The Begats
The Genealogy of Adam
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18 Jéred lived 162 years and fathered Enoch. 19 Jéred lived, after he fathered Enoch, 800 years, and he fathered sons and daughters. 20 All the days of Jéred were 962 years. Then he died.
18 וַֽיְחִי־יֶ֕רֶד שְׁתַּ֧יִם וְשִׁשִּׁ֛ים שָׁנָ֖ה וּמְאַ֣ת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיּ֖וֹלֶד אֶת־חֲנֽוֹךְ׃ 19 וַֽיְחִי־יֶ֗רֶד אַֽחֲרֵי֙ הוֹלִיד֣וֹ אֶת־חֲנ֔וֹךְ שְׁמֹנֶ֥ה מֵא֖וֹת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיּ֥וֹלֶד בָּנִ֖ים וּבָנֽוֹת׃ 20 וַיִּֽהְיוּ֙ כָּל־יְמֵי־יֶ֔רֶד שְׁתַּ֤יִם וְשִׁשִּׁים֙ שָׁנָ֔ה וּתְשַׁ֥ע מֵא֖וֹת שָׁנָ֑ה וַיָּמֹֽת׃
Jéred “begat” Enoch, and lived for 962 years — just 7 years shorter than Methuselah, though you wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t just said so. That’s because “the begats” are so monotonous they’re hard to pay attention to. We’ve already read essentially the same paragraph six times, and there are more to come after this one. Boring, right?
Richard Elliott Friedman (in his Commentary on the Torah) begs to differ:
With the birth of Adam's and Eve's son Seth, the text begins a flow of generations, narrowing to a particular family, that continues unbroken through the book of Genesis and ultimately through the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Ironically, the element that establishes this flow, that produces the continuity of Genesis, and that sets the history of the family into the context of the universal history is the "begat" lists. It is ironic because these lists are tedious to most readers. They therefore skip, skim, plow through, or joke about them. The result is that many (perhaps most) readers never get the feeling of Genesis as a book. It is a continuous, sensible work, filled with connections, ironies, puns, and character development — which are diminished or even lost when one reads it only as a collection of separate stories.
This is not exactly the way I would have put it, and I most certainly have not spent a week discussing each of these paragraphs, as I have done for many other texts of equal length. But it’s a good reminder that the Bible is not “a collection of separate stories.” We might go further and remind ourselves that the Bible is not a book of stories at all.
If we flip that statement around and look at it another way, we might put it like this: Bible stories are not the Bible. We all know the Bible stories because we were taught them as kids. (Unless your father was a Scientologist and your mother was a Buddhist. You know who you are.) To pick an example not entirely at random: Adam and Eve are told not to eat the fruit of a particular tree. The snake entices Eve to eat it anyway, she gives some to Adam, and they are kicked off the premises for sinning.
That’s the “Bible story,” but as regular readers of this column know, that’s not exactly the way the Bible tells the story. Another thing to realize, now, is that there are “Bible stories” that aren’t in the Bible at all. Lots of people know that Abraham’s father Terah had a store where he sold idols — but they don’t know that from the Bible. It’s a story that was written later.
Other stories about biblical characters and events were written not after the Bible, but while the Bible itself was coming together, before the various texts in it had become “The Bible” that you find in a drawer next to your hotel bed. In this next excerpt, from James Kugel’s translation of Jubilees in Outside the Bible, we’ll see two paragraphs that closely resemble our “boring” genealogy entries. In between Jered’s “begat” and Enoch’s “begat” is something that’s entirely missing from our Bibles:
Jubilees 4:16 And in the eleventh jubilee Jared took for himself a wife and her name was Baraka, the daughter of Rasuyal, the daughter of his father’s brother, as a wife, in the fourth week of that jubilee. And she bore a son for him in the fifth week, in the fourth year of the jubilee. And he called him Enoch.
17This one was the first who learned writing and knowledge and wisdom,* from (among) the sons of men, from (among) those who were born upon earth. And he wrote in a book the signs of the heaven according to the order of their months, so that the sons of man might know the (appointed) times of the years according to their order, with respect to each of their months. 18This one was the first (who) wrote a testimony and testified to the children of men throughout the generations* of the earth. And their weeks according to jubilees he recounted; and the days of the years he made known. And the months he set in order, and the Sabbaths of the years he recounted, just as we made it known to him. 19And he saw what was and what will be* in a vision of his sleep as it will happen among the children of men in their generations until the day of judgment. He saw and knew everything and wrote his testimony and deposited the testimony upon the earth against all the children of men and their generations.
20And in the twelfth jubilee in its seventh week, he took for himself a wife and her name was ‘Edni, the daughter of Dan’el, his father’s brother, as a wife, and in the sixth year of this week she bore a son for him. And he called him Methuselah.
This is followed by another paragraph, even longer than the second paragraph above, that corresponds to v. 24 of our biblical chapter, which has just nine words.
And that’s nothing. There is actually an entire book of Enoch — or, to be more accurate, three (count ‘em, 3) books of Enoch. Here’s how the Anchor Bible Dictionary describes them:
1 Enoch: A collection of traditions and writings composed between the 4th century B.C.E. and the turn of the era, mainly in the name of Enoch, the son of Jared (Gen 5:21–24).
2 Enoch: This pseudepigraphical apocalypse is attested only in Slavonic. Conventionally identified as 2 Enoch, the work has almost as many names as there are manuscripts, ranging from “The Tale of” or “Life of” or “Book of (the Secrets of) (Righteous or Wise) Enoch” to even more elaborate titles.
3 Enoch: A late Jewish apocalypse in Hebrew, probably compiled in the 6th or 7th century A.D. in Babylonia.
You can find 1 Enoch in Outside the Bible and all three of them in collections of the Pseudepigrapha (contrary to what you’ll read at this link, there are no Jews who consider the Pseudepigrapha “sacred scripture”). One of Kugel’s footnotes (see the * in line 17) suggests that saying Enoch “wrote in a book the signs of the heaven” is actually a reference to 1 Enoch 72–82.
Both Jacob’s son Reuben and Abraham’s son (by Keturah) Midian also had sons named Enoch, but the famous Enoch will not appear in the Bible again after v. 24, except for this brief recap of Genesis 5:
1 Chr 1:3 Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech.
Even in Genesis, Enoch’s “boring” begat paragraph actually has a few differences from the standard ones we’ve been reading. We’ll be talking more about that next time.