Hear My Voice (Gen 4:23)

You Can’t Go Home Again

²³ Lemekh said to his wives: וַיֹּ֨אמֶר לֶ֜מֶךְ לְנָשָׁ֗יו

Other men in the Bible talk to their wives, occasionally even two at a time (see Jacob talking to Rachel and Leah in Genesis 31). But there’s no real communication going on in this particular instance. Even though he speaks ל־ l- them instead of the standard preposition for speaking, אל el them, he addresses them by name and presumably is in their presence when he speaks. What he’s really doing, however, is uttering the Song of Lemekh. So the next few posts will give us a chance to spend a little time discussing biblical poetry.

I’ve no intention of getting into the intense scholarly arguments, past and present, about the nature of biblical poetry — including whether or not there actually is such a thing. I’ve been arguing since pretty close to the beginning of this column that the author (or, if you prefer, the composer) of this section of Genesis is a literary writer: someone who chooses words not merely to convey information superficially but also for their esthetic value, which in itself can add a layer of extra meaning to the text.

Whether or not what Lemekh says is great literature or profound in any way is not necessarily what I’m talking about right now. In fact, Lemekh merely “says” these things, va-yómer, the same way he may have said, earlier on the same day, “I’m going to work, see you this evening.” (Have you noticed that we’re not told what Lemekh and Ada and Zilla do all day, nor how they feed their amazing brood of children?) Poetry is called “song” in Biblical Hebrew, using the root שׁיר, but Lemekh does not “sing” his famous song.

However — as we’ll see in a moment — the first line that he speaks is extraordinarily reminiscent of the first line of Deuteronomy 32, which is introduced this way (in the NJPS translation):

^{Deut 31:30} Then Moses recited [וַיְדַבֵּ֣ר, literally ‘spoke’] the words of this poem [הַשִּׁירָ֖ה ha-shira] to the very end, in the hearing of the whole congregation of Israel:

So it’s very reasonable to call the following lines the Song of Lemekh, as scholars indeed do, and to discuss them as poetry, as we will indeed do. We’ll get started this time with his introductory words.

Ada and Zilla! Hear my voice. עָדָ֤ה וְצִלָּה֙ שְׁמַ֣עַן קוֹלִ֔י

Wives of Lemekh! Give ear to my saying. נְשֵׁ֣י לֶ֔מֶךְ הַאְזֵ֖נָּה אִמְרָתִ֑י

-       Lemekh! You are saying the same thing twice!

-       Yes, you moron, this is poetry. Stop annoying me with these idiotic comments. I have slain a man for less.

Yes, in fact, this kind of repetition is a hallmark of biblical poetry. The shorthand way to refer to it is parallelism. The current thing in scholarship seems to be to argue against parallelism (from various angles), but it’s still the most powerful tool to begin one’s understanding of biblical poetry and of any specific poem.

So, what is parallelism? The basic idea is that two successive lines of a biblical text can be lined up parallel to each other in such a way that you can see how the various parts of line B correspond to the parts of line A. The matching part may be …