Genesis 4:26

The verse opens with “Adam knew his wife again”. The verb yâdaʻ is the ordinary word for knowing, and here it is Scripture’s modest way of speaking of a husband and wife coming together. “Again” translates ʻôwd, a word for something continuing or happening once more. One son has been murdered and the other banished, and still Adam and Eve’s life together goes on as God designed it, even after the Fall and the grief of Abel’s death.

Eve names the child and explains the name herself: “For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.” The name Seth, Shêth, means “appointed” or “placed”, and it echoes the verb she uses for what God has done. That verb, shîyth, means to place, put or set, and it is used very widely in Scripture. The weight of her words lies in who did the placing. Eve credits this son to God, and she builds that confession into his name, so that every time the family calls him they speak of what God has given.

Her words also carry her grief. She names Abel, and she names Cain as the one who killed him. Seth arrives with the loss still fresh, and Eve holds the two together: a new son from God, and the son Cain slew.

The word Eve uses for her son is zeraʻ, “seed”. It means seed or grain, and it is used of sowing and of offspring. In this verse it means offspring, a child to carry on the family. Eve’s word takes us back to the promise God made after the Fall about the seed of the woman, who would one day triumph over evil (Genesis 3:15). With Abel dead and Cain gone, the family through whom that promise was to come stood in danger of being broken off. In Seth, God provides a way forward.

That line runs all the way to Jesus. Luke traces the genealogy of Christ back through Seth to Adam (Luke 3:23–38), so the son Eve received in Abel’s place stands in the family of the true seed of the woman, who overcomes sin and death once and for all. He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Paul sets Adam and Christ side by side: death came through Adam, and in Christ, raised as the firstfruits, all shall be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:20–22). Seth was given after a death, and Christ rose from the dead. The hope that began with Seth is fulfilled there.

Genesis 4 also shows what Paul means when he writes that “where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” (Romans 5:20). The first murder in history is followed by God’s gift of a son.

Seth grows up and has a son of his own. “And to Seth, to him also there was born a son” repeats the pronoun to stress that Seth, like Adam before him, has become a father and the head of a line. “There was born” is the passive of yâlad, to bear or beget, and in this form it simply means “be born”. The family Eve hoped for in Seth now reaches the next generation.

Seth names his son Enos, ʼĔnôš. The name is related to ʼĕnôsh, a common Hebrew word for man, often man as mortal and frail. The name may reflect a growing sense of human weakness in the world after the Fall, when death had already struck the first family, and that awareness may be part of why people turned to the LORD in Enos’s day. Genesis leaves Seth’s reason for the name unstated, so the link is a likely one.

This line is the heart of the passage. The verb for “began”, châlal, comes from a root that elsewhere means to profane or to wound. In the sense it has here it means to begin, and it is used of starting any action. Here it marks the start of something new among men.

To call, qârâʼ, means to call out to someone, to address by name, or to proclaim. To call upon the name of the LORD is to speak to God by his own personal covenant name, Yᵉhôvâh, which the KJV prints as “the LORD”. It takes in prayer, praise and worship, acknowledging that he rules and asking him to act and to be present. The words point to worship that was more open and more widely shared, practised among Seth’s descendants together in a world that was turning away from God.

The phrase runs through the rest of Scripture. Abraham called on the name of the LORD at Bethel (Genesis 12:8). The psalmist summons God’s people to give thanks to the LORD and call upon his name (Psalm 105:1). Joel promises deliverance to whoever calls on the name of the LORD (Joel 2:32). Paul writes, “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13). Jesus, the promised seed, is the one through whom we draw near to God. He is the mediator of the new covenant (Hebrews 9:15), and through his sacrifice and resurrection we call upon the name of the LORD for eternal life and are reconciled to him. What began in the days of Enos is still how people come to God.

Verse 26 comes right after the account of Cain’s descendants (Genesis 4:17–24). Cain’s line built a city and developed crafts and culture, and it grew more violent as it went. Its last word is Lamech’s boast of the vengeance he would take (Genesis 4:23–24).

Seth’s line, by contrast, is marked from its second generation by calling on the LORD. Genesis sets the two families side by side, one going its own way and one seeking God, and this belongs to the larger contrast in Genesis between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. The contrast grows sharper in Genesis 6, which speaks of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men”. Believers differ on who those were, and some hold that the sons of God are Seth’s line. Through it all God keeps a faithful people for himself while sin spreads across the earth, and the line through which his promise runs goes on.

These verses follow the darkest chapter of the first family’s story, and they show us who God is. He meets grief with a gift, so that Eve, with Abel’s death still in her words, can say, “God hath appointed me another seed.” He keeps his promise moving forward after sin has done its worst, and he preserves a people who call on his name, from the days of Enos to ours. That name is open to us too, because “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved”, and the promise rests on the Seed God appointed, Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead.