- Text of the passage in Nawat
My choice to call them stories is not to insist on their fictional character: stories can be true (or not), and besides, everybody talks about the "Bible stories", not just me. Rather, I say "stories" because they are largely self-contained literary textual units, involving certain characters, a plot line, a premise or situation which sometimes triggers a crisis, leads to an event or a change of situation, plays itself out dramatically, is resolved (often in a remarkable way) or not, and so gives rise to a narrative which feels like it has a beginning, middle and end. (One of the passages I loosely call a "story" which least fits this mould is perhaps the first, "Creation", which hardly involves any dramatic characters and hasn't got much of a plot either. Maybe it would be more accurate to think of this as almost a tol'dot passage, but given its special character and universal fame, we'll let it be.)
Each such story is not defined only by the things that happen in it, but is also given form by the way it is told, the narrator's skilful use of words to paint pictures, capture the reader's imagination and attract the listener's attention, and make the story all the more interesting and memorable through dramatic and poetic devices. This also contributes much to making Genesis great literature. Furthermore, the stories give the voice that narrates them an opportunity to revel in the full range of popular features of oral folk literature, such as rhythmic repetition, memorable sound bites, narrative formulae and so on.
Nevertheless, Genesis is far from being a mere collection of wonderful but unrelated stories, for they have all been woven into a single tapestry, they interconnect and are made to fit together in the framework of a larger narrative, and this work of integration of what, in their origin, must in many cases have started out as completely separate stories and distinct or even competing strands of folk tradition has been taken to such an extreme as eventually to give rise to a complete "world picture", a cosmology, which takes us step by step and almost seamlessly from a beginning, in which God decides to interrupt the deep dark silence of nothingness by creating light, through to the installation of a new-born people, the Israelites, in a foreign land, Egypt, setting the scene for the rest of "history" which is to be taken up in the next book in the Torah pentalogy.
Imagine collecting together all the oral folk stories and popular wisdom, even including variants, current in a national culture and sowing them all together into one grand literary masterpiece in a way that is logically coherent and aesthetically convincing! This is a major literary feat, to say the least. But of course, such a literary creation does have seams, or else it couldn't have been done at all. So, one useful way to think of the content of the book of Genesis is as an edifice built with bricks and cement. The bricks, or major building blocks, are what we are calling the "stories". The cement is a mixture of "other stuff" which serves, on the one hand, to stick the bricks together by bridging across from one story to another on the narrative level, and at the same time, as a place where an assortment of smaller chunks of narrative that didn't make it into the big league of major stories, but still should not be left out of the project altogether, can be squeezed in.
The tol'dot are the "cement."
The word tol'dot is actually the construct state of a plural word, toledot, which means that whatever the noun toledot means, tol'dot means 'toledot of'. This noun, which is only known in the plural (often in a collective sense), is a nominalization from the verb root y-l-d, which goes back to an older proto-root w-l-d. The basic meaning of this root, in the simple form yalad, is 'to bear (children)'. It has several binyanim or verbal derivations, in some of which the w resurfaces in the underlying form of the root: nolad 'to be born', yullad 'ditto', yilled 'to help deliver', holid 'to beget', hityalled 'to declare one's pedigree'. And these stems give rise to several derived nouns: yéled 'boy', yalda 'girl', yaldut 'childhood', leda 'childbirth, molédet 'descent, parentage' and about a score more (acc. to EK), one of which is toledot (plur., constr. tol'dot).
The glosses for toledot in CHALOT are: '(line of) descendants, (one's) generation, contemporaries, history, origin, order of birth.' The word is hard to define (and also to translate), and may cover a wide range of notions depending on the context. Given the root's meaning 'birth', and also that of the Hiphil (causative) stem holid 'beget' to which toledot is most directly related, it would seem that 'generations' is the fundamental etymological meaning, but although that is also reflected in traditional translations, it often doesn't seem to capture the textual sense very accurately.
Consider the first of its thirteen occurrences in Genesis (2:4, NBIE): élle tol'dot hasshamáyim w'ha'áretz b'hibbar'am 'and this is the story of the sky and the land / when they came to be made.' 'Story' is actually just a rough equivalent to the Nawat term ken ijtuk which is much more vague (perhaps it conveys something like the Yiddish term מעשה mayse). The thing is, people have genealogies; the heaven and the earth generally don't. If the intended meaning here were genealogy, we should understand it to be saying: this is the genealogy of everyone in the world. Only it isn't preceded or followed by a genealogy on this occasion. Not flustered, the LXX nevertheless states: hautê hê biblos geneseôs ouranou kai gês, the Vulg. istae generationes caeli et terrae, KJV/ESV These are the generations of the heavens and (of) the earth. Everett Fox outdoes them all with These are the begettings of the heaven and the earth. Speiser, on the other hand, suggested Such is the story of heaven and earth, which is followed in JPS. Although this is an instance of the standard tol'dot formula (except for the unusual argument following tol'dot), neither of the passages between which it is sandwiched is, of course, what we would call a tol'dot passage, which raises a difficulty I'll address in a minute.
First, though, let's look at one that is in the sort of place where we expect to find it, to illustrate the normal practice, and for that we now turn to the first line of our passage for today ("Adam to Noah": 5:1, KJV): ze séfer tol'dot adam 'This is the book of the generations of Adam' or, as JPS puts it, 'This is the record of Adam's line.' The following text does not quite launch immediately into listing names of Adam's descendants and their vital statistics because, let us remember, tol'dot passages also include anecdotes, and the first such is placed right here at the beginning, and concerns none other than Adam himself. Of course we already know the story of Adam from the chapters directly preceding, but the present passage takes no chances and gives a summary which is brief enough to quote (5:1b-2, JPS except the H glosses): b'yom b'ra elohim adam bidmut elohim 'asa oto [2] zakhar un'qeva b'ra'am way'várekh otam wayyiqra et sh'mam adam b'yom hibbar'am 'When God created man (adam), He made him in the likeness of God; male and female He created them. And when they were created, He blessed them and called them Man (adam).'
