Thoughts on Genesis 5

What's going on with all these lists of names?  Join us as we explore Genesis 5 and how it connects with the larger themes of scripture.  

Transcript

Rose 0:01

Hey guys, it's Rose. If the Two Trees has been a blessing to you, please leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcast. Or visit our website, www.thew trees podcast.org, and click the yellow buy me a coffee icon to leave a donation. And now let's join the conversation.

Jon 1:02

And we're back. Welcome to the Two Trees Podcast. You may not know me, but my name is John Dillon, and I've been gone forever. I'm here with my very good friends, Mrs. Rosemary Muller.

Rose 1:14

Hello.

Jon 1:14

And the right honorable chief of the village, Martin Listener.

Rose 1:19

Hey y'all.

Jon 1:20

Uh it's been we've been dark a little bit. We haven't had an episode, not because we didn't make one for you, but because the technology rebelled against us. But we have beaten it into submission and we are back. Well, if you're hearing this, we're back. Yeah, if you're not hearing this, then we continue to lose. It's entirely possible.

Rose 1:38

You know, I kind of miss Rusty. He recorded the other episode with us, and he is not here today to re-record.

Jon 1:45

Yeah, so I got a message on Facebook from a guy who lives local to us. His name's Rusty, really cool guy. And he's like, hey, I've got a sponsor for you. And we had him come out, we recorded this episode, and then I had to call him back and be like, You remember how we recorded that episode? It does because the board doesn't remember. Yeah, the board has no idea that we did anything like that.

Martin 2:03

But we'd remember.

Jon 2:04

So we tried. But we'll try again. We'll get Rusty back. He's got a Father's Day shindig that he's doing today. We're recording on Father's Day. Uh so Martin has been called in from uh fishing. He's been after the fish with his dad, and they were slaying him down there.

Martin 2:19

Uh just a couple. Dad got a really big one though. But I just got pretty much the same fish I think I catch every time because I go in the same spot.

Rose 2:26

Hello, Martin. Yeah.

Martin 2:27

Fish is really into piercings. Exactly. So I yeah. But I have a lot of fun with it. Never was a fisherman for a long time.

Jon 2:35

Yeah, for a long time. Martin would just roll his eyes when we talked about fishing because he's got the bug now. He used to say hooked. Hey oh.

Rose 2:43

Good one. That was low-hanging fruit.

Jon 2:46

Sorry. No, it's been a busy uh couple weeks for me. We had our vacation Bible school, which was hundreds of small people running around being crazy, and uh it was a lot of fun. Gospel got preached, kids had fun, and in general, it was an overwhelming success. So, all of you who helped with the Stillwater uh vacation bible school, thank you for your gifts, except for Rose. Um, everyone else is thanked.

Rose 3:07

You know, actually, I feel like we totally did a great job on the water slide, except for the part where you told the kids to unload all the water balloons on me. That was very low. But other than that, I think they loved that part. They did, indeed. They did.

Jon 3:22

Uh then I was out in Arizona in the Navajo Nation, and I taught for a while out there, and uh, we were doing a work project building a church, and then in the evenings I was teaching and I met some really beautiful people and had a really great time, and I'm back now. I I hate flying, so anytime I'm flying, I I hate it. But I'm back and I'm back on the earth, and I like it down here. So, all of you who are in America for the World Cup, you didn't go to space, you just it was close enough, man. I don't like it. There's not enough shoulder room in the plane, there's not enough anything in the plane. And the flight from Houston back to Dayton had no air. So it was very stinky and kind of just stale air the whole time. And the guy next to me had broader shoulders than I do, so we were just kind of like smushed into our seats very, very close together. And I didn't like it, but it's okay.

Rose 4:14

It seems to me as though close shoulders and no air conditioning could happen anywhere. But when it's in a plane, there's also no like earth.

Jon 4:23

Yeah, I can't go away. Actually, at one point I stood up and was like walking down the aisle to like go just stretch my legs, and the flight attendant was like, What are you doing? It's like, um go back to your seat. It's like, okay, I'm so sorry.

Rose 4:35

That light is for you, sir, not for everybody else.

Jon 4:38

I felt like I I should have been able to wander more, but it's okay. It went as well as it did, but I'm glad to be home. Uh and my team did a great job. They did a ton of work, and it was really great meeting uh many of our Navajo brothers and sisters out there and just serving them and talking and being able to teach. Uh, it's always fun when you have a Nav uh a translator uh to kind of help you with what you're saying. And so Carlos did an awesome job, helped me a ton. But uh we're back and we're redoing something that we have done before. And normally we have a sponsor, but we're gonna skip that today because we want to do rusties when we get him back here. Uh but Rose, do you have a review for us?

Rose 5:15

Well, not so much a review for the two trees, but I was uh watching Phil Bray's review of your book, The Way of Eden. And where is he from again?

Jon 5:26

He's from down under.

Rose 5:27

Well, I meant okay, he's from Australia. But there's a oh a podcast, Leviticus.

Jon 5:32

It's fun. Yeah, Leviticus is fun. He is a Leviticus guy.

Rose 5:36

Okay, Leviticus is fun. Phil Bray reviewed your book. And I think you put a link maybe on our Facebook page to it, or somebody did.

Jon 5:42

Yeah, he's a super kind guy, and he said nice things, which makes me love him more.

Rose 5:45

He did, and he did a little bit of a read aloud, which was lovely. I I mean I've obviously read the book, but I thought it was quite fun to listen to it, and it makes me feel as though it should be made into an audio book.

Jon 5:56

No.

Rose 5:56

Just saying is all.

Jon 5:58

No, I mean I'm not opposed to it. If someone else wanted to do it, that'd be fine.

Rose 6:01

I think Phil Brace should do it. His accent is a good thing.

Jon 6:03

Oh, it would sound very classy if Phil would do it.

Martin 6:05

You know what the best part about it is, is you wrote it and it's OSHA, is who he's talking about, which you said something. He said O-S-H-A. Well, they don't have that in Australia. Which is so funny, just the cultural difference. But it really leads into what we're doing with bridging the cultural gap. And so even though he may not have understood what OSHA is the same way that we do, it still resonated with him in a way that is the same with us, your book. So it is a pretty cool thing to reach out and say.

Jon 6:32

Yeah, absolutely. And really the purpose of this season is to bridge that cultural divide. There are things that the ancient authors and audiences expected and were doing in the text that uh seem strange to us, or we're not sure why it's getting so much airtime in the text and we're not really sure what to do with it. And so then the natural response is treat it as unimportant and push past it onto something that we recognize.

SPEAKER_01 6:57

Right.

Jon 6:57

And to be quite honest, you only have so many hours in your day. And if you're reading your Bible and you this doesn't make any sense to you, it does make sense to push on to the next thing. But if you're studying your Bible, you need to know that none of the Bible is just there. All of it was purposefully chosen to go into the scrolls, into the books. And so nothing is just filler, it's not just taking up space because someone wanted it uh to have a little bit of extra zing there. All of it is very purposeful and it has reasons for being there. Excuse me for my coughing. In particular, the idea of genealogies comes into play here because as a modern American, we know who our parents and our grandparents are, and you may know even who your great-grandparents are, but we are very individual focused. It's about me and my time, and the further back in time you go, the less um relevant people feel that it is. Uh, the ancient world didn't feel like that at all. They saw themselves as modern expressions of this story that began way back then. And so, if you wanted to know who you are now, you needed to know what had happened before. Why are we living where we are? What are our stories? What are our hopes? What who are we as a people? And um, this is the world that the book of Genesis comes out of. And so when we read the book of Genesis, you're used to it looking like one book. This nice little pre-packaged 66 books all wrapped up in one fake leather binder. And uh, we call this the Bible. And we know that hypothetically, once upon a time, these were individual scrolls and where they came from. People are kind of fuzzy on. And they have this idea that at some point in the past, Moses sat down with a stylus and uh an animal skin or some papyrus, and he just started writing. But Genesis does not seem to be that kind of a book. Instead, what you have is two very distinct sections that have been put together into one book. One of them is the first section of the book, the first eleven chapters that talk about what the world was like before the fall or before the flood. And then you have a section that is about what happens after. We've got Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the patriarchs, and so kind of from creation to Babel, and then from the story of Abraham, and these have been put together. But even those divisions aren't going to give you a clear example of what the book is, because an oral culture, like the ancient Israelites, they didn't just have a book that they were pulling down off the shelves to read from. There were lots of little stories, pieces of their history that were memorized and would have been brought out at family functions or fires or moments where the community was gathering. And one of those is what you're going to read in Genesis 5. And so when you're looking at this in English, we divide the book up with these ginormous numbers, right? They're in your Bible, we call those chapter breaks. But the chapter breaks are relatively recent inventions to scripture. That is not how the ancient people were finding things in the book. Instead, they looked at it more as literary units. There are instinctively in the book of Genesis 10 sections that are all marked off by the word tolydot, which is a very fancy sounding word, and it means generations. And so we look at the generations and we're like, I don't know what to do with this. Let me push on to it. To an ancient reader, when they saw this idea of Tolidot, of generations, they knew, oh, okay, we're moving into a new section of story. And so it would have been it would have served like a chapter break. There aren't chapter breaks, but the like one. And you're going to find five of them in the first section of the book, From Creation to Babel, and you're going to find five of them in the Abraham and his children's stories. That's not an accident. You have this repetition of the number ten. Uh, the chapters and verses of the Bible that we find all throughout the scripture are added later so that you can find things simpler. And if you are really studying the Bible, you're gonna come across places where you're like, wow, this chapter break is in a really inconsiderate spot. It's almost like they broke off the ending of the chapter. For instance, Genesis 1 and 2 is a famous example of this. Uh and you're like, I don't know why this is part of a new chapter. It's because those chapters aren't really there to break up the story, like what you would find in like a modern novel. Instead, they're there to help you find things quickly. That's their function, that's their purpose. You guys with me so far?

Martin 12:08

Oh, yeah. Um, the the biggest thing I was thinking of was when you said the stories we brought out at like family functions or even just weekly or whatever. You've mentioned several times before, even uh from the pulpit, about how today's world is so inundated with surplus that we lose some of the specialness of things. And when you're talking talking about like God's word, you get it anytime, anywhere. And if you don't talk to the Gideons, they'll get you one. Like there's an ability to get the word everywhere so that the the memorization of it becomes less important because you can always just grab it and find it, or look it up on your phone, or do this, or do that. And so one of the culture differences in my eyes comes from that stems from that idea, the fact that they were memorizing it because they may not have access to it written down ever in their life, or only the elite or only the the most important could. Whereas we have it so much that we lose the importance of it just because it's more abundant than they have.

Rose 13:06

That's a good thought, Martin. I've never considered that before.

Jon 13:08

Thank you. And you you'll find this is still very much the way that many cultures in the world operate out out in the the Navajo nation where I was, that's how they operate. They have stories that are for particular times, and they're remembered by the whole population, and they bring them out and they'll dance them or they'll tell them. Uh, the Jewish world was very much doing the same thing. Long before Genesis came out as one document, there were these smaller stories, the creation of the world. Let me tell you the creation of the world. And you can tell when you're reading it, this is very stylized. Somebody put a lot of thought and effort into why is it set up this way? And it moves very quickly from point to point to point to point.

