Lamech

למך


Genesis 4:18/24 names him as the last in a long genealogical line that starts with Chanoch, which of course infers Chanoch's father, who was Kayin (Cain), and Kayin's parents, who were Adam and Chavah, the very first. So generation 7: Adam, Kayin, Chanoch, Iyrad, Mechuya-El, Metusha-El, Lamech - at least according to this version of the family tree. And being generation 7 will become significant, as we shall see.

Genesis 4:23, at least in the pointed, Masoretic text, pronounces him as Lemech, as it pronounces Mechuya-El as Mechiya-El; Metusha-El (מְתוּשָׁאֵל), is the man of extraordinary longevity, usually known in English as Methuselah. 

4:19 has Lamech taking two wives, Adah and Tsilah, the former of whom mothered his sons Yaval (יבל) and Yuval (יובל); they were the ancestors of all tent-dwelling herdsmen and players of harp and pipe; in fact, they were probably the same person with variant spellings, and note that a Yovel (יבל) is a primitive trumpet. With Tsilah (צלה) he had Tuval-Kayin (תובל-קין), the master of copper- and blacksmiths, and Na'amah (נעצה) his sister (Greek Niamh?). 

The centrepiece of the Lamech story is his admission that he killed a man and suffered terrible revenge: "If Kayin shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and seven fold".My exegesis of all this can be found with the text of Genesis 4, but see also my notes on the Number Seven.

This genealogy makes him of the race of Kayain, but he also appears in the genealogy of Shet in Genesis 5:21 where he is not the son of Metusha-El (מְתוּשָׁאֵל), but of Metu-Shalach (מתושלח), and may of course have been an entriely different man. It was this Lamech who, at the age of a hundred and eighty-two, fathered No'ach. In this version he lived a total of seven hundred and seventy-seven years,  182 of them (Genesis 5:28), before the birth of his first son, who in this list was No'ach, 595 years (Genesis 5:30) after No'ach's birth. An interesting figure to complete the list: 7, 77, 777. And 7 is never just another random number!

Are Metusha-El and Metu-Shalach likewise two different people, or the same person, but the names variant by consequence of dialect variation? Or are there two different versions of the same genealogy, one in one tribal history, the other in another? See notes on Metusha-El and Metu-Shalach.

The root word for Lamech, in Arabic, means "a strong young man" - perhaps equivalent to Titan in Greek or the Yehudit Gibor (גבור).

Gesenius says that his crime was to misuse the arms his sons invented; but where is the evidence?

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