It feels strange to say it, but it's now been a full year since we began our journey together into the riches of the first book of Moses called Genesis. We've covered the first four chapters of the book – but they've been meaty, juicy, chewy chapters. (I promise, our journey is speeding up – it won't take us a decade to cover the rest!) Paul tells us that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). And we've proven its truth: just think where we've been and what we've learned!
We began from an eternal prelude, peering behind the veil of all created things to catch God 'at home alone' in eternity – and there we found Father and Son and Holy Spirit, three persons distinguished by relation to each other, each living the one and only God's inner life in relationship with the other two. And out of this infinitude of love, freely God cried out for a creation. We watched as all things burst into being out of nothing at his Word of command, and as his Spirit nurtured and prodded and vivified all that he had made. The light of God burst instantly into his world with a bang, stretching out time and space, and filling them with so many celestial marvels. We luxuriated in God's wisdom and God's goodness as we watched him create so many parts of his magnificent, splendid, superabundant world - separating sky and sea and soil, blanketing the world with plant life, sending sentient life surging through the waters and the skies and the land. We wondered as God built this universe into a temple for himself, and as he rested in it by filling it with his gracious control, sanctifying it as 'open for business' (Genesis 1:1–2:3).
The final piece necessary before resting in his temple was for him to install his image in the world – and that's us, a curious creature at once material (like animals) and spiritual (like angels). Installed in God's sacred garden within a world of goodness entrusted to our care, we're priests, put here to guard and exalt God's holiness as we minister within the sacred rhythms of creation. We're royalty, here to administer the earthly creation, studying and naming things and subduing them all for God's kingdom. God diversifies his image as men and women, then calls us back together, bidding us be fruitful and multiply. He expects us to extend his blessing from the garden to all the realms of his creation, filling space and time with his visible goodness, preparing creation for that nuptial day it can be swept off its feet into bliss eternal by its Bridegroom and Maker (Genesis 1:26-30; 2:4-25).
In order to live out that mission, only through growth in a commandment could we be made ready to receive our place beside God's angels. Enter, then, the first glimpse of darkness, as a twisted power within God's creation aims to stoke doubt and disbelief toward the Creator's goodness. We undertook here a case study of the shrewd way the Serpent manipulates and misguides, and of the original temptation that lured us slithering after him. And we witnessed, horrified, the primeval failure and its fallout. Enter now shame, guilt, fear, division, and a cursed and mortal life. Excommunicated and exiled, we were sent out, yet not without hope – for in judging our manipulator, God not only promised combat between the Serpent's seed and the woman's, but that one day, the Woman's Seed would strike the Serpent's own head a lethal blow. And who knows but that then all terrors shall end, even death (Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-24)?
Stripped of the grace we'd been given, diverted from our heavenward path, hazily we stumbled from this garden we don't know to the wounded world we do. And there we saw human life as we know it begin, in a family all too real. But although the parents undoubtedly treasured firstborn Cain to a fault, their esteem was not shared by God, who declined Cain's half-hearted gift but instead embraced Abel and his offering. In a character study, we explored how Cain reacted in anger and despair, and we heard God's counsel, how he could yet tame his passions and direct them toward the good, if only he'd choose to master this demon-beast (Genesis 4:1-7).
Sadly, we watched Cain surrender to his rage, turning him into a murderer and persecutor, and Abel being made a victim and a martyr. As the killer was questioned by God, we explored the stark contrast between Cain's callous outlook and the care God expects us to show for one another. Although Cain was then fittingly punished for his heinous crime, even here God showed him mercy, sparing his life and pledging himself as Cain's avenger (Genesis 4:8-15).
We then watched Cain wander off to a distant land, turning his back on God's face. This chapter since then has continued with Cain and his descendants, focusing on them as the human story – cities, culture, crafts; arts and sciences; technique and technology. This, to ancient Sumerians, is where history really begins. Entwined deeply with this rise of civilization, however, is the ripening fruit of Cain's way to be human. At last we met Lamech, the seventh generation from Adam. Lamech, a Sumerian-style hero, takes Cain to a new level. He uses civilization to build oppression; he defends his pride with vengeful war; he refuses to admit any limits, making himself out to be a god on earth (Genesis 4:16-24).