Martin 13:51

But that's why I think the um like the Christmas story is so good with the Nativity walk that Stillwater does, is it emphasizes so much importance on it and it's told in an oral fashion instead of a written-down fashion. I think that's paying homage to kind of the history of how these things would have been passed down, and that's why it is so it resonates so much with people. Of course, you have the the the actors and the characters and everything, so it brings it to life as well. But I think a little bit of it just puts more emphasis on it because it is a special thing. Everybody knows the Christmas story. If you if you don't, by now I'll be happy to tell you Luke 2 and everything. Uh but just generally speaking, most people that come to the Nativity Walk already know the story. They're not coming for oh, this brand new movie, I've never seen it before. Like they know the story, but the way that it is portrayed emphasizes the importance of it much more. And I think that if we looked at uh Genesis in the same fashion of like how can we emphasize the story in the same way that they did, it makes it come to life. When we recorded this one last week, it made it come to life for me, just having an understanding of what the the generations are talking about.

Jon 14:57

Yeah, that phrase tolidot, the fact that it's in your Bible ten times is it has cultural significance. And we'll get into that, but let's let's begin with some scripture. Let's look at Genesis five, verses one through five.

Rose 15:11

I will get there in just a minute. I was thinking about something which What are you thinking about? Well, here's the thing it is so far from scripture, it's almost not worth bringing up, but I have to do it anyway because I can't let it go. When we do 20th century history and we're done, I always have the kids listen to We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel. And it is literally like a generational thing of half of the 20th century, you know, it's just name after name after name, and and you know, things that are going on. But it actually is really helpful to them because by the time that we have finished 20th century history, which frankly is a giant bummer, um, they recognize much of what's going on in the lyrics. It's almost like a recap of everything we just talked about. Does that make sense? And so that's like as I was listening to you talk, I thought, this is like we didn't start the fire, but you know, yeah, that's a modern version of this.

Jon 15:59

Like it doesn't give you any of the background.

Rose 16:01

Right.

Jon 16:02

It references this name, this thing that you have backstory for because you've been alive in that time.

Rose 16:10

Exactly.

Martin 16:10

And Billy Joel selected certain people because he was trying to invoke different emotions, and that's what the the generations are gonna do in the Bible as well. Like I think Luke is the most famous one with and we'll get into that later. Sorry, I'm spoiling everything. I don't read ahead of time because I know too much.

Jon 16:29

Well, I we didn't intend to record twice.

Rose 16:32

Genesis 5, 1 through 5. This is the book of the generations of Adam.

Jon 16:36

Okay, we're gonna stop there.

Rose 16:37

Of course we are.

Jon 16:37

Right, we're gonna stop there because you're getting a glimpse there into the fact that this chapter used to be its own thing. This is the book of the generations of Adam. That word generations is the word toty dote. And it emphasizes hey, this used to be its own thing. This was like a roll call of who we are as a people. And you can imagine like grandfathers sitting around and explaining to the young or to uh the warriors or to the families at a big gathering. Let me tell you your past, where you come from, how did the world become what it is today? And just like we didn't start the fire, um, who, by the way, Billy Joel is not a friend of the show, as far as I know. Um but if he wants to come on, I have questions. Um but uh love your stuff, man. Uh but if he did, like you'd be like, okay, each of these names that are going to come isn't intended to just tell me the order of events. I'm touching a past motif and event. And all of the listeners had categories for these words and these names to go in. And so this is the story of our people. These are the generations of Adam.

Martin 17:43

It's so weird that like it doesn't even resonate to us that this is chapter five, and the first line is like telling you what this book is about.

Jon 17:51

Yeah.

Martin 17:51

If you were reading like a Hardy Boys book and you got to chapter five, and then they were like, this is a book about two guys that are going to solve a mystery, and you're like, I'm already halfway through the mystery.

Jon 17:59

And you're like, man, why are we doing this here? Because this was the first line of the song, of the story, of however they were telling it. And it's because later on, when the scribes were putting this together, they thought, we need to make sure we include this. Like, if we're trying to put all the information of the pre-flood world, we need to make sure that these stories aren't forgotten. And so there wasn't like a moment where Moses, as far as we know, just like started scribbling this out. No one had ever read this before. These are most likely stories that he would have heard as they're wandering through the wilderness. That these are what the people are telling each other. So let's keep going.

Rose 18:38

When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.

Jon 18:41

Okay, this is important. This again goes back when they told their story, they emphasized not how long ago, but what is mankind. We are to image God. Keep going.

Rose 18:54

Male and female, he created them and he blessed them and named them man when they were created. When Adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he fathered his son in his own likeness after his image and named him Seth.

Jon 19:08

So again, we see this image idea, but now things have changed a little bit. God made man in his own image, and then it says that Adam is going to have a son in his own likeness and image. And so there is something passed on from father to son. And interesting, it swapped the order that mankind is described in. When Adam has a child, it says it's in his own likeness and image. When God creates man, it's in his own image and likeness. And so this is kind of a way of saying we recognize that what happens between father and son comes from God. But we recognize that God did something greater than, and it's connected, but it's not exactly the same. And so this is a way of viewing yourself and your children and the generations before you as part of this ongoing creation of God. Keep going.

Rose 20:05

Um let's see. The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were eight hundred years, and he had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days that Adam lived were 930 years and he died.

