Lémekh the Lothario (Gen 4:19)

You Can’t Go Home Again

¹⁹ Lémekh got himself two wives וַיִּֽקַּֽח־ל֥וֹ לֶ֖מֶךְ שְׁתֵּ֣י נָשִׁ֑ים

By now we are in the 7^th generation of humanity. Says Cassuto:

Now that we have reached Lamech, the seventh generation from Adam, Scripture speaks of him at length.

It’s true that, as we’ve seen, Cain’s story really took place in a world where civilization was already flourishing, not in a world with just four human beings. Still, this story was grafted on to the creation stories in a way that asks us to take the count of generations seriously — hence the lists bringing us quickly to Generations 7 and 10 without stories about the intervening generations.

Now that we have indeed reached Lamech, I had better explain why I’m calling him Lémekh.

Speiser comments on “Lamech” in the Genesis volume of the Anchor Bible:

This form is particularly regrettable in that its -a- is “pausal,” coming as it does here at the end of the sentence. The normal Heb. form is “Lemech,” as in 19, 23 (bis).

Yes, this guy’s name is pronounced Lémekh — accent on the first syllable, with a short e sound. (I prefer to avoid spelling guttural sounds as -ch- since those letters usually do something different in English, and I try to remember always to include an accent mark when the word or name is accented somewhere other than the last syllable.) His name appears 11 times in the Bible, 3 times at the end of a verse as לָ֫מֶךְ and 8 times as לֶ֫מֶךְ, his real name. Why do our Bibles insist on calling him Lamech?

Because his name has a “segholate” shape, named after the two seghol vowels in it (the three-dot Hebrew vowel —ֶ — that sounds like -eh-), and such nouns like to change their shape if you are ending a phrase with them and not rushing past. The word for a grape vine is géfen, but when it comes at the end of the blessing over wine, we say gáfen. (You can learn much more about this in Lesson 12 of my Hebrew course.)

Or maybe one wife called him Lamech and one called him Lémekh? Let’s get to the juicy stuff. Rashi explains (in my Commentators’ Bible translation):

This was the custom of the generation of the Flood: one wife for procreation and one for sex. The one who was for sex would be given an infertility drug.

In the story as we have it, just two men so far have wives:

• Adam (as we started calling him last time) has a woman custom-made for him in Genesis 2.

• Cain just happens to have a wife; we’re told no more about her than that she gave birth to Enoch.

Obviously the intervening men who fathered children had wives too. Nonetheless, it’s not until here in v. 19 that we find wives mentioned again — and I have to admit that Lémekh seems to be doubling down on them. Before we talk about these family arrangements, a couple more linguistic points:

• In the Bible, as in Modern Hebrew all these years later, אשה isha means both woman and wife. (The same is true in French, if I’m not mistaken, and perhaps it is common to many languages.) Why don’t I translate more literally here: “Lémekh took two women for himself”?

• Answer: Though לקח l-q-ḥ is a verb used widely in the sense of ‘take, get’, laqaḥ isha is an idiom that indicates the equivalent in biblical narrative to what we would call marriage. I said last time that we’d have many more occasions to discuss linguistic change in Biblical Hebrew, and here, immediately, is the first: this idiom eventually changed from “taking” a wife to “lifting” a wife, with the verb נשׂא n-ś-aleph. The same root gives us the word for “married” in Modern Hebrew, nasúi. (The verb marry in Modern Hebrew is התחתן, a biblical verb that literally means “to make yourself [someone’s] son-in-law”; see 1 Kgs 3:1.)

Sarna observes: