18 To Enoch was borned* Irad. וַיִּוָּלֵ֤ד לַֽחֲנוֹךְ֙ אֶת־עִירָ֔ד
[* More on “borned” in a moment.]
With this verse our narrative picks up historical speed. (For some reason it always makes me think of R. A. Lafferty’s great story, “Slow Tuesday Night.”) It starts with Adam’s grandson and takes us all the way to his great-great-great-great-grandson, a human being of the 7th generation. You will probably not be surprised to learn that 7s and 10s are significant biblical numbers — nor that Irad, Mehujael, and Methusael are not going to get much ink in the Bible. Lamech, of Generation 7, will.
There are a few interesting things to say about Irad before we move on, and (have no fear) we’ll be talking about some grammar too. The first thing to say about Irad is to point out the Greek version of his name, “Gaidad” (Γαιδαδ). This is far from the last time that confusion between Hebrew ר (r) and ד (d) shows up in the text; since it’s pretty clear the Greek translator simply misread that letter, our study of the Hebrew text can ignore that.
Where’d he get that G, though?
We discussed this subject briefly when YHWH God decided to make the man “a helper matching him [עֵ֖זֶר כְּנֶגְדּֽוֹ׃].” In short, Proto-Semitic (the ultimate ancestor of Hebrew, as Indo-European is of English) had two ע sounds, as Arabic still does: one that Greek writers treated as silent (עָמוֹס = Amos), and one that they heard as g (עַזָּה = Gaza).
Normally, we get biblical proper names in English from the Greek version. So why isn’t this kid’s name Girad? I have no answer for that, but Irad is interesting for quite another reason.
Nahum Sarna comments on Irad:
The name has not been satisfactorily explained. Curiously, in Sumerian traditions, the first city was Eridu, now Tell abu Shahrain, in southern Mesopotamia, which excavations have revealed to be the oldest site in that part of the world. It has been suggested, therefore, that the statement in verse 17, “He founded a city, and named the city after his son,” really belongs here, so that Enoch, not Cain, built the first city and named it Irad (=Eridu) after his son.
As we’ll see when we get to an in-depth discussion of Enoch in Genesis 5, the reason this suggestion is plausible is because the Bible may be trying to downgrade Enoch’s importance. Without prejudice to this argument, I’m going to assume that Irad and Eridu are indeed variants of the same name, and we’ll talk more about Eridu shortly.
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