Jon 20:16

So again, we're seeing this used to be an independent scroll or a story, and it's being recorded by the Jewish people. These are people who came out of uh Mesopotamia, these western Semitic tribes that would have had connections to Old Babylon, the cities like Sumer that or Akkad that um Abraham and his family left from. And so even when they're down in Egypt, they're a recognizably Mesopotamian people. They didn't just pass off as you know the same thing as all the other Egyptians. They were a recognizably distinct people. And the people groups of Old Babylon uh they liked to set their histories up in sets of ten. This was a real popular way of summarizing massive periods of history. Now, is it possible that this is exactly the number of generations? It's incredibly possible that that's the case, but it is not necessarily so. Because when we tell a genealogy, we're doing a very specific thing. I want an accurate reflection of every generation. What an ancient person is doing is saying, Am I still connected to my past? How do I fit into this? And so sometimes you will skip generations to keep the story going, especially if you're trying to hit a specific number. Uh for instance, famously in the Gospel of Matthew, there are kings who are taken out of Jesus' genealogy, not because he's not related to them, but because a space needed to be made for these women. To be added to the story so that you recognize right away, wow, this person is different than most kings. He's cutting kings out of the list to make room for people like Ruth and Bathsheba, people who were ostracized in their day, but have become vital parts of the story. And so what you're seeing here is different in its purpose. It's not intending to tell you exactly who was related to who, which, as a West Virginian, we need this, right? This is a common question people ask you who your people are. They want to know where you came from. How are you related? Uh, and instead, what it's doing is it's saying, there is a people that you belong to, and this is your story. And so you have a set of 10.

Martin 22:45

But that's what I was talking about with the the Billy Joel reference, is like he doesn't do all of 20th century history in his song.

Jon 22:51

Yeah, and it doesn't even go in chronological order.

Martin 22:54

Right. There's a lot that's cut out and moved around because stylistically speaking, it needs to work for the song. And so it's the same thing that they're doing here. They're they're trying to write with a style that invokes either emotion or some kind of a position as you're reading this that you can get your mind set upon, not to be a 100% historically accurate depiction of everything that happened between this time and this time.

Jon 23:17

Yeah, and we still have elements of this in our culture. More specifically, we have this with colors. Uh, the color red can either be a warlike color or a passionate color. Uh, yellow sometimes connects the idea of friendship. It can also connect the idea of cowardness. You tell by the context. And so you can tell if something is girly or manly, like how are they painting the nursery? kind of a vibe. These colors have meaning to us. Also, sounds do this. Our generation that's living right now should recognize this with the whole idea of musical soundtracks to movies. You're trying to make you think, uh-oh, I hear the jaws bump, bum, bum, bum. And it tells me this is not a peaceful part of the movie. When I hear this, I'm expecting something. Phantom of the Opera does this famously. My favorite musical is Fiddler on the Roof. And when you hear uh that tradition uh concept come up, you're aware, oh, you're trying to draw my attention to a specific thing. When the ancient peoples did sets of ten, they were remembering back to the creation of the world where God speaks ten times. And it ends with the kingdom of God, with the Lord on his throne. And so if I'm trying to emphasize the kingship of God or the words of God as king, I would set it up as a set of ten because it communicates more than just the words that I'm saying. It's bringing all of this into it. So you're gonna have ten plagues, ten commandments. In the parable of Jesus, you're gonna have ten virgins. In the story of Daniel, you have this beast with ten crowns, ten horns. The number ten has significance that's cultural. And so when I'm reading this and I say, Oh, okay, you have a genealogy set here of ten, that's telling me something about what's going on.

Rose 25:13

Why do you suppose it's ten and not seven? I mean, seven is supposed to be the perfect number, right?

Jon 25:20

Yep. Seven is a way of saying a specific thing. This is a holy thing. And so when you read the prophets, especially like the minor prophets, you will oftentimes find that they set their thoughts up in sets of seven. It's a way of setting this aside and saying this is a holy thing. Um, some books even kind of mirror the menorah pattern where the first chapter and the last chapter are connected, the second chapter and the sixth chapter are connected, the third and the fifth, and then there's this isolated chapter that stands on its own and it makes a menorah pattern. And so they're making art as well as remembering history. They just did it differently back then than we do now.

Rose 26:01

I understand. I just think that if God is the one who chooses to speak ten times and to have like the ten virgins in the story, I wonder why he chooses ten and not seven.

Jon 26:11

Oh, that's a good question. And I don't know the answer. No, I don't suspicion is that it's a specific kind of holiness. This is referencing the idea of God as king. Uh for instance, the Jewish people don't call them the ten commandments, they call them the ten sayings, because the first one isn't really a commandment, it's a saying. And so what you have here is the king speaking to his people ten things. Just like I created the world with these ten expressions, here are ten things for you. Or when he's judging Pharaoh and the gods of Egypt, he sets out ten ways to interact with the world. That carried resonance in the same way. The number 50 has significance to us that someone from Portugal, they're not going to care about because it's not part of their story. It would, though, specifically talk to us about where we come from as an American.

Rose 27:13

And all flags are like that. Whenever we study countries of the world, they have the kids have to notice everything on the flags and what they mean and stuff. And it's pretty fascinating, to be honest, how stories can be told.

Martin 27:23

It's art, it's story in motion. Also, there's, and this is kind of a wild theory, I guess, but there's a an understanding of the human mind that 10 makes sense. Like if you do 10 plus 10, it's 20. It's very easy. Any kind of multiplication of 10 is very easy. All of the there's a better understanding of 10. And my theory is is that something that's ingrained with us because it is God speaking to us and we're in his likeness that there is an ability to understand 10. So that's why it is used in that fashion, or is it just because that's math and we made numbers? Oh, yeah.

