The Godfather (Gen 4:20)

You Can’t Go Home Again

²⁰ Ada gave birth to Yaval. וַתֵּ֥לֶד עָדָ֖ה אֶת־יָבָ֑ל

As we resume our detailed reading of Genesis, we find the second named woman in the book giving birth. We saw at the beginning of the chapter that the Bible sometimes says a woman “got pregnant and gave birth,” and other times doesn’t bother to state the obvious fact that she got pregnant first. It seems reasonable to expect some pattern of when that is mentioned and when it isn’t, but as far as I know we have not figured out any such pattern.

I’m transliterating this boy’s name as Yaval and not the Jabal that’s traditional in English Bibles because his brother’s name, Yuval, is a reasonably common name in modern Israel. When people with that name have to spell it in Roman letters, they spell it as it’s pronounced. So it might be a good time to spend a moment or two on why our Bibles transliterate names the way they do.

We’ve already seen that most proper names in the Bible come to us via the Septuagint, the Greek translation made in the first couple of centuries before and after the beginning of the Common Era. They seem to have spent some time in German, though, before they made it as far as English. That’s where our j in such names comes from.

It’s important to remember that no such names were ever pronounced with the j sound. That is how our y sound is spelled in German. Neither Jabal nor Jubal nor Joseph nor Joshua nor, for that matter, Jehovah was ever pronounced with that sound. (Can I really never have written a column about that strange divine name Jehovah? I will have to remedy that soon.)

As for the b, that is a matter of transliterating ב the same way all the time, though in the Tiberian reading tradition, בּ with a dagesh is pronounced as b and ב without a dagesh is pronounced as v. As I said, Ada’s second son will pronounce his name Yuval, so this one will do the same. I’m not promising to follow a standard transliteration scheme in these columns — I’ll do what seems to work best in each particular situation.

More on this particular name at the end of the column.

He was the godfather of … ה֣וּא הָיָ֔ה אֲבִ֕י

Okay, um … godfather? I guess that will take some explanation as well.

Robert Alter translates “he was the first” and comments:

The Hebrew says literally "father of," in keeping with the predisposition of the language and culture to imagine historical concatenation genealogically.

All I can say about “imagining historical concatenation genealogically” is Don’t Try This at Home. In our own culture, everyone knows that George Washington is “the father of our country,” and there must be a lot of people who know that Vint Cerf will come up when you Google “father of the internet.” There’s even a long Wikipedia page dedicated to people who are considered the father (or mother) of this or that.