That is one example of a short notice of the kind with which the tol'dot lists are peppered. With one significant difference, as it turns out: on this rare occasion, upon reading the notice of Adam, we know the story the thumbnail sketch of which this is, and can fill in the numerous gaps and so make complete sense of what is said, which serves as a simple reminder.
Usually when we encounter such brief notices in the tol'dot, we know very little indeed about the subject alluded to, and the text is nowhere near sufficiently explicit for our purposes. There are examples of this in the mini-tol'dot of Cain's descendants (4:17-24): take Lamech, about whom, apart from the names of his ancestors and offspring, we know that (4:19, JPS) 'Lamech took to himself two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other was Zillah.' We also know that Lamech is said to have recited to his wives the six lines in verses 4:23-4, which were discussed in my notes in situ. And that's all we know about Lamech.
In the present passage there is an even more exasperatingly laconic notice about someone called xanokh (English Enoch; not to be confused with Cain's son of the same name, unless we actually have conflation of two traditions about the same xanokh placed in two family trees, see note on 4:17). The xanokh in ch. 5 was Noah's great-grandfather, about whom we know (5:24, JPS): 'Enoch walked with God [or perhaps the gods? ARK]; then he was no more, for God took him.' Well, you may think, that's easy enough: this is just a poetic way of saying that Enoch lived until he died (really??). The trouble is, we're talking about a list of ten generations, from Adam (via Seth) to Noah, with almost identical, formulaic statements about them all, with only the names and the numbers changing, and of the ten, it only says this about one of them: xanokh, and it interrupts the formulaic pattern - what, just to tell us that xanokh "lived until he died"? So did the others, didn't they? This begs a question: what's up with Enoch? What's with the business about walking with (the) god(s), really? People may guess and make up stories, but the honest-to-God truth is: we don't know, because it doesn't say.
Tol'dot passages are usually prefaced by a statement to the effect that "These are the tol'dot (conventionally, the generations) of X," and a genealogical list follows (to borrow MZB's phrase applied to another context, these are above all "useful if you are ever having trouble falling asleep"). But as was mentioned, the first thing that looks like a tol'dot preface is not followed (or even preceded) by such a list, which is confusing. Now one theory that has done the rounds to explain this suggests that perhaps what happened is that the first tol'dot announcement (in 2:4) originally was followed by the expected list, but some stories were later inserted at that point, separating the announcement from the list that it announces; probably the tol'dot passage we are now going to look at is in fact that list (a new heading having been added). The reason for the insertion is that the stories are relevant to the characters that are about to be introduced in the genealogy.
So here's the idea: just as there are short notices interspersed amidst the dry, tedious name lists of the tol'dot, so also there are longer notices, much longer ones: namely the Genesis stories. Where this is taking us is to the idea that perhaps in reality all of Genesis is a great big tol'dot passage that is merely punctuated by full-length stories about some of the characters in the genealogy, rather than a collection of stories punctuated by annoying bits of genealogy every so often. This great big tol'dot passage would be the list of the ancestors of Jacob and his son's, also known as the Twelve Tribes of Israel, whereby their ancestry is traced all the way back to the first human God created, Adam. The book is a book of lists; the stories are nothing but long-winded footnotes to the list. Well, as I said, that's one way of looking at it.
With regard to the origins of this part of the genealogy, as was observed in the notes on the preceding passage, there is a suspicious degree of similarity, verging on actual overlapping, between a few of the names in the Cain branch of the family tree, given in 4:17-24, and the Seth branch, presented here. The following summaries (based on CB p. 125) may be found helpful:
- The Cain branch acc. to 4:17-24:
adam (Adam)
qáyin (Cain)
xanokh (Enoch)
‛irad (Irad)
m'xuya'el (Mehujael)
m'tusha'el (Methushael)
lámekh, lémekh (Lamech)
yaval (Jabal) - yuval (Jubal) - tuval qáyin (Tubal-cain)
- The Seth branch acc. to ch. 5:
adam (Adam)I will talk in a little more detail about these names as they come up in the verse notes below.
shet (Seth)
enosh (Enos(h))
qenan (Kenan)
mahalal'el (Mahalalel)
yáred, yéred (Jared)
xanokh (Enoch)
m'tushálax, m'tushélax (Methuselah)
lámekh, lémekh (Lamech)
nóax (Noah)
shem (Shem) - xam (Ham) - yáfet, yéfet (Japheth)
What about the amazingly long lives that these people are reported to have had? CB (p. 128, my emphasis):
The long lives of the patriarchs have often been felt to be a stumbling block, which apologists have sought to remove by ingenious but futile theories. For instance, the names, Adam, &c., have ben supposed to represent tribes or dynasties, and not individuals; 'year' has been held to mean 'month,' &c., &c. These theories are worthless; the idea that men in primitive times lived very long lives is common to the traditions of many races, and was clearly held by the author of the Priestly Document. It is also clear that these figures have no historical value except as exemplifying Semitic theories of chronology.
In cultural and historical perspective, it is clear that this symbolic use of numbers "for their message" and the general practice of maintaining such exceptional ancient genealogies are not Israelite innovations, but rather reflections of the existing customs and beliefs that form their background.
A detailed examination of the numbering in such passages by those who have the patience to undertake it has shown that while there is evidence for a considerable degree of tenacity by the authors and transmitters to remain faithful to the "correct" numbers, there is also evidence of "slippage" or amendments, whichever we prefer to call it, between different ancient versions (such as MT, Sam. or LXX). These differences may be of two kinds: apparently deliberate and apparently accidental. The former type in particular, which are sometimes too systematic to have resulted from chance (see CB p. 127), seem to suggest that there is a "theoretical" (rather than purely empirical) aspect to these numbers; in other words, they are there to prove something or to embody some sort of symbolic value.
So for example, it is surely meaningful (from the author's viewpoint) that the generations following Adam that it takes to get to Noah in this passage number exactly ten, and EH points out that such ten-generation genealogies connecting key turning points are also found in other ancient records in the Near East. Two other features of such lists may also be attested elsewhere: unbelievably long life spans (those in older Sum. lists are many times longer than those given in Genesis!) and a progressive reduction in the length of lifetimes as time went on.
Other arithmetical features of the number patterns are also undoubtedly pertinent and will have influenced the way these numbers were established. For example, in accordance with calculations supported by the numbers given in the Torah, the number of years after Creation when the Flood took place is 2666 (CB p. 128), which is two-thirds of the expected duration of the world: four thousand years. This premise puts constraints on how long the cumulative lifetimes and, more importantly, individuals' ages at the time of the begettings, must have been, given that they had to be spread out over a given number of generations (e.g. from Adam to Noah, ten)!
And here is another constraint: given that everybody except Noah and his family was wiped out at the time of the Flood, we can't have people in the genealogy having lifespans which would place their date of birth before the flood and their death later than the flood! So quite literally, the authors of this text were forced to do their arithmetic!
Let me quote from a more recent commentator (EF, p. 29):
The extraordinary numbers in this section are significant, not so much for their length as for their message. Cassuto has tried to fit them into a defined scheme, showing that the purpose, and achieved effect, of our text is to convey that human history follows a meaningful pattern... Hanokh's life span, 365 years, exemplifies the number scheme of Genesis: as an expression of numerical perfection (the number of days in a year), it symbolizes moral perfection.To the example of Enoch's 365 years, Speiser adds another nice one (EAS p. 43), while also providing a further argument making it more and more likely that the Cain and Seth lists are variants of each other. The song that the other Lamech sings (see 4:23-4) talks of the numbers 7 and 77 (JPS): ki shiv‛atáyim yuqqam qáyin w'lémekh shiv‛im w'shiv‛a 'If Cain is avenged sevenfold, / Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold,' and it so happens that that Lamech (the Cainite Lamech) is the seventh generation from Adam. Well, you'll never guess how long this Lamech lives (the Sethite Lamech)? 777 years. Interesting!
Where does this passage end? Using thematic criteria (what is it talking about and where does it stop talking about it?) there are several possible break-off points, the first of which is the place where the genealogy reaches Noah, who is going to be the protagonist of the next big scene in the saga. But there are still some further minor, fragmentary notices at the beginning of ch. 6 which go with the present tol'dot section if only in the sense that it is the most convenient place to stick them. Then the text returns to Noah in 6:8: is that sentence the beginning of the Noah story, or the last word of the present passage which thus finishes its job of setting the stage (a literary decision, really)? I decided to look at the proposal that is implicit in the traditional Jewish division of Genesis into weekly parashot, which makes the second of the twelve sections of the book begin at 6:9, and found that, in my humble opinion, this is an excellent place; in fact, all the parasha breaks in Genesis seem to me to work well in literary terms, so I will follow them. Hence, the miscellaneous notices in our present passage continue all the way down to 6:9, where the actual story of the Flood inaugurates Part 2 of the Genesis saga. One effect of this is to give Part 2 a strong start, which is not achieved if we have to preface it with the very obscure first few lines of ch. 6, to which we must now turn.
Given that this obscure little text is placed before the narration of the Flood, most commentaries assume that whatever it says is leading up to that event, either, one assumes, because that is why these lines were written or because the compiler of Genesis saw them as related to it and that's why it was placed where it was. But since it is quite obvious that the present lines are fragmentary and come from a source that has been otherwise lost and so are not fully intelligible, we can safely rule out the possibility that they were custom-written as an original integral part of the Flood narrative; rather, whatever this is, it has been pasted here, and the assumption that it is anticipating the Flood story is only that, an assumption.
The trouble is that this assumption encourages other assumptions which may or may not be valid. One is the assumption that what is talked about in this fragment provides the motivation for God's decision to destroy the world; well, perhaps - or perhaps it has nothing to do with it. A further assumption, which this one tends to reinforce, is the idea that whatever this fragment is talking about it must be something very bad. We don't know what it is but it seems to have something to do with (1) sons of gods, (2) sons of gods marrying the daughters of men, (3) possibly people living too long, (4) other things associated with the carnal (basar) nature of ha'adam. But our attempt to make some sense of all that tends to be prejudiced from the start by the preconception that it is talking about something we have done wrong.
But what if the source of this fragment goes so far back that it is a dim memory of earlier beliefs of a long-forgotten age, which, at the time they were entertained, were not supposed to be bad at all, but were a mythology of the origins of "the gods" and "the man" (ha'elohim and ha'adam)? Now clearly, if so, then those were beliefs that were later superseded in the Israelite religion that forms the backdrop to the Torah. The notion that before the Israelites had their "current" religion (from a biblical, ancient Israelite chronological perspective) they had other religious beliefs which were later abandoned is nothing terribly surprising or hard to explain; in fact it is a virtual logical necessity and the contrary would be much more difficult to believe!
