Jude's own day. And Jude said, The Lord is coming with ten thousands of his saints. Now, this is an expression that can certainly refer to a judgment that's coming.

And Jude may have been applying it to 70 A.D., which was coming soon after he wrote this, and it would judge these men. Perhaps if they were Jewish false teachers, they would come under that judgment. Although the difficulty here is that Jude says that this prophecy was given by Enoch, the seventh from Adam.

Now, why this is difficult is there is a book called First Enoch, which circulated in Jude's day, and the author describes himself as, quote, Enoch, the seventh from Adam, the very phrase that Jude uses here. The book of Enoch is said to be written by Enoch, the seventh from Adam. And that book, which is still in print, you can find and you can buy it and read it.

You can probably read it online. The book of First Enoch, it contains this prophecy that Jude quotes. So Jude apparently is quoting from the book of First Enoch.

No one has ever doubted that, because the book of Enoch is known to scholars. It is available to read, and he clearly is quoting from it. But the problem is that Enoch didn't write the book of Enoch.

At least, I don't know of any scholar who believes he did. All scholars recognize the book of Enoch as an apocalyptic work that was written, perhaps, within the first or second century before Christ. That is, sometime after 200 B.C. Now, Enoch, who was the seventh from Adam, lived thousands of years before Christ, and therefore was not the author of that book.

And yet Jude quotes it as if he was. And this actually caused problems for Jude when it came to deciding which books belonged in the New Testament canon. Because the fact that he quoted the book of Enoch as if it was authoritative led many of the Church Fathers to feel like he shouldn't be included in our canon of Scripture, because he was mistaken.

He thought that Jude prophesied. It wasn't really Jude. On the other hand, it is thought that all the Christians and Jews of that time knew that the book of Enoch wasn't written by Enoch.

That it was just one of the apocalyptic writings that was pseudepigraphal. There were a lot of pseudepigraphal books. The book of Baruch and things like that, of people that are in the Old Testament, but weren't written by them.

And many say, well, Jude would have certainly known that, just like all his readers would have known that, that Enoch didn't write that book. And it may be that Jude is not saying that Enoch really wrote that. It sounds like he says it, because he says Enoch, the seventh from Adam, spoke of these men, prophesied about these men.

But he may be putting Enoch, the seventh from Adam, in parentheses. That's the name given by the author of that book. Almost with a wink, you know, Enoch, the seventh from Adam, the guy who wrote this book and claimed to be Enoch, he gave a prophecy that applies to these people.

That may be what Jude was doing, and it may be that Jude was using a known religious fiction to illustrate something, because preachers do that all the time. And they're not, I mean, it's very common for preachers to quote from C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia as sermon illustrations. You know, nobody believes there's really a place called Narnia.

No one believes those stories are true. But I've often heard preachers say, you know, Aslan is not a tame lion. Just like it says in the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan's not a tame lion.

He's not a safe lion. Well, he's talking about Christ, who's, Aslan is the lion in the story who represents Christ. And, you know, the preachers talk, I mean, the way they give the reference, it would almost be like, what, he believed in that story? He thought that story was true? He thought there really is an Aslan, is a lion? But he understands that his audience and he are, they're sort of in on a little secret.

They all know this fiction story and they all know it's fiction, but it serves as an illustration for something that is real and true that they want to talk about. And they use that illustration. And it may be that Enoch's book was like that.

It was a very popular book among Jews and Christians in the first century AD. In all likelihood, they all knew that Enoch didn't write it. And so possibly Jude was not suggesting that the real Enoch gave this prophecy.

On the other hand, I would point out, he doesn't say that Enoch wrote these words, but prophesied these words. And another alternative would be that the real Enoch, who may well have actually given a prophecy verbally, that was perhaps this very prophecy that's quoted. And then it was preserved orally through the generations because he was a prophet and maybe even written down as a separate prophecy.

And then later, when somebody wrote the book, First Enoch, somebody not Enoch wrote this fake book that they incorporated a prophecy that everyone had known to be a real prophecy of Enoch because it would give credibility to the book. I don't know. We don't have any idea really of how this prophecy might have come down from Enoch or exactly what Jude was thinking when he quoted it.

But since Jude tells us that Enoch prophesied and we don't know that he meant this with a wink and a nod, it may be that Enoch was a prophet, that Enoch did give this very prophecy, and that the prophecy was preserved throughout history, later incorporated into the book of Enoch, although that book of Enoch was not written by the man. In any case, the prophecy that is quoted by Jude is a prophecy of judgment. But what's going to come in judgments upon the ungodly? Now, Enoch might very well have prophesied such a thing in his day because he had a son that he named, His death shall bring it.

And therefore, I mean, Enoch did predict the flood. He predicted the flood, and although he didn't predict the exact date of the flood, it's a little bit like Jesus said, This generation will not pass before these things are fulfilled. He didn't say the exact year or day, but he did say, This generation will not pass.

There's by the time the last person of this generation is dead, it'll have come. And that's what Enoch said about his son. When he is dead, it'll come.

And so Enoch, as it turns out, is a prophet, whether he gave that prophecy in Jude, literally or not. He did predict the flood, and he did predict that his son would live only as long as that to the flood. And so when you do the calculations of the years, you find that the year the flood came was the same year that Methuselah died.

Now, the one thing I'd like to observe before we close on this is that that that correlates with the fact that Methuselah lived longer than anyone else that we know of. It means that when Methuselah was born, God already knew the flood was coming. God already knew he's going to judge the world.

He knew man was wicked, and God's going to do something about it. He's going to bring a global judgment. He warned the prophet Enoch, and he says, When your son dies, that's when it's going to come.

So Enoch prophesied, gave him the name Methuselah. And so this is the commitment God had made. When Methuselah dies, I've got to judge.

Now that now that this has been set in motion, now that this prediction has been made, God's obligated to judge the world when Methuselah dies. But he keeps Methuselah alive longer than he keeps any other man on earth alive, showing it would seem God's own reluctance to judge. We find God often judging societies, Israel, Judah, even the Canaanites, only after very long times of tolerance, hundreds of years in many cases, because he's reluctant to judge.

Judging is God's strange work. He's slow to anger and plenteous in mercy. And so though God had already predicted and committed himself to judge the world when this man dies, God shows his forbearance and his reluctance to bring judgment by extending this, stretching this man's life out longer than any other man who ever lived, which testifies to God's patience and God's mercy toward even the men that he knows he's going to have to kill if they don't repent, gives them more chance to repent.

It says that in 2 Peter 3, that the reason Christ hasn't come back yet and many people mock and say, well, why hasn't he come back yet? I thought he's going to come back by now. He says, well, the reason is that God's not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. And that's why that's why the judgment that we await has not come yet, because God is still desiring more people to have the chance to repent.