Genesis5chapter 5

Genesis 5:1-2

the book of the generations of Adam: This is the second of the eleven times Genesis says these are the generations, and the divisions narrow as they go, from the heavens and the earth at 2:4 down to one family in Egypt at 37:2. Missler built his reading of the whole book on that structure. Before the counting of deaths begins, the writer says twice that God made man in his own likeness, and records that God gave the name Adam to the man and the woman together.

Genesis 5:3

in his own likeness: Adam was made in God's likeness and his son is born in Adam's, and the wording shifts on purpose between verse 1 and verse 3. Henry read that shift as the fall passing down through the family, since what Adam had lost he could not hand on. Paul works from these verses in Romans 5, where death reigns from Adam onward and Adam is called the figure of him that was to come. The register also passes over both Cain and Abel, and carries the line through the son given after the murder.

Genesis 5:4-8

The same three words close entry after entry, and by the eighth repetition they land with weight: and he died. Long lives do not change the ending. This is the sentence of chapter 3 carried out one man at a time and set down as a list, which is the ground Paul stands on when he says death reigned from Adam to Moses.

Genesis 5:9-14

The older commentators take the name Enos to mean mortal or frail man, and chapter 4 says that in his days men began to call upon the name of the LORD. His son Cainan carries a name close to Cain's, and the two family lists share name after name: Enoch and Lamech stand in both, Methusael beside Methuselah, Irad beside Jared, Mehujael beside Mahalaleel. Gill notes the overlap plainly and leaves it standing. Two households run almost the same names and come to opposite ends.

Genesis 5:15-20

Mahalaleel is the fifth from Adam, Jared the sixth, and Jared's son Enoch the seventh, which is how Jude names him when he quotes his prophecy. The seventh from Adam in Cain's line is the other Lamech, who boasts in 4:23 of killing a man and claims a vengeance of seventy and sevenfold. The same place in the two lines holds a man who walked with God and a man who sang about a killing. Luke carries these same names backwards from Christ in his third chapter.

Genesis 5:21-24

The pattern breaks once. Enoch walked with God is said twice, at verse 22 and again at verse 24, and Genesis says of a doubled dream at 41:32 that the thing is established by God. The only other man in Genesis described as walking with God is Noah at 6:9. Hebrews says Enoch was translated by faith so that he should not see death, and Jude quotes him prophesying that the Lord comes with ten thousands of his saints.

Genesis 5:25-28

Methuselah lived longer than any man recorded in Scripture and died in the year of the flood. Several teachers, Jamieson among them, read his name as a warning built into the family, though the etymology is disputed and the text itself makes no comment on it. What the numbers plainly show is that judgment held off through the longest life in the Bible.

Genesis 5:29-31

Lamech names his son Noah and says he will bring comfort concerning the ground the LORD cursed, which sends the reader back to 3:17. This is the second Lamech in Genesis, and the first had used his voice to boast of vengeance in 4:23. The comfort he asks for arrives in a form he did not name, since 6:8 says Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD, the first time that word appears in the Bible.

Genesis 5:32

The chapter stops without saying that Noah died, and the refrain that has run through eight entries breaks off here. Shem is named first though 10:21 calls Japheth the elder, and Clarke says the order follows the line the promise runs through rather than the order of birth. Genesis will pass over the firstborn again with Isaac, Jacob, Pharez and Ephraim. Chapter 10 divides the nations among these three names.