The endurance in a society of memories (though almost always grossly distorted) of former beliefs that have been abandoned and replaced is a normal thing. For instance, Christian societies long continued to talk about witchcraft, which is one "reprocessed" shadow of what were once pagan religious practices of the same society which Christianity has displaced, historically speaking. Those shadowy, only vaguely understood memories become one of the components of folk stories, where witches and so on still live on in a new guise. The new "take" on such archaic elements is always negatively charged; the "reason" why they are allowed to be remembered at all is perhaps because of the need, initially at least, to keep up a dialectic in order to finish the job of discrediting the old ideas: you can't fight against something that you don't acknowledge to "exist". The embarrassment over the fact that the text so much as mentions these remembered things is an a posteriori reaction; subconsciously, we would rather not be told or reminded that the forefathers of our forefathers had such beliefs. Sometimes, it seems, Genesis is just a little too forthright for our liking and it bothers us a bit, rather than leaving us indifferent.
That it has this effect is perhaps another component of its greatness as literature. Great literature may do many things, but leaving us indifferent is not one of them! But as a translator whose job it is to look and see what is there, we are not supposed to be collaborating in a cover-up operation, and in reality Genesis says things that we may not know how to deal with - sea monsters, gods, sons of gods, demigods even - but even so they are there (in the text) and we must respect the text, not invent ways to pretend we didn't see that shadow flitting past behind our backs. This is not children's literature: we are called upon to be bold and do the text justice, not to protect our readers from disquieting thoughts.
5:1
Fox notes that, very unusually for BH, verses 1-2 (or is it perhaps just v. 2?) seem to be playing with a rhyme scheme: [1] ze séfer tol'dot adam / b'yom b'ro elohim adam / bidmut elohim ‛asa oto / [2] zakhar un'qeva b'ra'am / way'várekh otam / wayyiqra et sh'mam adam / b'yom hibbar'am. This turns it into something of a jingle (not the only time that may have happened: see yaval, yuval etc. in 4:20-2).
séfer tol'dot
This is the only occurence of the word séfer in Genesis. Perhaps the concept had no place in the life of patriarchal times! Here, of course, it is part of the metadiscourse: the verse is telling us that what we are going to read is the séfer tol'dot adam 'the book of the generations of Adam' (see above for alternative translations). It is the only time, therefore, that Genesis refers to the séfer toledot; elsewhere (as in 2:4) it is just élle tol'dot..., and twice we find the expression l'tol'dotam 'according to their generations' (10:32 and 25:13). The word séfer in BH has the meanings 'inscription, writing, document, scroll' (CHALOT), and in the present context may be taken to mean that either the following genealogy as given here or the source from which it was copied was an actual physical document, recorded in writing since ancient times. Speiser, JPS and Fox all translate it here as 'record'. The H word séfer is in origin an Akk. loanword acc. to EK.
5:2 zakhar un'qeva b'ra'am wayyiqra sh'mam adam
'Male and female he created them and he called their name Adam.' The clearest statement found, and the clearest possible, that adam can refer to both sexes, although in parts of the narrative in ch. 3 it has to be admitted that adam is used, there at least, to designate the male, e.g. (3:8) ha'adam w'ishto 'the adam and his wife' etc. In that passage, "Eve" is referred to as ha'issha 'the woman' or ishto 'his wife.' Sometimes Adam is himself called haish 'the man' (using the more commonplace noun ish): (3:6) wattokhal wattitten gam l'ishah ‛immah wayyokhal 'she ate and she gave also to her man/husband (= ish) with her and he ate.'
5:3ff
The formulaic pattern in which the genealogy is presented goes like this:
way'xi A α (shana) wayyóled et B way'xi A axare holido et B β (shana) wayyóled banim uvanot wayyihyu kol y'me A [α + β] (shana) wayyámotTo follow Everett Fox's literal translation, this means:
When A had lived α (years), he begot B, and A lived after he begot B β (years), and begot other sons and daughters. And all the days of A were [α + β] (years), then he died.The next verse will begin: way'xi B γ (shana) wayyóled et C... 'When B had lived γ (years), he begot C...' and so on. There is a measure of redundancy, since we could actually work out the total lifespan of A by adding α + β on our own; but for bookkeeping purposes this serves as a useful tallying check against errors of copying. The reason I put shana and 'years' in parentheses is that the exact form depends on the syntax of the complex numeral expressions, which often involve repetition of the noun, so for example, Adam's 130 years upon begetting Seth are expressed as sh'loshim um'at shana 'thirty and a hundred years', but the total years of his life, 930, are expressed as t'sha‛ me'ot shana ush'loshim shana 'nine-hundred years and thirty years', and so on.
It is useful to work out this template and use it as a baseline; it makes it easier to pick out any divergences from the template, which can then be treated as "new information" for literary analysis. In what follows, then, the only data that need be considered, once the template is established, consist of the template variables, namely the names (A, B, C...) and the numbers (α, β, γ...), and also note the occasional departures from the mechanical scheme.