Up to this point in Genesis, we would be forgiven for assuming that this is the only story of humanity that there is to tell. The only counterexample to this trajectory, Abel, is dead. Why shouldn't we then identify with Cain? Why shouldn't we be his children? Why shouldn't we be the hopeless sons and daughters of Lamech, enslaved to his logic of oppression, worshipping his vengeance out in the Land of Wandering where we built our vain cities and put our trust in our civilization? If this is where Genesis has led us, it seems that humanity is simply doomed to the downward spiral, and that this is our story without remainder. But, as one author puts it here, “the menacing outcome of the line of Cain – the line of pride, presumption, violence, the arts of death, and the desire for apotheosis – begs for another way. We are not disappointed.”1 For chapter 4 has two more verses.
Right off the bat, these verses remind us of something: Adam and Eve. They've been off-screen since verse 2, but now Genesis rewinds to the originals of the human type – before Jabal, Jubal, Tubal-cain; before Lamech seizes his wives; before Methushael, that hero of hell. Retreating to the Stone Age, what did the events of this chapter look like through Adam and Eve's eyes? The son they gloried in gave himself fully to the Serpent, bringing bloodshed into human life; the son they'd discounted, the only one favored by God, lay dead at a brother's hand. Consider the shock, the sorrow, the grief and woe of losing two sons, one to death and the other to exile. Genesis 4:25 picks up nearly 130 years after the end of chapter 3 (Genesis 5:3), and one later Jewish writing imagines that “Adam and his wife were mourning four weeks of years on account of Abel.”2 And all this time, Eve will tell us, they haven't forgotten “Abel, whom Cain murdered” (Genesis 4:25).
The effects of such grief on a marriage can be profoundly devastating. Some Jewish legends imagined that it took divine intervention to bring Adam and Eve out of that.3 But now, after however long, “Adam again knew his wife” (Genesis 4:25). This is so different from Lamech and his wives, plural, whom he does not 'know' in intimacy but merely takes so that they bear him sons (Genesis 4:19-22).4 But Adam and his wife act out their marriage, and she conceives and bears, so that the chapter that began with nativities will end with one, too.
“She bore a son, and she called his name Seth” (Genesis 4:25). When Cain was born and named, Eve made herself the star of the show: “I have gotten a man with the LORD” (Genesis 4:1). But now over this son she speaks words of praise, piety, thanksgiving, awe, and wonder for what God has done. On the other side of grief, Eve concedes all credit to the Creator for this child. As one writer comments: “No longer boastful..., chastened regarding also her own pride in Cain's birth, she feels only gratitude in the birth of Seth.”5
She explains his name by saying, “God has appointed for me,” “God has established for me,” “God has set for me,” “God has placed for me” (Genesis 4:25). The Hebrew word for 'set' or 'place' or 'establish' sounds a lot like the name 'Seth.'6 It's the verb that will later be used when Pharaoh 'sets' Joseph in a role of authority over the land of Egypt (Genesis 41:33), or when the LORD 'sets' the boundaries of the promised land (Exodus 23:31), or when the LORD 'sets' the sons of David on Israel's throne, generation after generation (Psalm 132:11). But the only time so far in the story that we've heard this verb is in the LORD God's curse against the Serpent: “I will set,” I will establish, I will appoint, “enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed” (Genesis 3:15). Now, says the woman, “God has appointed for me another seed” (Genesis 4:25). Cain chose to become a seed of the Serpent and to strike down Abel to death. But the woman has faith that God has made this new son the woman's seed, another chance to resist the Serpent and his hostile designs on the world.7
He's “another seed,” Eve says, “instead of Abel, whom Cain murdered” (Genesis 4:25) – a living memorial, constantly holding forth before the world both Abel's innocence and Cain's guilt.8 St. Augustine suggests this gave Seth a mission in life: that “he was the one who would fulfill his brother's holiness.”9 Born in Abel's stead, Seth is set in his martyred brother's place to face enmity from the serpent's seed, whatever form it takes.
Genesis leaps over Seth's childhood, though one Jewish writer comments that Seth, “after being brought up and attaining to years of discretion, cultivated virtue and excelled in it.”10 “And as to Seth, also to him there was born a son,” we read (Genesis 4:26). Life goes on. The family Abel could have started but never got the chance, Seth now will have for him. The woman's seed begins to multiply. “And he called his name Enosh” (Genesis 4:26). Now, that choice of name matters. 'Enosh' is, like 'Adam,' a Hebrew word meaning 'human.' In a sense, Enosh's very name casts him in the role of “a second Adam.”11 You could almost say that, “in effect, the human race is starting over,”12 from a position not of pride but of humility. As the psalmist asks, “What is 'enosh, that you are mindful of him, and the son of 'adam, that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:4).
Where Seth calls the name of his son Enosh, “then he began to call on the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26). This is a phrase we'll find throughout the Bible, but it begins right here. Moses marveled how near the LORD was to Israel “whenever we call upon him” (Deuteronomy 4:7). Where pagans call on their own gods in vain, Elijah “will call upon the name of the LORD” and receive an answer by fire (1 Kings 18:24). What made other kingdoms doomed, the psalmist says, is that they “do not call upon your name” (Psalm 79:6). But the prophets held out hope that, in the end, “all [peoples of the earth] may call upon the name of the LORD” (Zephaniah 3:9).
Where Cain's Enoch is built on the foundation of Cain's departure from the face of the LORD, Seth's Enosh is a marker of the exact opposite: a search for the face of the LORD, calling out the LORD's name in an active quest for the living God.13 One commentator calls this “the beginning of religion.”14 Already there'd been the notion of ritual and offering (Genesis 4:3-4), but now we get vocal religion, calling out to God in prayer.15 This is both a deeply personal relationship and an organized public worship, involving us as thinking, speaking beings.16 This lays a foundation for theology, for preaching the LORD's name, character, and will to others.17
Last Sunday, we puzzled through conundrums posed by all we know as civilization. But in Seth and Enosh, we encounter a different way to be human. Nowhere does Genesis mention their cities or cultures or technologies. In the eyes of Cain's kids, no doubt, Enosh and his clan might as well be barbarians or beasts, rude and crude, filthy and ignorant. They live a simpler life indifferent to Cain's concerns and values. They, too, are innovators, but their contribution to the world is not civilization but true religion.18 This is exactly where Cain's civilization does not invest, for all of Sumer's grand temples and priesthoods and rituals and pretty poems to false gods.19 But this one thing needful is worth more than all the Cainites' cities and cultures combined. Enoch may have a city, but Enosh has a calling! Where Cain offers us humanity concerned with constructing and crafting and controlling, “strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12), Seth offers a portrait of humanity concerned with what makes humanity humane: God's image surrendering, seeking, believing, trusting. And in the face of a civilization marching steadfastly in Lamech's direction, those who most cherish humanity have all the more urgency in calling on the name of the LORD, begging him to fix the world.20
In focusing life on the spiritual, “the birth of Enosh signaled a renewed hope for redemption and restoration.”21 No wonder, then, some Jewish writers described Enosh as “the first lover of hope,”22 or as a man “distinguished by... a hope and expectation of obtaining good things from the only bountiful God.”23 No wonder early Christian readers, too, saw that “Enosh bears witness to hope,”24 for “Enosh, by means of the steadfast hope of faith, took hold of the good things to come, for which he had hoped, and vigorously called out to God.”25
Which points us ahead to the spiritual meaning of these passages. We've seen already that Abel, in his death at a brother's hand, prefigured the death of Jesus Christ, crucified by those whose brother he'd stooped to become. But as God appointed Seth to be born in Abel's place, this was – in the words of one old bishop – “a premonition of the resurrection of Christ.”26 For Christ is, at last, Another Seed, born to crush the Serpent's head by his death and resurrection. And in him, human nature itself has been refashioned.27 When Seth fathered Enosh, he was a figure of “hopes and aspirations for a new humanity,”28 to “prefigure... the human society that lives... according to God in the hope of eternal happiness.”29 Enosh spiritually signifies “man as the son of resurrection,” standing for the new humanity “itself born of faith in the resurrection of Christ.”30 For “according to his great mercy, God has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3). Now “a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God” (Hebrews 7:19).
Peter quoted the prophet at Pentecost, that “it shall come to pass that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Acts 2:21); and Ananias told Saul to “rise and be baptized and wash away your sins, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16). “Give us life,” the psalmist prays, “and we will call upon your name” (Psalm 80:18). That's why Paul declares that Christians are “those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:2). Calling on the Lord's name is our worship: “I will offer to you the sacrifice of thanksgiving..., I will lift up the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the LORD” (Psalm 116:13-17).
