Daughters (Gen 6:1)
Adam’s Aftermath
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.
1 and daughters had been born to them, וּבָנ֖וֹת יֻלְּד֥וּ לָהֶֽם׃
There are now some tens of thousands of people on earth. Intuitively, you’d think precisely half of them would be male and precisely half female, but that apparently isn’t how it works. Still, even with a 5-digit population instead of a 10-digit population like we have today, a 50-50 ratio is what we used to call “close enough for folk music.”
The first two children we know about were male. In 4:17 we learn that Cain has a wife, and we presume that (like Ḥavvah) she was female, but (unlike Ḥavvah) she was actually someone’s daughter. Whose? As we said when we were discussing Genesis 4, that’s a story that doesn’t really continue Genesis 3. It assumes an already populated world in which there are farmers and shepherds, a world with — let’s say — tens of thousands of people already in it: precisely the world we are faced with in Genesis 6:1.
Was the Cain story a different version of the run-up to the Flood, one in which the violence expanded exponentially from Cain to Lemekh and beyond? I don’t suppose we will ever know the answer to this question. In the meantime, our search for the First Daughter goes on.
In 4:19 Lemekh doubles down and marries two wives, Ada and Zilla, the first women after Ḥavvah who are named. Again, they must have been born, but we’re not told about that. The genealogical information of the chapter is packed into 4:18, which is all-male and includes just one male per generation.
Each of Lemekh’s wives “bears” a child, and each of those two children has a sibling — one of them, in 4:22, Naamah. After four chapters of the Bible and (at least) seven generations of humanity, we still haven’t seen the word “daughter” or been told that a woman was “born” or “begotten.” Not until …
DING!
Gen 5:4 The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years, and he fathered sons and daughters.
In The Genealogy of Adam, the extended genealogy that fills up most of Genesis 5, bringing us from Adam to Lemekh via Seth rather than via Cain — that’s where those daughters mentioned here in 6:1 are born, not just to Adam but to all of the first nine ancestors in the Genealogy. That is the setup for one of the strangest, and still one of the least understood, stories in the Bible.
You’ll have noticed, perhaps, that Ancestor #10, Noah, did not “father sons and daughters.” Instead, he has three sons, all named, like Lemekh’s in Genesis 4. Someone fathered the women whom his sons married, and you would think we’d care to know who, but that is not what this story is about.
So what is it about? David Kimhi explains:
And daughters were born to them. There could be no need to mention this, since the world could not exist without both males and females. But the story that follows is about the females, after whom the men went astray.
As we’ll see next time, this is a story of the kind we would call “mythological,” set in a world where human beings and gods interact. (Don’t worry, we will also present Kimhi’s responsible opposing viewpoint.) First, I must confess that the daughters we found in Genesis 5 were something of a red herring. To explain why, I have to discuss the Hebrew text and (yes) even mention the dreaded binyanim. ⇥ A reminder: you can learn more about binyanim in Lesson 15 of my Hebrew course. ⇤ Another reminder: I don’t do the grammatical stuff just to annoy people, but for a purpose. I have one this time too, of course.
The ancestors in Genesis 5 “fathered” their daughters (and sons) with the verb וַיּ֥וֹלֶד va-yóled, the Hiphil (causative) form of the root ילד y-l-d. The daughters in our verse “had been born” in a binyan that no longer exists, the Qal Passive: יֻלְּד֥וּ yuldu. That’s exactly what happened in Gen 4:26, before the Genealogy got rolling, when we are told of Seth that too him also “a son was born [יֻלַּד yulad] and he named him Enosh.”
This form went out of style very early in the recorded history of Hebrew, so long ago that the Masoretes who created the vowels and punctuation marks did not recognize it. But the Qal Passive is not uncommon in our story:
“This one shall be called Woman, for from man was she taken [לֻֽקֳחָה]” (2:23).
“Until you return to the ground—for from it you were taken [לֻקָּ֑חְתָּ]: (3:19).
“to till the soil from which he was taken [לֻקַּ֖ח]” (3:23).
Between them, the roots לקח and ילד make up half the 80 Qal Passive forms in the Bible. Twenty of them are in Genesis, and just four are from different roots (שׂים and טרף).
I’m not saying this just because morphology is fun — notice that I’m saving the story of how we know something the Masoretes didn’t for another time. Today, the point is that the other examples you see above are in Version 2 of creation, the story that’s told in the J voice. That’s where we are again as Genesis 6 begins. Like adama earlier in the verse, this linguistic usage is another clue to who’s telling us this story.
Lots of people assume that the distinction between elohim and YHWH is the complete proof set for the existence of earlier texts that were combined to create the Torah. Not so! There are many differences such as the linguistic ones I’ve been pointing out recently — even “this one” of 2:23. There is nothing theological, or religious in any way, about some of the things that distinguish the various biblical voices. Different writers write differently. The challenge for the writer who created Genesis was to weave the earlier texts into an artistic whole.
Oh, that comma at the end of my English translation of the verse? This sentence is not over! Dress nicely next time. That’s the day we’ll be meeting “the sons of God.” See you then.