5:3 adam
It has been noticed that adam is used inconsistently in ch. 2-4, sometimes as a common noun meaning 'human' or 'man', sometimes as the proper name 'Adam' and now and then ambiguously. Here, however, it is unambiguously a proper name: 'Adam lived 130 years...'
wayyóled bidmuto k'tzalmo wayyiqra et sh'mo shet
The first "generation" departs thus from the template: (JPS) 'he begot a son in his likeness after his image, and he named him Seth' (as opposed to the standard formula which would have given simply wayyóled et shet 'he begot Seth'). Note also the tiny inconsistency between this formulaic account, which standardly only names males and says here wayyiqra 'and he named', on the one hand, and the account, on the other, in 4:25 which stated: wayéda‛ adam ‛od et ishto wattéled ben wattiqra et sh'mo shet 'Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and she named him Seth.' I guess they both named him Seth, now be quiet.
shet
Here is another divergence from the standard template: the normal practice is to name the first male child at this point, but of course, according to ch. 4, Seth is Adam's third son. But this can be accounted for (as it is in EH) given that what we are given here is actually the Seth branch, because the first son Cain was expelled (not just from his land but even worse, from his family tree), and Abel of course is assumed to have died childless. The point, anyway, is to work our way forward to Noah, and he is nine more stops down along the Seth line. Another explanation, in metatextual terms, might be that, as suggested earlier, originally perhaps there were two competing traditions, two genealogical stories: one begins with Adam, carries on with Cain and continues on towards Lamech etc. etc. (as in ch. 4); the other knew nothing of Cain, but goes from Adam direct to Seth and continues on, also reaching Lamech (as happens now). In the process of compiling all the traditions, the composers of Genesis did not wish to have to choose one story and omit the other, so they included both. How? Just watch...
5:5 asher xay
A slight departure from the template occurs here: everyone else gets 'And all the days of A were n years...', but Adam gets wayyihyu kol y'me adam asher xay etc. 'And all the days of Adam that he lived were...' But then again, Adam was special, he was the first. Maybe it needed explaining.
5:6 enosh
As a common noun, enosh means '(hu)man', generically , so its use as a proper name is quite comparable to that of adam. See also 4:26. Says CB, p. 124:
The name probably comes fom a tradition which spoke of the first man as Enosh and not Adam. The author of these versions has preserved both names by uniting them in a genealogy - a familiar method of gathering up miscellaneous fragments of tradition that none might be lost.Older English translations spell the name 'Enos' (Vulg. Enos, LXX Enôs); newer ones use 'Enosh.'
5:9 qenan
This name, transcribed 'Kenan' in English, is in reality almost the same as Cain (H qáyin). To understand how close they are, it must be understood that in H the sequence -áyi- in a stressed syllable corresponds to -e- in an unstressed one, as for example báyit 'house', absolute state, corresponds to the construct state bet; thus, if you take qáyin (Cain) and extend it by adding -an (cf. y('h)oxanan > Eng. John), the displacement of the stress automatically turns the name into qen-an. Therefore, in form at least, the name qenan is a variant of qáyin. It is hardly likely to be a coincidence that, in the "Cain tradition", adam's first son is called qáyin, while in the "Enosh tradition" enosh's firstborn is qenan. Cain's son is named xanokh 'Enoch', and so also is Kenan's great-grandson.
5:12 mahalal'el
I.e. Mahalal-El, a compound name. In Hebrew spelling the second component, el, still begins with the letter aleph (representing glottal onset). Numerous H proper names are so formed: X + (')el. The Greek of the LXX resorts to inserting an extra vowel in the place of the aleph, here writing maleleêl for example. Greek has no word-internal h sound, so omits the syllable -ha-. The Vulg. contributes to the evolution of the name's spelling by inserting an h between the contiguous vowels, thus Malalehel. The KJV restores the "real" h in the first part of the name, and eliminates the "false" one of the Latin spelling; however, it retains the extra vowel which the Greek introduced, hence Mahalaleel. Later English translations, however, have got rid of the spurious -eel and restored it to Mahalalel.
5:15 yáred
This name has the pausal form yáred and the non-pausal form yéred. The trad. Eng. name is Jared. He is the father of xanokh; notice that in the Cain genealogy there is an ‛rad (4:18) who is the son of the other xanokh. In H consonantal spelling the names yáred and ‛irad are only off by one consonant (ירד versus ערד) although the vocalizations are different.
5:18 xanokh
'Enoch' in English. See also 4:17, and my note above on 5:9.
5:21 m'tushálax
This name is a segolate with the a/e alternation between pausal and non-pausal forms: non-pausal m'tushélax. (Most segolates have e in the last, unstressed syllable, e.g. hável, lámekh, yáred etc., but there are exceptions: in words ending in x or ‛, the last syllable has a. Nouns with y before the unstressed vowel, such as qáyin, are also similar to segolates, but have unstressed i in the last syllable and keep a in the stressed syllable in both the pausal and non-pausal form, though the a is long in the former and short in the latter.) This name is transcribed mathousala in Greek, a language which has no schwa, often uses th for H t, substitutes s for H sh and lacks guttural consonants. Latin re-transcribes the Gk. form as Mathusala but adds the accusative ending -m given the syntactic context. In Eng., KJV adopted the fairly correct form Methuselah, which has stuck. Sp. swallowed the declined Latin form whole, as Mathusalam (RV), apparently not looking even as far back as the Greek, never mind the Hebrew, but popularly the name was re-formed as Matusalén. It is tempting to associate m'tushálax with the name m'tusha'el in the Cain genealogy (4:18), as both names have the same beginning and both had a son called lámekh.
5:22 wayyithallekh xanokh et ha'elohim
This is a notable departure from the standard template, which normally says here way'xi X 'and X lived'. The Eng. translations say 'Enoch walked with God'. An alternative translation of the H clause would potentially be: 'Enoch walked with the gods.' If we assume this clause is archaic, and considering what is coming in 6:2 (qv.) for example, it is not impossible that the meaning here was 'the gods.' Notice that the form ha'elohim is used; it is more usual for elohim, as a unique designation for God, to occur without the definite article, although there are a few counter-examples (e.g. 22:3 wayyáqom wayyélekh el hamaqom asher amar lo ha'elohim). Exactly the same statement is repeated two verses later (see 5:24). In any case, the consensus is that this formula means that he was a good person who did all the right things. A similar statement is made about Noah in 6:9 (et ha'elohim hithallekh nóax). The verb forms wayyithallekh, hithallekh exemplify the derived class (binyan) called in H grammar hitpael of the verb h-l-k 'to go', here used in a function which Speiser (p. 41) calls "durative"; by contrast, the simple forms, wayyélekh, halakh mean simply 'he went.' Let us notice that the same expression is used, in the next passage, of Noah (6:9, JPS): et ha'elohim hithallekh Noax 'Noah walked with God.'
5:24 wayyithallekh xanokh et ha'elohim w'enénnu ki laqax oto elohim
Another conspicuous departure from the template which replaces the usual notice of the death of the person (wayyámot X 'and X died'). The first part replicates the non-standard clause in 5:22; the second part, (KJV) w'enénnu ki laqax oto elohim 'and he was not, for God took him', is enigmatic in its meaning and has given rise to all sorts of speculations, which while they make interesting reading, produce nothing conclusive.
5:29 wayyiqra et sh'mo nóax etc.
Having now reached the end-point of this tol'dot section which culminates in Noah, the genealogical template is majorly exceeded. The standard template does not contain a "naming clause", firstborn sons simply being introduced by the formula wayyóled et X 'and he begot X'. The name is given but not explained. Here, on the contrary, the name (X) is delayed by the unusual variation wayyóled ben 'and he begot a son', so that it may then be stated that wayyiqra et sh'mo nóax 'and he called him Noah', followed, as is typical in passages introducing significant characters, by a name explanation which is probably spurious but perhaps symbolic, and in any case apparently appreciated by the audience: a folk etymology, and we all love those. The discourse marker telling us that the explanation for the name is coming is lemor 'saying'. It goes on (EF): ze y'naxaménu mimma‛asénu ume‛ittz'von yadénu min ha'adama asher er'rah YHWH 'May he comfort our sorrow / from our toil, from the pains of our hands / coming from the soil, which YHWH has cursed.' This is by no means the only translation in which this sentence reads awkwardly, reflecting difficulties, certainly with the syntactic details and perhaps with the intention of the message. It has to be said that it is also not a brilliant "etymology" as these things go, the word that is supposed to account for the choice of name nóax, which is y'naxaménu 'may he comfort [our sorrow]', being a form of the root n-x-m 'to comfort', of which only the first two consonants are present in the name! There is really no way to account for that other than to say "We-e-e-e-ll..." I am also at a loss to say just how, in the story that follows, Noah performs what is predicted of him, but we cannot discard the possibility that, in the days when this was composed, there circulated additional stories about the folk-hero Noah (I take the epithet from EH), which, had they been preserved, might have helped to make sense of this. On the other hand, there are clear resonances here of something that has gone before, namely the curse on Adam in 3:17-9: ha'adama asher er'rah YHWH 'the ground which YHWH has cursed' looks back to arura ha'adama 'cursed is the ground', and also repeating the key word ‛ittzavon 'pain' is a dead giveaway.
6:1 way'hi ki hexel
This is the beginning of an introductory time clause: 'When (mankind) began...' The syntactic analysis is as follows: way'hi is the untranslatable disourse marker (see note on 4:3), thus (for the present purpose) "ignore"; ki, then, is not a complementizer subordinate to way'hi (i.e. the meaning is not '(and) it was that...', 'it came to pass that...'), but rather a subordinating conjunction introducing a time clause ('when...').
ha'adam
Notice the collective sense in this case: 'When man (mankind, humankind) began...'
6:2 b'ne ha'elohim
Commentators have run around in circles trying to make proper sense of this part of the narrative, and in particular to explain (away) who or what are the b'ne ha'elohim, the 'sons of the gods'. In my opinion, it is time to come clean and say that (1) we don't know (and quite probably never will, for sure), and (2) like it or not, it says what it says: 'the sons of the gods.' One legitimate question we may still wish to ask is whether the ambiguous form elohim is, in the present context, a singular ('God') or a plural ('gods'). But notice the ha-. I think it is reasonable to think that this ha'elohim could be the same thing as the ha'elohim that we just read in 5:22 and 5:24 (wayyithallekh xanokh et ha'elohim etc.) and that the meaning is everywhere 'the gods.' If the phrase is theologically embarrassing, I don't see how it is any more or less embarrassing whether assumed to be singular or plural! But the question still remains: what or who are these gods whose paternity is here asserted? Are they 'great ones' as Onk. says (ravr'vayya); and if so, what does that mean? Whatever the answer, as EH points out, the presence of the definite article would seem to suggest that they were something with which the original audience was familiar. In any case, as a translator the only proper way to translate b'ne ha'elohim is to say what the original text says, which depending on one's interpretation is either 'the sons of the gods' or (less likely in my humble opinion) 'the sons of God' (like the LXX hoi huioi tou theou, Vulg. filii Dei, KJV the sons of God etc.).
wayyiq'xu lahem nashim
This phrase (KJV: 'they took them wives') does not imply any form of violence, since it is the customary expression used for the equivalent of what is expressed in English by 'to marry', as in (24:67, JPS): way'vi'éha yitzxaq ha'óhela sara immo wayyiqqax et rivqa watt'hi lo l'issha 'Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebekah as his wife'; (25:1) wayyósef avraham wayyiqqax issha ush'mah q'Tura 'Abraham took another wife, whose name was Keturah.'
