We watch Cain set off with his wife to the Land of Nod, or Wandering, leaving Adam and his wife bereaved of both their sons. We can picture the agony of their discovery of Abel’s corpse, and the tears with which they consigned him to the earth, the first victim of Eden’s curse (Genesis 3:19). Death had become real, for the first time, and they learnt with dismay how fragile and precious is life, passing swiftly beyond recall. It impresses on us the urgency of the Psalmist’s plea: ‘So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom’ (Psalm 90:12).
Their aching hearts were comforted a little later by the birth of another son. ‘And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth, for she said, “God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel, for Cain killed him”’ (Genesis 4:25).
Genealogies
The family tree is a topic of perennial interest. We may experience a sense of wonder at hearing our grandparents talk about distant relatives they knew when they were children, linking us by ties of flesh and blood through great spans of time to an age before motor cars, aeroplanes and computers.
To the Jews, their family tree was more than interesting, it was sacred. The purity of their descent from Abraham was the proof that they belonged to God’s people. They learned by heart their pedigree, and taught it to their children. That is why genealogies are so common in the Bible’s Old Testament. The first two of them are in Genesis—the family trees of Cain in chapter four, and Seth his brother in chapter five.
Cain’s first son was called Enoch. He was born when his father was building the world’s first city, and the proud father named the city after his son. The genealogy then passes through four more generations, with no time scale given, until we arrive at the time of Lamech (Genesis 4:19). Here it lingers to give us a brief biography of this man, and through it a tiny window of suspended time through which we can peer at the life of that age.
Lamech
The first thing we learn about Lamech is that he had two wives. That statement alone speaks volumes. God had given Adam ‘a helper fit for him’ (Genesis 2:20). Eve was to become one with him in love. ‘Therefore,’ said Jesus, quoting from Genesis 2:24, ‘a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate’ (Matthew 19: 5–6).
One man, one wife was the ideal, to the extent that in Jesus’ view it ruled out the possibility that a man, having been married to one woman, could divorce her and start over again with another. How far from the ideal, then, was the possession of two wives at the same time—resulting, as it must, in a divided loyalty, and an unhappy rivalry between two halves of the household. Lamech’s example has been followed by many since. It is a sad reflection on our world that multiple partners is no longer considered objectionable. When real love is replaced by lust, the family unit and the society in which it exists will deteriorate.
But Lamech appears as a pioneer in other directions, too. He had three sons—Jabal, Jubal and Tubal, all of whom became inventors of new techniques and industries. Jabal discovered the benefits of nomadic agriculture: ‘he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock’ (Genesis 4:20). Jubal introduced the lyre and pipe—musical instruments, symbols of the pursuit of pleasure. Tubal-cain, the third son, was ‘the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron’ (v. 22), and from what follows it sounds as though this new-found skill was soon turned to the manufacture of weapons.
How diabolical that the human brain, so exalted in its potential for good, devotes billions of pounds and the careers of many of the world’s best scientists to the searching out of ever more sophisticated ways to destroy lives. It all started here, in the beginning, and will never cease until the Prince of Peace returns to teach people to ‘beat their swords into ploughshares,and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’ (Micah 4:3).
Lamech was a warrior, and proud of his victories. For Cain to crush a human life out of existence had been a great sin, to be visited by the direct judgment of God. By the time of Lamech, five generations later, violent death had become commonplace. ‘Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold’ (Genesis 4:23-24).
What a monster this man was! And yet how typical of many who succeed in this world. He represents the brash, the arrogant, the violent. He gave better than he got. See how lightly he treated the solemn curse of the Creator—he did not need God to avenge him, he could look after himself! He’s like many popular characters in today’s books and films.
The Way of the World
The Bible sets a different standard for success in life. Only reflection and experience support Solomon’s view that ‘the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong’ (Ecclesiastes 9:11). Christ himself said that ‘all who take the sword will perish by the sword’ (Matthew 26:52). To tame the human spirit and bring it into subjection is a greater victory than to conquer an army, or to climb to the top of the business tree. To return a good deed for a bad one, to call down a blessing on those that persecute you, to forgive your enemy, to put self last and others first, that’s the challenge of Christianity. In return it offers a reward that will endure. Success, power and fame will eventually vanish into oblivion. The apostle John sums it up: All that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides for ever (1 John 2:16–17).
James puts it more strongly: ‘Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God’ (James 4:4). These words may sound harsh, but they emphasize the change in outlook that must follow when we decide to follow the Lord. There can be no compromise. It is no use arguing that Jesus made friends with harlots and publicans. He was the friend of sinners when they came to their senses and sought through him forgiveness and a new start in life (John 8:11).
But a true judgment of his relation to the world can be seen in the drama of Calvary. It was men of the world like Lamech that put him to death. His pure life and fearless denunciations of their hypocrisy, self-seeking, and oppression of the poor, spotlighted their inner corruption, and they could bear him no longer. There was no fellowship between Christ and the world, and there cannot be for his followers. ‘If the world hates you,’ he warned his disciples at the Last Supper, ‘know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you’ (John 15:18–19).
Two Family Lines
“Like father, like son” goes the proverb, and it certainly applied to the descendants of Cain. Our research into his family tree can only be brief because the list of his descendants in Genesis 4 stops short after the children of Lamech. But already we have seen a group of people beginning to fill the earth whose lifestyle was characterized by greed, pride and violence.
The Bible writer continues (v. 25) with the genealogy of Seth, the son who replaced Abel, and in whose line came Noah, Abraham and Jesus Christ. He interposes the terse comment: ‘At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord’ (v. 26). This expression is cryptic, but an alternative translation is ‘At that time people began to call themselves by name of the Lord’. The inspired writer may well be commenting that already there was a division in the family of humankind between those, like Lamech, who cared nothing for God, and a minority, in the family of Seth, who identified themselves with Him. Certainly, Seth’s descendants seem to have been of different character from Cain’s.
Enoch
We can only pause here to look at one or two of the most remarkable of them. Take Enoch, the son of Jared. It is Jude in the New Testament who points out that Enoch belonged to the seventh generation from Adam (Jude v. 14), in case we might not notice that this puts him parallel with Lamech, who was also seventh from Adam in the line of Cain. But what a contrast there was between the two men. ‘Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him’ (Genesis 5:24). Enoch walked with God. He lived as if God was so real in his life that He was there all the time, right alongside, looking over his shoulder.
And more impressive still, Enoch witnessed fearlessly for God against the wickedness of the world he lived in. We read his testimony in an amazing prophecy preserved for us in the New Testament by the pen of Jude. Enoch ‘prophesied,’ he writes, ‘saying, “Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones, to execute judgement on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him”’ (Jude vs. 14–15).
This shows our assessment of the state of the world in the time of Lamech was justified—Lamech was one of many ungodly men. But note how Enoch foresaw the end of it all—a day of judgment when the Lord will come, with his holy ones, to execute judgment and to convict unrepentant sinners. Such a prophecy would have sounded natural from the lips of Jesus or one of his apostles, yet it was uttered by a man only seven generations from Adam! What a wonderful book the Bible is, in the unity of its message, and how powerful is the example and the warning of this pioneer of faith.
Enoch ‘pleased God’, concludes the writer to the Hebrews, adding his page to Enoch’s biography: ‘By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God’ (Hebrews 11:5).
Enoch’s reward, like that of the other heroes and heroines of this chapter of Hebrews will come in that great day of which he spoke, when he, along with all who share his faith, will be ‘made perfect’ (v. 40).
David Pearce
(to be continued)