Jon 27:55

So there's actually, I guess we can do this here. Uh, if you look at your hand out there in audience land, uh you you're probably tempted to count with your fingers, like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And that makes sense to us. People from Abraham's culture, though, looked at their finger and they saw it's divided into sections. There's three sections on a finger, and so they would go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, a dozen, and then they would hold up one finger. And so they're just as comfortable counting by dozens as we are by tens. And so you're going to find that there are cultural differences here. But you're right, ten is a building block, it's an easy reference point to a solid thing. But we find that when the Bible is utilizing this set of ten or hundreds or thousands, it typically has this kingdom concept floating around somewhere in the background. And what the author has done is he's kind of given a subtle nod to this. If you're reading through Exodus and you're like, okay, God wants the Israelites to go into the promised land and conquer the people, it usually gives a list of people, and that list is six because of the significance of the number. It gave off a vibe. There's more peoples living there than just those six uh tribes, but it's a way of referencing, okay, these guys, you're not going to like them. They're not servants of the Most High, they are serving other gods. And so you can see right away in the beginning part of this section how the rest of this is going to flow. And the one thing I want to point out before we jump deeper into this is that Adam's life is divided into two sections before his child and after his child. Now, Seth is not the oldest child, that's Cain, but he is not in the image and likeness of his father. He is not an acer to his family. And so what the Bible says is Adam has lots of kids. It doesn't tell us when each one was born. He has sons and he has daughters, but it says specifically there was one who carried on his calling, and his name is Seth. So the people of the ancient world are used to thinking of genealogies as part of discussions. It's part of what happened in the world. And the Babylonians and the people living in Mesopotamia, they thought they knew a whole lot about the world before the flood. Genesis is going to be part of a conversation that's saying, you're remembering it wrong. Someone has lied to you about what happened. Yes, there were powers that moved on the earth. Yes, the darkness did raise up mighty men, but they weren't heroes. They were villains, and it ended in God's judgment of the world. And so Genesis is telling the truth about what happened. Babylon's story is not heroic, it's rebellious. But not all of humanity walked willingly in the darkness. And just like in that song, We Didn't Start the Fire, each of the names is their own story. This little poem, this little tenset of genealogies, gives you references back to individuals, but it doesn't tell you their story. You know their story because you have read this as part of one thing. But Seth, like the name Seth, literally means uh compensation or replacement. And it makes sense to you because you just read Genesis 4 and you're like, oh, okay, that makes total sense. But this would have at one time floated as its own story. And so if you don't know the story of Cain and Abel, you might wonder, why do you name him replacement? Why do you name him compensation? What happened there? It's a reference to this character's name is telling me there's more story going on here than what meets the eye. And so let's kind of walk through the generations here. The very first generation, the Toledo, is Adam himself. His name means man, Adam and Eve, right? They are both mankind. That's what they are. It's a species designator, but it's also a reference to the first of us. All of us are children of Adam. And then you notice, okay, kid number two, you would expect to be Cain or Abel. It's not. And Abel's name, by the way, means like vapor, like something that's here for a moment and then gone. And if you read his story, that makes total sense because he doesn't exactly get speaking lines. He's just there and then he's gone. The whole, the major thing about Abel is the horrible thing that happens to him. And so you're looking at these characters and their names, and the question that keeps popping in my mind is is this what they were really called by their parents, or are these the names that these people are remembering the stories? And because these events are on the other side of Babel, we can't know.

Martin 32:54

And I always think about that too, because if you have a guy, and this is maybe unfortunate, but has an injury or a war injury, and he loses his right arm, and you call him Lefty from there on out, his name isn't Lefty. That's not what his parents named him. But throughout history, if you look back, you'd be like, oh yeah, I remember Lefty, and then everybody will know the story that goes with Lefty and what happened and how he was and whatever, but that's based on the name that he was given due to what happened to him during his life. Same thing like with Abel.

Jon 33:23

Absolutely. You can kind of see this in the Robin Hood story. You have a guy named Little John, and he's huge.

SPEAKER_01 33:29

Right.