Calling on the Lord's name is our proclamation: “Oh, give thanks to the LORD, call upon his name, make known his deeds among the peoples, proclaim that his name is exalted” (Isaiah 12:4). Calling on the Lord's name is our regular prayer, for “every day I call upon you, O LORD; I spread out my hands to you” (Psalm 88:9). For we have grasped by faith the hope that is in store, and it was said long ago that “the one who has truly recognized and truly hoped for the things of the future never ceases to call out, through his practice, for that which he hopes, and he becomes another Enosh, calling upon God.”31
Ultimately, I can put this no better than Bede, the medieval monk we quoted often last Sunday, who so clearly saw the spiritual meaning of today's passage: “Enosh, the son of Seth, represents figuratively the Christian people, who through faith and the sacrament of the Lord's passion and resurrection are born daily throughout the whole world from water and the Holy Spirit. For they, preferring the grace of their regeneration to their first generation, in everything which they do are accustomed to invoke the help of the name of the Lord, saying, 'Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,' and so forth, of the same Lord's Prayer, or of other prayers with which we are accustomed to beseech his grace, without which we are nothing able. Hence also we are properly called by the name 'Enosh,' that is, 'human being,' on account of our awareness of our weakness. But on account of the hope of our future immortality, we prove to be sons of Seth, that is, of resurrection.”32 So may we, sons of the resurrection, a new humanity of hope, truly call on the Lord with hopeful hearts; let this be our hallmark on the mountains of Seth and the cities of Cain, to everywhere spread our hands to God in Christ.
1 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 149.
2 Jubilees 4:7, in Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 2:61.
3 Greek Life of Adam and Eve 3.2, in John R. Levison, The Greek Life of Adam and Eve, Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature (De Gruyter, 2023), 156.
4 Martin Sicker, Reading Genesis Politically: An Introduction to Mosaic Political Philosophy (Praeger, 2002), 69.
5 Leon R. Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press, 2003), 149.
6 Richard S. Hess, Studies in the Personal Names of Genesis 1-11 (Eisenbrauns, 2009), 65-66.
7 James McKeown, Genesis, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Eerdmans, 2008), 44; Bryan C. Hodge, Revisiting the Days of Genesis: A Study of the Use of Time in Genesis 1-11 in Light of Its Ancient Near Eastern and Literary Context (Wipf & Stock, 2011), 126.
8 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 20.13, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:44-45.
9 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God 15.15, in Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/7:161.
10 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.68, in Loeb Classical Library 242:33.
11 Richard S. Hess, Studies in the Personal Names of Genesis 1-11 (Eisenbrauns, 2009), 66-67.
12 Donald E. Gowan, From Eden to Babel: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 1-11 (Eerdmans, 1988), 74.
13 Mark J. Boda, A Severe Mercy: Sin and Its Remedy in the Old Testament (Eisenbrauns, 2009), 20.
14 Donald E. Gowan, From Eden to Babel: A Commentary on the Book of Genesis 1-11 (Eerdmans, 1988), 74.
15 Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 40; Bruce K. Waltke, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan Academic, 2001), 101; John Goldingay, Genesis (Baker Academic, 2020), 105.
16 C. John Collins, Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary (P&R Publishing, 2005), 207-208.
17 Matthew D. Jensen, “Noah, the Eighth Proclaimer of Righteousness: Understanding 2 Peter 2:5 in Light of Genesis 4:26,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 37/4 (2015): 465-466.
18 Bill T. Arnold, Genesis, New Cambridge Bible Commentary (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 82.
19 Brian Neil Peterson, Genesis: A Pentecostal Commentary (Brill, 2022), 63.
20 Adam E. Miglio, The Gilgamesh Epic in Genesis 1-11: Peering into the Deep (Routledge, 2023), 87.
21 Joseph E. Coleson, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary in the Wesleyan Tradition (Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 180.
22 Philo of Alexandria, On Abraham 2 §7, in Loeb Classical Library 289:7.
23 Philo of Alexandria, That the Worse is Wont to Attack the Better 38 §138, in Loeb Classical Library 227:295.
24 Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 14.2, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 107:39.
25 Maximus the Confessor, Responses to Thalassios 47.2.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 136:257.
26 John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 21.8, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 82:56.
27 Cyril of Alexandria, Glaphyra on the Pentateuch 1.3.3, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 137:75.
28 Richard S. Hess, Studies in the Personal Names of Genesis 1-11 (Eisenbrauns, 2009), 133.
29 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God 15.18, in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/7:166.
30 Augustine of Hippo, The City of God 15.17-18, in Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century I/7:165.
31 Scholion 2 on Maximus the Confessor, Responses to Thalassios, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 136:264.
32 Bede, On Genesis 4:25-26, in Translated Texts for Historians 48:160-161.
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