Genesis 5:20

Genesis 5 opens as “the book of the generations of Adam” (Genesis 5:1), and it follows Adam’s family through Seth down to Noah and his three sons. God made man in his own likeness, and Adam passed that likeness on to his son Seth (Genesis 5:3). From Seth the line runs on, one father and son after another, and these verses cover the stretch from Seth to Jared.

Every entry follows the same pattern. A man lives a number of years and begets a son, lives a further number of years and begets sons and daughters, and then his whole life is added up and closed with the words “and he died”. The pattern began with Adam (Genesis 5:5), and it holds for every man here. Its steady order marks these as real men, carefully counted, and it shows God at work through one family across many centuries.

This family stands beside the line of Cain in the chapter before (Genesis 4:16–24), a line that went on in violence and self-reliance (Genesis 4:17–24). Seth’s line is the one in whose days “began men to call upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26). Right after the fall of Genesis 3, God promised that the seed of the woman would bruise the serpent’s head (Genesis 3:15), and this chapter follows the family through which that promise was carried. Later records take the same line further: from Shem to Abram (Genesis 11:10–26), on to David (Ruth 4:18–22), and at last to Jesus (Matthew 1:1–17, Luke 3:23–38).

These verses record real history. Their careful detail points that way, and so does Luke, who traces Jesus’ own ancestry back through these same men to Adam. Together the entries give a chronology from creation to the Flood, which was coming on a world that grew more and more wicked (Genesis 6:5–7) and which fills the chapters that follow (Genesis 6–9), with Noah at its centre (Genesis 6:9). The names have meanings, and this study gives them below, but the main work of the list is to record the line itself.

The verb yâlad, “begat”, means to bear young, and in its causative form to beget or father a child. It is the beat the whole chapter keeps, and here it also shows lineage, who came from whom. Beside it stands châyâh, “lived”, the ordinary word for being alive, which can also mean to be kept alive, preserved or revived. Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel and Jared each “lived” a stated number of years, and in a world under the sentence of death God kept them alive and kept the family going.

Each man begets one named son, the one through whom the line continues, and then “sons and daughters”. The word for son, bên, is tied to the idea of building, a son being the one who builds up the family name, and bath, daughter, is its feminine form. Daughters are counted along with sons, and they too would marry and found new households. So Adam’s family kept growing and spreading over the earth, as God had commanded at the beginning: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28). The fall had brought death into the world, and still God’s blessing on human life went on, across the whole family and in the line of promise most of all.

Five verses in this passage end with the same three words. Seth died at 912 years, Enos at 905, Cainan at 910, Mahalaleel at 895 and Jared at 962. The verb mûwth is the plain word for dying. The phrase “all the days” uses yôwm, the word for day, which comes from a root meaning to be hot, the warm hours of daylight. It can mean a single day or a span of time, and here it stands for a whole lifetime.

God had warned Adam, “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17), and after the fall he said, “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). Genesis 5 shows that word coming true, man after man. These were men of the line God chose, long-lived and blessed with many children, and every one of them died. Paul gives the reason: “by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), and “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).

The refrain strikes all the harder against the size of the numbers. Nine centuries is a very long life, and it ends the same way as the “threescore years and ten” of Psalm 90:10, which “is soon cut off, and we fly away”. However great a man’s length of days, he stays as mortal as the rest of us. The steady march of deaths also prepares for the Flood, when God would judge a world filled with sin.

The one exception comes just after this passage. Jared’s son Enoch “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24), and his entry alone closes in a different way.

Luke traces Jesus’ ancestry back through every man in this passage: “Which was the son of Mathusala, which was the son of Enoch, which was the son of Jared, which was the son of Maleleel, which was the son of Cainan” (Luke 3:37), “Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God” (Luke 3:38). Matthew begins his record with “Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham” (Matthew 1:1), and Paul says that the seed promised to Abraham is Christ (Galatians 3:16). The promises God made to Abraham (Genesis 12:1–3) grew from the same root that these verses trace.

So these men are Jesus’ real forefathers. The Son of God came into a real, historical family that reached back through Seth to Adam, and he shares our humanity in full. God sent him “to redeem them that were under the law” (Galatians 4:4–5), and he is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).

The refrain points to him as well. Adam brought death on his whole family, and Christ brings righteousness and life to his (Romans 5:12–19). Paul calls him “the last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45) and writes, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:20–22). Christ died and rose on the third day (Luke 24:6–7), and “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him” (Romans 6:9). He “hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Timothy 1:10).

Where Genesis 5 says again and again “and he died”, the risen Christ says, “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore” (Revelation 1:18). He is “the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25–26), and God gave him “that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Death is “the last enemy that shall be destroyed” (1 Corinthians 15:26), and “thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 15:54–57).

Enoch, the son born in this passage, gives a foretaste of that victory. His walk with God and his being taken point ahead to the fellowship with God that Christ opens to all who trust him, who are raised with him to “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).

Every man in these verses was known to God by name and by the number of his years. Most of them are remembered only for their ages and their children, and God kept their record all the same, because each one carried his purpose a step further. Our lives belong to the same long story, which runs from Adam through Christ to everyone who calls on his name today.

What these fathers handed down, we hand down too: the life God gives, the mortality we share, and, best of all, the faith of Enos’s day, when men began to call on the name of the LORD. Whether our years are many or few, they are counted by the God who kept this list. “And he died” is true of us as well, and for those who belong to Christ the last word over that death is his, the word of the one who is the resurrection and the life.