Enosh

אנוש


Genesis 5:6 names him as a son of Shet (שת = Seth). At the age of ninety he fathered Keynan, which may be a dialect variant of either Kayin (Cain) or Kena'an (Canaan), or even, possibly, both, as we can see from the tribe known as the Kenites; he lived a total of nine hundred and five years.

Shet was originally the Egyptian ass-god Set who appears in Kena'an as Chamor the father of Shechem, and to whose cult King Sha'ul belonged.

Genesis 4:26 informs us that, at the time of Enosh, "men began to call YHWH by name", a statement which is contradicted in Exodus 6:3, which claims that the patriarchs did not know YHVH by that name, but only as El Shadai.

Enosh is usually only used in the plural, as Nashim (נשים) = "women", and as Anashim (אנשים) = "men/Mankind", though some linguistic converging has taken place to link Ish (איש) and Enosh (אנוש) and to allow both to mean "Humankind". Probably Ish became Enosh became Nashim/Anashim for the human race in exactly the same way that El became Elim became Elohim for the gods: singular, plural, multiple plural.

But there is also a clear link to ESHET, the Egyptian mother-goddess, who is known in her Greek name as Isis; ESHET was really her title not her name: "the Supreme Woman", or "The Woman of Women". ISHAH in Yehudit also means "woman", probably derived from the same root, which was ISHTAR in Chaldean, and "the woman of", or "the wife of", becomes ESHET grammatically; so there were probably two different words originally, each entering Yehudit from a different language source, and they merged in this manner over time.

And then there is that other human progenitor Adam, whose name also means "a man", as well as being the name of a specific individual, and in his case rooted - I choose that word deliberately - in Adamah, which is the red earth of the region, and which would lead to the name of the county of Edom.

It may be that Enosh is Chaldean and Adam Hurrian; and earlier still, Adam probably did not mean Man at all, but was simply the autochthonous and eponymous ancestor of the Edomites, who was viewed as the universal progenitor and therefore came to be named Man.

In the light of other Middle Eastern cosmogonies, Adam as progenitor, with Enosh (Mankind) as his eldest son, would be the more logical pattern; what has happened here is the interjection of Shet. Prbably Shet was added only very much later, and quite anachronistically, because the Redactor felt the need to include him and could find no better place. What that need might have been is enigmatic, but likely it had something to do with the Alexandrian Jewish community and the writing of the Septuagint, for Alexandria was the centre of the ass-cult of Set, and became after the exile almost as important a Jewish community as that of Yisra-El itself, despite the commandment (Deuteronomy 17:16) never again to dwell in Egypt.

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