Jon 33:30

Like it's a joke. You also have Friar Tuck, like in many places, tuck means like snacks. And so you've got Friar Snacks, and he's always eating, or he's he's kind of plump. It's a joke. You recognize that. Okay, I now know something about this character because of his name. And so there are a lot of people who want to fight about what exactly the names are and what they mean. But what I'm trying to show you is that regardless of what language they spoke, the names tell you something about the events of this person's life and what happened there. We can't know the languages on this side of Babel because of the act of God that confused the languages. But the stories didn't change. They remembered them and they kept telling them. And so you have Seth, his name means compensation. Seth has a kid named Enosh, which is another name for man. He's named after grandpa. That's nice. Maybe you're named after your grandpa. Then after him, you find a guy named Kenan, and his name means possession or belonging to. Are you noticing like there's a strong emphasis on family? You know, this kid is mine. You belong with us. There's this sense of belonging, of deep roots. And then you have a guy, his name is Mahalel, and his name means praise God. This sounds like a great story. Like if you had to come up with a story for each one of these guys, this is like a little house on the prairie story. Like things are gonna be okay. You can read this, and all is well, and then things fall off the rails. The sixth man in the story's name is Jared, and his name has a meaning that is uncomfortable for us, and it's lacking any story that goes with it, and that makes us feel weird because his name means and they came down or the descent. And so I'm wondering, well, what happened? What happened in your life that like this guy's name is grandpa, and this guy's name, praise God, and this guy's name is like my little guy, and then this guy's name is the descent. Like, oh man, something has must have really changed in the world. And when you put this and you ask yourself, what did ancient peoples think happened in the world before the flood? The number one thing they bring up is the gods came down and fathered children, and these mighty men and heroes were all over the world, and they were mighty and powerful, and it was the golden age of man. And when you read the Bible, it says the same thing, except it doesn't say this was the golden age of man. It says that the desires of mankind's heart was only evil continually, that there is this moment where humanity seems to just go off the deep end and the world changes and becomes incredibly violent. And so throughout the early part of the Jewish people in the Second Temple, when they talk about Jared, they connect his story with the descent that we find in Genesis 6. The sons of God saw the daughters of Ben, behold, they are fair, and they have sons and daughters. There's this idea where the worlds collide. Jude and Peter are going to talk about how the angels left their first estate and are now chained up, that something went really wrong. This story is ubiquitous across the world. I was just out in the Navajo Nation and they had the same story. They weren't hanging out with ancient Babylonians, but their stories about where the monsters came from connected right back to this story. To me, it was fascinating. Because I'm seeing a historical memory among the peoples of the earth, and you're like, wow, this sounds an awful lot like what Genesis is doing. But if you substitute a modern question into an ancient book, you miss it. So if my only purpose here is why is Charles Darwin wrong and evolution is weird and the earth is not as old as it seems, then I get hung up on the who lived when and for how long. And I don't have any time to spare for the names and the meanings. Instead, if I then take an ancient framework and ask, what was the question they were asking? And the question they were asking is, what happened to the world? How did it start out so well and turn into the world that we're living in today? And do I have any connection back? Is there any hope for me to follow the Lord? And is he still king? I got all these questions because it looks like Babylon is unstoppable. It looks like their buildings and empires and their armies, what could stop something like that? Does God still care about us? And so you can read this and just say, okay, just the facts. Here they are. This guy has this kid, this kid, this kid. You can do that, and you can be completely correct. But if you also then want to do study and you say, is there anything more that I can draw from this? Culture, archaeology, those things add color. And so it isn't saying anything wrong. It's just not saying everything that there is possibly to say.

Rose 38:46

Which makes sense because the Holy Scriptures are not like a math problem. You know, this isn't the Da Vinci Code where we're gonna unlock some mystery from writ written text or whatever of of like tree rings of, you know, to reverse engineer the age of the earth and all that kind of stuff, you know, which like you said, that could be possible, whatever, but that's not what's going on here. And I think that that is really interesting.

Martin 39:11

Why does it have the years in there that they lived in all that?

Jon 39:14

Oh man, so I I don't know the answer to this, but I will tell you that there is throughout the Mesopotamian world a book or a document that's called The Ancient King List. And it has rulers living for incredibly long periods of time, like thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And it seems to give the impression that humanity started as a much stronger species and we're declining. There's a lot of questions about whether the numbers have meanings. I don't know. But what I do know is that there seems to be, even in the pagan world, a memory that humanity used to be really long. Even after we've worked ourselves out of Eden and into the realm of death, humanity is still blessed. There's abundance of life. And each of these characters is referenced as a father. And then it says, had many sons and many daughters. There's this massive influx of family, but at the same time, there is a force at work against them, so much so that by the time you hit Noah, none of his cousins seemed to be interested in getting on the ark. Where are all the other family members, especially if they're living for hundreds and hundreds of years? There may have been people alive who remembered, you know, not very far away from Adam by the time that this all fell apart. I don't know. But I don't think the Bible is trying to give you uh jigsaw pieces to answer a time question. The Bible is trying to tell you the darkness is here, you have to fight against it, and the Lord is with you. That's the underlying question that they're asking. The modern one of how old is the earth is a very recent question. And so when you try to impose it back onto the text, you end up with weird things. Like in Matthew, how dare you cut out kings from the list? Who gave you permission to do that? Well, everyone who'd ever done a genealogy before that gave them permission to do that. They had their own rules that they were because they were doing something different than we are. It's not dishonest, it's not breaking the rules, it's simply a cultural difference between us and them.

Martin 41:29

It's just wild because my brother is uh 12 years older than me. And I always thought that was kind of odd because there's not as strong a relationship because when I was when he was 18 and wanting to move out, I was like seven, six, and he was wanting to just hit me with pillows as much as he could. So, like we just had a an age difference. But I couldn't imagine my brother being 400 years older than me. Like what would that have looked like? You know, did he come to your birthday party? And when he's 400 and you're one, like it's it's just it's odd. So you mentioned that everything in the Bible is there for a reason. It's just weird that you get these very oddly specific numbers that go along with things. And I'm I'm trying to figure out is there a reason because some of them live like 130 years and then this kid comes out. The other one is like 60 some years and then the kid the chosen child comes out.