6:3
I surmise from the commentaries I have read that, all told, this verse is pretty much complete gibberish: it doesn't make much sense as it stands and it is difficult to say how we could amend it to restore some sense to it, both absolutely (i.e. how to make the text of the verse say something intelligible) and relatively (i.e. to figure out how, if at all, this fits into the context in which it appears: do these statements follow logically from 6:1-2 or are they independent fragments?). Many of the commonly repeated assumptions are really just unconfirmed conjectures. I believe that in a case like this, the translator's integrity is better served by admitting defeat than by acting as if we really did know what it is talking about. However, that said, most readers' aesthetic interests may still be served by practising a little sleight of hand to endeavour not to make the resulting text look broken. We might call it tactical fudging. The following notes do not provide solutions, they only point out some of the doubts for cautionary purposes.
lo yadon ruxi va'adam l'‛olam
Meaning unclear. The KJV 'My spirit shall not always strive with man' may not be correct. JPS has 'My breath shall not abide in man forever' which concurs with the LXX (ou mê katameinêi to pneuma mou en tois anthrôpois toutois eis ton aiôna) and the Vulg. (non permanebit spiritus meus in homine in aeternum); EAS has 'My spirit shall not shield man forever'. Says Speiser: 'The traditional "abide in" is a guess lacking any linguistic support.'
b'shaggam hu vasar
Assuming the text is not corrupt (if it is, maybe this was not what it originally said, but has been miscopied by confused copyists who couldn't make sense of it either), then hu vasar means 'he (= ha'adam) is flesh', but (1) what does that mean, really? and (2) what does it have to do with the context (the "story")? And b'shaggam is obscure: the translations assume it is equivalent to ba'asher gam 'in that (also)' (so Onk. b'dil d'inun bisra, LXX dia to einai autous sarkas, Vulg. quia caro est, KJV for that he also is flesh), but that is no more than the best thing anyone has come up with.
w'hayu yamaw me'a w'‛esrim shana
It is also quite uncertain what is meant by 'his days will be a hundred and twenty years': it is widely assumed that this means that the lifespan of ha'adam will be limited to 120 years, but that is really a guess, and even if we grant it, in what sense is this said in the text? It is taken to imply that until then, either people lived forever or lifespans were longer (and they are, according to the genealogical accounts), but in that case, is this a punishment? A safety measure? Or just a consequence of whatever lo yadon ruxi va'adam l'‛olam is saying, which might not have been a threat at all but simply an observation of a fact. However, another possibility is that what God was stating here is that, on account of some reason or other, ha'adam (the race as a whole) would last 120 years before it ceased to exist (in anticipation of the Flood, perhaps, if the two narratives are linked other than through mere juxtaposition in the final document).
6:4 n'filim
Traditionally n'filim (Nephilim) is glossed as 'giants'; this goes back to the LXX: hoi de gigantes êsan epi tês gês en tais hêmerais ekeinais, whence Vulg. gigantes autem erant super terram in diebus illis etc. However, the LXX uses gigantes again where the H says gibborim in this verse. It is not clear whether n'filim and gibborim (Vulg. potentes, KJV mighty men, EAS, KJV, EF heroes) refer to the same thing (in Onk. both n'filim and gibborim are glossed gibbarayya). As Speiser notes, gigantes are a concept that forms part of Greek mythology; thus by glossing n'filim as gigantes the LXX translators may have been drawing a cultural analogy (or undertaking a "cultural translation") rather than providing a simple lexical gloss. Speiser also provides arguments which suggest an indirect cognate relationship (not derivative in either direction but rather descendants from a common ancestor) of these respective mythologies, and also hints at ultimate Mesopotamian roots. Thus what we may have here is an ancient legendary framework which, in various translations and adaptations, circulated in the whole cultural area, which even included Ancient Greece, and the possibility that with reference to that shared proto-framework, the Greek translators recognised in the Hebrew n'filim the same referent as the Greek gigantes or "giants" who, in Greek mythology, are named titans and do battle against the god of the sky, Zeus.
b'ne ha'elohim, gibborim
The sons of gods (which still have the definite article ha- on elohim and which still sound to me like sons of gods, not of God) return in this verse too. It doesn't read to me as if they are the same as the n'filim; they have already visited us in 6:2 (where there was no talk of n'filim). This comes across if we read the H with close attention to the syntax: the subject-initial clause hann'filim hayu va'áretz puts the subject in focus and presents hann'filim as new information; that doesn't make sense if we are already talking about them, which would be the case if they and b'ne ha'elohim were co-referent. What follows in the rest of the verse, then, logically refers to the b'ne ha'elohim, not to the n'filim who have vanished from the story as suddenly as they came! What follows is a laconic statement about b'ne elohim: it says that they mated with human women (confirming what 6:2 said: wayyiq'xu lahem nashim mikkol asher baxáru), who bore them children. The they (hémma) in the next clause would have to refer to that offspring; it was the product of mixed marriages between sons-of-the-gods (b'ne ha'elohim) and daughters-of-the-adam (b'not ha'adam) who were the "famous heroes of old" (gibborim asher me‛olam anshe hasshem).
To sum up, then, we have the following cast of characters:
- ha'adam 'the (hu)man' (collective): began to multiply and beget daughters (6:1);
- b'ne ha'elohim 'the sons of the gods': saw and liked the human daughters (6:2) and mated freely with them (6:2, 6:4), thus begetting the famous heroes of old (6:4);
- hann'filim 'the giants(?)': were in the world at that time (when??) and later (6:4);
- YHWH 'the Lord': he said, cryptically, lo yadon ruxi ba'adam l'‛olam b'shaggam hu vasar and declared (also cryptically) that ha'adam would get 120 years (6:3).
Regarding the expression bo el to express sexual intercourse, see my note on 16:2.
