Genesis 5:1

The word for book, çêpher, means a writing of any kind: a document, a register, a letter or a scroll. Here it is the written register of Adam’s family, set down with care as a true record. The word for generations, tôwlᵉdâh, means descent or family, and by extension a history. Genesis uses it about ten times as a heading to open its main sections, and this is the second of them. It can mean “the account of” or “the descendants of”, and here it opens the history of the family that came from Adam.

What follows is the line from Adam through Seth to Noah and his three sons, one father and son after another. Each man’s entry gives his age when his son was born, how long he lived after that, and the whole length of his life, and almost every entry closes with “and he died”. Adam’s entry, in these five verses, sets the pattern for the rest. Two lives stand out further on in the chapter. Enoch “walked with God”, and his entry ends differently from the others, and Noah’s birth brings the one note of hope in the list, with his father hoping he would bring comfort.

Genealogies mattered greatly to Israel. They established the claims of kings, priests and tribes, settled the rights to land, and kept a people’s identity whole from one generation to the next. In a society built around families, the line of descent was how heritage, promises and duties were handed down. This genealogy also tells us that Adam and his sons were real men in real history, and that God was at work through one family across many centuries. Chronicles begins its own long genealogies with the same name, Adam (1 Chronicles 1:1).

The chapter comes after the fall in Genesis 3 and Cain’s murder of Abel in Genesis 4, and it carries the story from those first chapters to the Flood. If you came to one of these verses and found mostly numbers, this is what the numbers are doing. They are a record God kept, generation by generation, so that we can trace the line from Adam to Noah.

Before naming any of Adam’s sons, Genesis returns to “the day that God created man” and says again what Genesis 1:26 and Genesis 1:27 said: God made man in his own likeness. The verb bârâʼ, “created”, is the word for God’s own act of bringing something into being, and it tells us that man is the direct and intended work of God. “In the day” here has the sense of “at the time when”, and it covers the whole of God’s making of man.

The word for likeness, dᵉmûwth, means a resemblance, a model or a shape, and it comes from a root, dāmah, meaning “to resemble”. With “image” in Genesis 1:26, it speaks of what in man reflects who God is: the power to reason, to choose between right and wrong, to love and be in relationship, and to know and worship God. These set mankind apart from every other creature, and the likeness lies in this spiritual and moral life of man, which mirrors God’s own character.

Genesis says this again here because so much had gone wrong since creation. Adam had sinned, death had come into the world, and Cain had killed his brother. Even so, the first thing the record says about Adam’s family is that God made man in his likeness. Sin marred that likeness, and still it remained. God later gives it as the reason human life is sacred: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man” (Genesis 9:6). So every person, of every nation, man or woman, great or small, and even a person deep in sin, has a worth that comes from the God who made them. Our dignity rests on God’s hand in making us, and it holds even where our goodness fails.

“Male and female created he them” repeats Genesis 1:27, with the verb bârâʼ again. Man and woman both come from God’s intended design, and the two sexes belong to that design from the beginning. Jesus pointed back to it when he taught on marriage: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4), and he went on to the words about a man leaving his father and mother and the two becoming one flesh (Genesis 2:24). Scripture shows mankind made as two distinct sexes that complete each other, and this is the ground of marriage, of the family and of the bearing of children.

Then God “blessed them”. The verb bârak has the root meaning “to kneel”, and from that, to bless. When God blesses, he gives his favour and with it the power to flourish and bear fruit. This is the blessing of Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it”, with dominion over the living creatures. It was God’s good purpose for mankind before the fall, and Adam’s sons and daughters in verse 4 show it still being carried out after it.

“And called their name Adam” uses ʼâdâm, a word from a root meaning “ruddy” that means a human being or mankind as a whole. It later becomes the first man’s own name, but here God gives it to the man and the woman together. They share one name, one nature and one standing before him, and both receive his blessing. All people share this one origin, which is why sin and salvation alike reach the whole human race. “In the day when they were created” ties all of this to the time of creation, so that being male and female, being blessed and being named were part of mankind from the very start.

At 130 Adam “begat a son in his own likeness, after his image”. The verb yâlad means to bear young or to beget, and it recurs through the whole chapter as each generation follows the one before. dᵉmûwth is the likeness word of verse 1, and tselem, image, comes from a root meaning “to shade” and means a resemblance or a representative figure. In Genesis 1:26 these two words describe man’s likeness to God and his place as God’s representative on earth. Here the same two words describe Seth’s likeness to his father.

That likeness carries two things at once. Verse 1 has just said that God made Adam in his likeness, so when Adam has a son like himself, the likeness of God passes to Seth and on down the line. Adam, though, was now a fallen and mortal man, and the son who resembles him shares his condition, with a nature inclined to sin and a body that will die. The line that carries God’s likeness carries the sentence of death too, and that is why one short phrase, “and he died”, closes nearly every life in the chapter.

After Seth’s birth Adam lived eight hundred more years, “and he begat sons and daughters”. The word for son, bên, comes from a root meaning “to build”, since a son builds up the family name, and it can mean any male descendant. bath, daughter, is its feminine form and is used just as broadly. Adam had Cain and Abel before Seth and many more children after him, and Genesis names none of these later ones. It follows Seth’s line alone, because that is the line God chose for his saving purpose. The command to be fruitful and multiply (Genesis 1:28) went on being fulfilled after the fall and the coming of death, and God’s purpose for mankind stood firm.

Adam’s years are counted “after he had begotten Seth” to keep Seth at the centre. He is the son who takes Abel’s place, and his is the line the chapter traces.

“All the days that Adam lived” uses yôwm, day, for the whole span of his life, a long life that still had an end. The verb châyay means to live, and also to revive, and it speaks of his life in its full strength. The name here is ʼÂdâm, the first man himself, the father of all mankind. After all those years come three short words: “and he died”. The verb mûwth means to die, or to kill, and here it is the plain end of bodily life.

This is what God had said would happen. In Eden he warned Adam about the tree, “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Death came into God’s good world as the penalty for sin, and Adam’s death shows that God’s word holds, in judgment as surely as in promise. Paul writes, “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23), and Hebrews says, “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).

Adam’s great age makes the end stand out all the more, since even 930 years could only delay the sentence. He is the first whose death this chapter records, and the same words follow nearly every man after him. Whatever the length of a life, death comes to every son of Adam.

Adam’s line runs on through Seth and Noah and on to Abraham and David, and it ends in Christ, as the genealogies of Matthew 1:1–17 and Luke 3:23–38 record. Luke takes Jesus’ line all the way back to Adam. The whole careful record of these generations was leading to him.

Adam passed on a likeness marred by sin. Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) and “the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3). Paul calls him “the last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45), who perfectly fulfilled the calling the first Adam failed, to bear God’s image and rule in righteousness. The first Adam died because of his own sin. Jesus went to the cross willingly, died as a sacrifice for the sins of others, and rose again in victory over death. “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:21–22). Those who receive God’s grace “shall reign in life by one, Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:17).

In Christ, God renews his likeness in his people. Believers are “changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). They “put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:24), the new man that “is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3:10). God has predestinated them “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29). If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17), and “there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).

You were made in the likeness of God, and so was every person you will meet today. That gives the neighbour, the stranger and the weakest person around you a worth that comes from God himself, and it is why we owe every one of them respect, kindness and justice. Our calling is to reflect our Creator’s character, his righteousness, love and truth, in our homes, our work and our worship.

Adam’s eight hundred quiet years and his unnamed sons and daughters are a reminder that God works through the ordinary run of family life, one generation after another, as surely as through great events. And the three words that close Adam’s life will one day close ours. That is a sober truth, and it turns our hope to the One who went through death and came out alive, so that those who are in him will live with him for ever.