Jon 42:17

Let me speak into that a minute also because it isn't always the oldest who inherits. Remember, what we're looking at here is which of them followed in the footsteps of their father. And so sometimes you'd be like, wow, they weren't wait, they were waiting 300 years before they had kids. Well, probably not. They were probably getting married as soon as they were interested in girls and they were able to have a family, but this is the one who carries on the story. Uh and so, as far as like more about the numbers, Martin, you'll have to ask someone a lot smarter than me uh because I don't know. But I also have read a lot of people and they don't seem to have a satisfactory answer either. And so it makes me wonder. It's a bit of a mystery, and I'd like to know, but I don't have a really good answer for that. If you're interested in more about Jared, you can read commentary on the book of Enoch, uh, which is written in the Second Temple period, much, much, much later than this. But it shows you how the ancient Jewish people were using this character's story to uh advance the major concept of the stories that they were telling. Now, Jared has a son, and his name is Enoch, which again is a family name. Remember, Cain has a son, and he names him Enoch, but this is the seventh from Adam, and his name means dedicated or like loyal. This is an interesting name because his story is the only one in here that we get a little bit of a narrative about what happened in this man's life. And I think that it's there. This is a John Dylanism, okay? This is not a definitely in the Bible. I think it's there because of what happened in Jared's lifetime. The world went squirrely. Is God done with us? Are we now the property of these beings? Apparently not, because in that same generation with Enoch, God comes and walks with Enoch. The same phrase that you get with Adam back in the garden. There's still hope for humanity. So something horrible must have happened in Jared's day, but God still shows his desire for mankind by doing something special. The names are part of a much larger story that serves as a backdrop for this piece of revelation. And this isn't unique to ancient Hebrew literature. One of my favorite authors is a man named G.K. Chesterton. And we're reading one of his books right now in St. Anne's, our book club, which is about what are we reading? We're reading Orthodoxy. He wrote a book or a poem called The White Horse, and he's telling England's history. And let me read you a part of it says, For the end of the world was long ago, when the ends of the world waxed free, when Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves and the sun drowned in the sea. There's nothing in the poem that explains to you who Rome is or what happened to it. But anyone who knows world history knows Rome was famous for slaves, and it collapsed under its own weight, and you get this Dark Ages thing that comes about. And so the story just references it. This is going on. Later on, when it's talking about King Alfred, it says, It's not by Alfred's dwarvish sword nor Egbert's pygmy crowned that shall stay us now that descend in thunder, rending the realms and the realms thereunder through the world and down. And reading that, I'm like, wow. Dwarvish swords and crowns, but I don't know the names of either of these people. Who is Alfred and who is Egbert? What's going on? They're talking about when the Vikings came. Weren't they movie critics? Oh yeah. But when the Vikings came, they completely messed up everything, right? Alfred preserves the kingdom. And you have this story that isn't bothering to give you the backstory. It drops these names because the people reading this poem knew who they were. It was part of this much bigger story. So let's jump now back into verse 18 of chapter 5.

Martin 46:13

When Jared had lived 162 years, he fathered Enoch. Jared lived after he fathered Enoch 800 years and had other sons and daughters.

Jon 46:21

So you see that same pattern. It's in there ten times, right? So he has a life before, then he becomes the father, and this name is passed on. Uh someone in his image, someone to bear the name. Keep going.

Martin 46:33

Very appropriate. We're recording this on Father's Day. Oh, it is. Thus, all the days of Jared were 962 years and he died. When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. And Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred and sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.

Jon 46:57

So this is weird. It breaks the pattern. The seventh man in the list breaks the pattern. In the last chapter, with the descendants of Cain, you got six people, and then the pattern broke with Lemmech. That is to show you. Sixes are connected to imperfection, and here's your seven, Rose, that goes back. Okay. So that tells me a little bit about what's going on. These are not unfaithful people, these are faithful people. And so Enoch is walking with God. Now, during the Second Temple period, people were really interested in when is the Messiah coming? Are there stories about when God will come and deliver his people? We're slaves again. Oh my goodness, this is bad. And they began trying to look back in their history and to compose pieces of literature to explain what was happening and also to give them hope. And so they took men like Enoch or sometimes um uh Melchizedek, they become almost messianic figures in the literature. And this guy, you can see why he pops off the page because it seems like he doesn't die. Like God treats this human different than any other human. He's bringing him into his presence, he walks with God just like Adam did, and then it says he was not, for God took him. I would like about five more chapters of information, please, about what exactly that means. Because today, if I was to say to somebody, Oh, grandpa, he's not anymore, God took him. Typically that means he's passed away, like death has come upon him. But this text seems to be treating it like the opposite of that. It purposefully broke the way that the life cycle is running, and his age is uncomfortable because he's 365 years old. Remember, in the Second Temple period, they were really interested in the calendar. You got the Essenes trying to figure out what day is the calendar. There were big fights about this, and here you got a guy whose whole life is the exact time of a year. So they did a lot of cool stuff with this. How much of it is accurate? I don't know. It's entertaining, though, if you're into weird corners of the Bible. Uh, there's a lot of oddness here. What I do know, though, is that the New Testament talks about this guy, and it gives us more information about the character of Enoch. So let's go to the book of Hebrews, chapter 11, verses 4 through 6.

Rose 49:26

By faith, Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. And through his faith, though he died, he still speaks.

Jon 49:39

So right away we're going back, we're like, okay, this is all one story. The whole Cain and Abel thing, it also is going to connect. Remember what God said to Cain? The blood of your brother is crying out from the ground. Even today, we remember this. Keep going.

Rose 49:54

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. And without faith, it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.

Jon 50:14

So whoever wrote Hebrews, and we're not entirely sure, there's a lot of debate, but he's linking this story. And he's saying, you know what? There's the Cain and Abel saga, and it's bad. But don't lose heart. God is still with you. Look at what happened to Enoch. He was taken up, he was given entry back into the presence of God. And why was he taken? Because he was pleasing to God. And then he takes it further and he says, Without faith, it is impossible for you to please him. For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and he's a rewarder of those who seek him.

Rose 50:47

I have a I have a question here, and I don't want to derail what you're talking about, but go for it. Specifically in this in this passage from Hebrews, there's so much um repeating between the two stories. So Abel offered an acceptable sacrifice, he was commended as righteous, and then he was killed, but his his faith was still commended even though he died. And then Enoch is also being commended as having pleased God, and then he was taken, so he wouldn't taste death. Like I'm not trying to be a conspiracy theorist, but was Enoch's life in danger? I mean, it feels like he's following the same path that Abel did, and Abel was killed, and Enoch is just taken.

