Noah or Menahem? (Gen 5:29)

The Genealogy of Adam

²⁹ [This one] will change our attitude. יְנַחֲמֵ֤נוּ

Those of you who are not paid subscribers should know that I spent the last 300 words of the previous post discussing the word zeh. (You dodged a bullet!) We’ll come back to it when we continue the verse. First: y’naḥamenu.

We’ve got two things to talk about with this verb נחם, which we’re seeing here for the first time in the Bible: (1) What does it have to do with Noah, who doesn’t have a מ/m in his name? (2) What does this verb mean, anyway? We’ll see it again just a few verses from now, in 6:6, but there’s no telling how long that might be in Bible Guy time. I’ll link back to this post when we get there.

The basic meaning of the root might surprise some of you: It is about changing one’s mind. Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at 1 Samuel 15. First, the word of YHWH comes to Samuel:

^{1 Sam 15:11} “I regret [נִחַ֗מְתִּי] that I made Saul king, for he has turned away from Me and has not carried out My commands.”

Then, Samuel passes it on to Saul:

^{1 Sam 15:29} Moreover, the Glory of Israel does not deceive or change His mind [יִנָּחֵ֑ם], for He is not human that He should change His mind [לְהִנָּחֵֽם].”

We just heard YHWH with our own ears saying that he had changed his mind — to which Samuel might reply, paraphrasing Chico Marx, “Who are you gonna believe, me or your own ears?” (For more discussion of this, see pp. 16f. and 99f. of my book The Bible’s Many Voices and toward the end of Episode 15 of the companion podcast.) My point right now is made: נחם n-ḥ-m has the basic meaning of “change one’s mind.”

Let’s take a look at it through the lens of the Dictionary of Classical Hebrew: