The Beginning of the End (Gen 6:1)

Adam’s Aftermath

Today we begin reading Genesis 6. If you are keeping score at home, that means we’ve finished five chapters in about 20 months. We “zoomed” through Genesis 5 because there was so much repetition in it. If the good Lord’s willin’ and the creeks don’t rise, perhaps we’ll finish Genesis 6 by the end of this year.

As I once discussed briefly on my Torah Talk Substack, the verse divisions in the Bible are Jewish, but the chapter divisions are Christian. (Follow the links there for more on the subject.) The MT makes no break here, continuing on until it finishes v. 4; the four verses after that are another entire section to themselves, bringing us to v. 8. That’s the end of the Jewish “lectionary” — in plain English, the weekly parashah — that begins the Bible, Parashat Bereshit. V. 9 begins Parashat Noach.

Nonetheless, I have made something of a break here, giving these eight verses a name of their own, “Adam’s Aftermath,” because The Genealogy of Adam is clearly over at this point. That’s undoubtedly the reason the Christian chapter break occurs here. I can add that we are now switching back from the priestly voice that seems to have preserved the Genealogy to the J voice we heard in Version 2 of the creation story.

But, Genesis 6 fans might reasonably ask, isn’t this the beginning of the Flood story? We have just introduced Noah, the hero of that story. Don’t these first eight verses give us some perspective on the wickedness that the Flood was intended to cleanse from the earth? That does seem to be the function they’re serving now. On the other hand, we find the word ha-adam (which we’ll look at in depth shortly) six times in these eight verses. Together, they seem to be not just an introduction but a hinge, connecting the first era of the newly created world with the Flood that will clear the way for earth 2.0.