Jon 51:23

Okay, so this is the realm of conjecture. I think everyone's life was in danger during the lifetime of Enoch. After Jared, when the sons of God come down, the world is now an incredibly violent and an angry place. And so, yeah, I think so. The problem with it though, Rose, is we just get like a taste of it.

Rose 51:43

So in Abel, it says, and through his faith, though he died, he still speaks. So even though he died, his faith was the message that he was putting forth into the world that we still see today. So, what is Enoch speaking through not dying?

Jon 51:58

Enoch is speaking through not dying. In my mind, it's saying, Do you remember how you were exiled from the garden and all man must now walk in death? Don't lose hope. God is still with you. Why are Cain and Abel sacrificing outside the Garden of Eden? You can't help but assume they wanted back in. Humanity's been drifting further and further and further from this. Here's a human being who's brought back in. God is still with you. Even the name Emmanuel that we're going to cope with later is this idea that mankind, you're not done. There's still hope, there's still faith, trust in God, not in the horses and the armies of the empires, but in the faithful acts of worship to the God that made you.

Martin 52:42

And John dropped this little nugget last time we recorded this episode, but also the timing of Enoch being taken by God is very peculiar as well. When you talk about Jared and the descent, it seems that the fallen angels or fallen watchers, those coming down and being with the women of humanity, is kind of the strong point of the darkness. And so God has to, not has to, God chooses to, you know, kind of send a message back to them. Like you think you're in control. That's what I think.

Jon 53:12

There's a little bit of a resurrection motif here. Like darkness, you think you've got this, you think you figured it all out. Here's a little flex. No one has to do anything. I'm God and I can do what I like. The same thing. If they had known what would happen if they killed Jesus, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory because it blew up in their faces. This is a way of saying, I am king. This is why that number 10 kind of adds an element of, oh, I can see you now as king. The rebellion is in full motion. But here is the king reaching into the middle of the rebellion and demonstrating dominance. Nothing is outside of my control. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

Martin 53:51

It's finally a sports reference. Didn't do it the last time. But in big time wrestling, there's an unspoken rule that whoever lays the trap falls victim to it. So whoever gets the chair out and tries to hit the other guy is the person that's going to get hit by the chair. That's good storytelling. Trevor Burrus, Jr. And so it's the same idea with this, with the crucifixion. If they would have known that they were going to get hit with the cross, not Jesus, they wouldn't have put him up there. And it's the same with Enoch in this situation, is what we're talking about. If they would have known that coming down and being with the women was not the biggest picture, not the biggest sword they could swing. God still had something up his sleeve at the time. Maybe they would have thought differently than acting like that.

Jon 54:32

There is a judgment that takes place here. And it's it's really interesting because, oh, there's just so many directions you can go from this. But once you understand, like this is a story not about how old the earth is. This is a story about God is king regardless of what's happening here. He is going to provide for his people. You begin to see how it connects and it snaps into place. Now, Enoch, which by the way is a name we've heard in Cain's line before, he's going to have a name of a son who's very famous. His name is Methuselah. And we remember him because he lives longer than anyone else in the Bible. He lives almost a thousand years. And most people don't stop and ask, what does his name mean? And his name literally means spearman or man of the dart. This is an incredibly, this is a warrior's name. And so we think of this like what kind of world is it that's moved from the earlier peaceful concepts of the names. Now the son of Enoch is a warrior. He's a killer, but not a killer in the idea of Lemmoch. Here you have the idea of a righteous man of defending against the darkness. And I think it's ironic that the oldest man in the Bible, the longest living human being, is a warrior. That seems like it should be the opposite. If you're going to go into war as your lifestyle, I would assume that you're going to die early in life. This man is preserved by God longer than any other human being in the Bible. Now, he's going to have a son. His name is Lemech, which ought to again sound off some familiar bells in our heads. This is the same name that we didn't know what it meant back in the line of Cain. And Lemmech also has a line of text. He has speaking lines, which is unusual. I would like some lines from Enoch and from Methuselah. We don't get them. We do get them, though, from Lemech. So let's read what he says in verse 28 of chapter 5.

Martin 56:33

When Lemmech had reached 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah. I didn't say twenty-nine this time. Sorry. Saying, Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from our painful toil of our hands. Lamech lived after he fathered Noah five hundred and ninety-five years and had other sons and daughters. Thus, all the days of Lamak were seven hundred and seventy-seven years, and he died.

Jon 57:04

It's kind of an anti-666. So Lemmech, he's following the same motif. He's having children. His life is defined by his fatherhood. But then he says, This son, what is the name of this son? And his name is Noah, which sounds very similar to the Hebrew verb for comfort or give relief. And so it's a little bit of a pun. What is it that this family is still longing for? Like this sounds like it could have come straight from Cain and Abel. We want the curse on the ground to be lifted. We want back in the garden. Lamech has had a son, and he's remembering the promise that's given to Eve that there's going to come a serpent crusher, that the enemy is going to be defeated, and he's looking forward with hope. Maybe this is the one. Maybe this is the Messiah. And to me, it's this beautiful picture of faithfulness that we've had 10 generations of people living through what you have to imagine is unbelievable violence. Because by the time Noah is a grown man, the whole world is reached levels of depravity that are almost undescribable.

Rose 58:16

I think it says that that was continuously wicked, the thoughts of every man. That's bad.

Jon 58:21

I mean that's worse than now. Like if you really break it down. And so what you're looking at here is this beautiful story of faithfulness. And you can imagine somebody from the ancient world hearing this would also think it may have been a long time since this happened, but God is still with us. The Lord is with us. And even though there's still darkness and still evil, God is still the God of gods, the Lord of Lords, mighty and awesome.