A Tale of Two Lemekhs (Gen 5:30–31)
The Genealogy of Adam
New to the column? We’re doing a close reading of Genesis, which started in September 2022. Visit the Archive and plunge in, or look here to get oriented.
Last time, we finished up the paragraph about Ancestor #9, Lemekh — the father of Noah, hero of the Flood story.
Or was he? In Genesis 4, this same character — or at least someone with exactly the same name — had four other children, and Noah was not mentioned. It’s true: that Lemekh was the son of Methusael, and our Lemekh is the son of Methuselah, and מְתוּשָׁאֵל and מְתוּשֶׁ֫לַח don’t look quite as similar in Hebrew as they do in English. Lemekh #1 is the great-great-great-grandson of Cain, while Lemekh #2 is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Cain’s brother Seth.
Still! I announced last time that I was continuing to ignore the differences in the numbers in the ancient versions, but now I’m revising that policy. Lemekh dies at three different ripe old ages, depending on which Bible you are reading:
In the Greek of the LXX, he dies at 753.
In the Hebrew of the Samaritan Pentateuch, he dies at 653.
In the Masoretic Text (our Bible), he dies at 777.
Okay, does it really matter? It does to the actuaries, of course, and there’s a big difference if you intend to go on collecting Semitic Security payments for an extra 124 years. What I’m really noticing here is that Noah’s father, Lemekh #2, has an awful lot of sevens in the age on his tombstone. I’m sure you all remember what Lemekh #1, husband of Ada and Zilla, told them in his famous Song:
Gen 4:24 Yes, let Cain incur sevenfold revenge
And Lemekh seventy-sevenfold!
You don’t need a degree in the higher mathematics to spot a pattern here:
7
77
777
You might claim that at least the 53 part of 653 and 753 is “historically accurate” (whatever that might mean in a part of the story where people are still living mythologically long lives) and that 777 is the result of deliberate alteration to make it seem that Lemekh #1 and Lemekh #2 are the same person, or at least to meld them together literarily. Or you might feel that the Bible is inerrant and that the 7 / 77 / 777 pattern is what a friend of mine likes to call a God-incidence.
Whether the writer who achieved this remarkable result was an author with a small a or an Author with a capital A, the two lists of ancestors have been merged into a kind of optical illusion. Israel Knohl writes:
The final redactors of the Pentateuch, who had to put together diverse ancient traditions, nonetheless found a way to resolve the disagreement between the two traditions. Since they belonged to a priestly school, they adopted the priestly view that Noah was a descendant of Seth. To do this, however, they had to sever the genealogical connection between Cain and Noah, and so they cut the description of Noah’s birth and naming from the original ending of J’s Cainite dynasty and relocated it within P’s Sethite genealogy (Gen 5:28). In place of the original conclusion of the Cainite genealogy, the editors inserted the story about the naming of Seth (Gen 4:25). This story presents Seth as the son who was born to Adam after the murder of Abel by Cain, thereby harmonizing in this way the two different traditions.
This is from his article “Cain: Son of God or Son of Satan?”, which we looked at when we were reading the previous story in the Bible, the one lots of people call “The Story of Cain and Abel,” but which I called “You Can’t Go Home Again.” I should mention that Knohl is the scholar who in his book The Sanctuary of Silence convinced most Jewish Bible scholars and many non-Jewish ones that the “final redactors of the Pentateuch” were priests, members of what he called the Holiness School (HS).
I too have spoken of “H” (he and I are on a first-initial basis) as the creator of the text that we are all reading together with such care and interest. If it’s not clear already, let me make it clear now: Biblical scholars love to speak of various “schools” that wrote the documents that (many think) lie at the basis of our current biblical text. I’m sure traditions were passed down in these groups, but I think the writers — and especially the final redactor of the Pentateuch — were individuals, in many cases individuals with great literary talent.
I’ve certainly spoken of the composer of what you and I have been reading together as a creative writer, and I am standing my ground on that. So I’m trying to understand our Tale of Two Lemekhs from a literary perspective. We’ll come back to that shortly; first two additional, more focused perspectives:
Genesis 5 is a thorough interpretation of the speeches and events present in Genesis 1-4. The interpretation includes inversion, omission and addition of information, culminating in Lamech’s speech in 5:29 which attributes to YHWH what has not been explicitly stated. The view that YHWH has cursed the ground is not the view of the text. It is the view of a figure, who, in the view of the text, represents a tendency to view God as merciless. [Eugene Combs, “Has YHWH Cursed the Ground?” (2009)]
And this, which seems quite opposed:
The written document of Adam’s descendants (Gen 5) serves as P’s original creation account, and has been incorporated entirely by the Holiness redactor(s) as an extended quotation with a single modification. In this case, I have suggested P’s superscription (v. 1a) and creation accounts (vv. 1b–2) served as H’s inspiration for Gen 1 and the structure for the book as a whole (i. e., by means of H’s adaptation of the tôledôt clause elsewhere in the book). We may also have a single H insertion at v. 29. [Bill Arnold, “The Holiness Redaction of the Primeval History,” (2017)]
Is Genesis 5 trying to shape our perspective of Genesis 1, or is Genesis 1 trying to shape our perspective of Genesis 5? (Perhaps you can figure out which way I lean.)
And now I turn to Ed Greenstein, in a 1989 piece about whether Abraham was born in Ur or Haran, which we’ll look at in more detail when we get toward the end of Genesis 11:
A historian, or a reader who reads like a historian, can abide only a single solution: Abraham was born in Ur, or he was born in Haran. Perhaps we have here two traditions. If so, one is wrong.
…
As history, the narratives about Abram’s birth do not read coherently; as coded stories, or myths, they do. Each geographical assignation tells a different piece of the biblical worldview.
As history, Lemekh #1 and Lemekh #2 cannot be the same person. In a story, they can be. Either way, our author has blended them into one. I often quote Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote in his memoir Speak, Memory:
I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern on another.
The author of Genesis has done the same. We’ll continue to examine these patterns next time.