6:5 ki rabba ra‛at ha'adam ba'áretz
There is no indication that the wickedness of man (ha'adam) which YHWH found to have increased in the land and the evil thoughts which pervaded his mind have anything to do with what 6:1-4 has been talking about, for they could be unconnected fragments in origin. This evil nature of mankind, then, doesn't necessarily have any connection with the business about the sons of gods, the daughters of man, giants or heroes. Since we don't know for a fact that they're connected, it's safer to assume they aren't. In any case, God saw that man was so thoroughly evil that the situation was hopeless.
6:6 wayyinnaxem YHWH
If the Creation had been an experiment, then it had failed. The adam he made had turned out bad.
wayyit‛attzev el libbo
God was sorry: it pained him that he had done this. The verb ‛-tz-b used here is the root of the noun ‛ittzavon which occurred at several key places in the narrations of this parasha: see notes on 3:16, 3:17 and 5:29. Another interesting point worth noting: this part of the text is the conclusion of the first parasha, and hence of the first section of Genesis as I will divide it; we are coming to a dramatic cliff-hanger now, where God makes the terrible decision to destroy all the life he has created on earth. Given that this is the case, it would certainly be nice to know why God decides to wipe out life, and that is the underlying question that is driving these last lines of the section. It is pointed out in some of the commentaries, which express an interest in comparisons of the coming Flood story with similar stories that are documented in ancient Mesopotamia, that a notable difference is that only the Israelite version of the story establishes a moral reason for this action, as opposed to an arbitrary "act of god". And this verse speaks on an interesting issue: God's feelings on the matter (remember this is the same "humanized" God who apparently felt so sorry for Adam and Eve when he had to throw them out of Eden that he even sewed some clothes for them). God feels remorse (wayyinnaxem) for having created life in the first place, either because it has turned bad or perhaps simply because now he is going to have to destroy it, and it pains him (wayyit‛attzev) to have to do this now. Despite these feelings of sorrow and repentance, God has to do what he has to do; there are reasons, which have to do with ra‛at ha'adam ba'áretz 'man's wickedness on earth' and the bad maxsh'vot libbo 'schemes in his mind'; as in the case of Eden, once again it is men and women who have forced God's hand. But the interesting thing to note is that, in all this situation, and contrary to what apparently could be expected in the polytheistic legends of earlier religions (right down to and including Greek and Roman mythology), there is no word in the present text intimating that God felt any anger. This is a significant moral point: God is portrayed as having human-like emotions, but the universal flood is no temper tantrum of his: on the contrary, the text here takes pains to assure us that he feels remorse and sorrow.
6:7
This verse sums up and spells out succinctly the state of affairs at this point in the big story: what has happened, what is going to happen, and the position on the matter of God, who is now ready to make his move. Everything in this drama is now in place. The execution order has been handed down.
6:8 w'nóax
Except that there is this one man... Up until now, the writer's deft hand has provided background on who Noah is but, unless we've already seen the film before (or read the book?), we don't yet know how he is going to fit into the unfolding drama, but we are about to find out, so this is the moment to put him on the centre of the wordly stage under the spotlight. Note that the syntax of the last short sentence in the parasha does this, again, by using the first position slot (the place at the beginning of the clause, preceding even the verb whose default position in BH is word-initial) to spotlight what goes in that position. The unmarked (default) word order of this sentence would have been V[erb] - S[ubject] - O[bject], with the particle w- prefixed to the initial verb, thus: wayyimtza nóax xen... (lit. 'found Noah grace'). Putting the subject first (w'nóax matza xen...) has the effect of signalling a turning point at the discourse level, and so the w- which usually precedes the first word is in such sentences sometimes translated as 'but' (remember that Hebrew does not dispose of much materielle in the area of coordinating conjunctions). But it means more than just 'but': it has a dramatic effect at this point of dramatic tension; indeed, it is the verbal equivalent of the stage direction: ENTER RIGHT NOAH. WALKS TO FRONT OF STAGE. LOOKS AT AUDIENCE. LOOKS UP TOWARDS GOD.
matza xen b'‛ene YHWH
This is a conventional, idiomatic turn of phrase often used in BH. In the traditional versions it is translated literally: LXX heuren kharin enantion kuriou tou theou, Vulg. invenit gratiam coram Domino, KJV found grace in the eyes of the LORD. The commentaries all hasten to add that the use of 'grace' in this translation must not be allowed to lead to any confusion with the technical term grace which is part of Christian theology; it is just an old Hebrew idiom, equivalent to saying that God approved of Noah, or was pleased with Noah. The JPS reads: 'But Noah found favor with the Lord.'
END OF SECTION 1
And so we have reached the end of the first parasha, one of the twelve traditional sections of Genesis following the Jewish weekly reading custom. This first parasha consisted of four passages: three stories and a tol'dot passage. The three stories are among the all-time top Genesis stories in terms of widespread familiarity and popularity. We have learnt how the world started in the beginning (b'reshit), how God got things going and created people and immediately things started to get complicated: don't they always? On the positive side, God has blessed his creatures and tried to make things nice for newborn humanity, with a garden to live in and some very simple rules to obey. The humans, with a little help from a snake, fail to follow the rules and bring upon themselves several calamities: they are evicted from their garden and denied immortality; so from now on they will need to take care of their own reproductive needs and procure their own food from the earth, and both these things are something of a pain as we know, but such is life. But God is still present and men start trying out ritual practices in an effort to please him, some of which turn out more successfully than others. The first siblings ever invent sibling rivalry, and have the first tragic fight, inventing murder in the process. This leads to the invention of punishments for crimes, which it turns out, God finds abhorrent. However, life must continue by means of continual reproduction and constant work, and soon professions are invented, and so are genealogies. And that is how there ended up being a certain man with three sons, a descendant of adam and xawwa, whose name was nóax. To be continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment