Day 002 - Genesis 4-6

The first murder, a list of people who reach ridiculously large ages and a handy guide to shipbuilding are on today's agenda.

God's compassionate response to Cain in this passage has always struck me in the past. Yes, God punishes him for his deed, but is moved by Cain's plea and makes sure that he won't come to mortal harm as he wanders the land. He obviously went on to have a prosperous life as the next we hear is that he's building a city for his son.

Cain's descendant Lamech is a rather nasty piece of work and his life seems to be a hint at the greater decent of man that we see in chapter 6. Apparently Lamech's speech to his wives is a brilliant example of Hebrew poetry (it loses a lot in the translation) and begs a question about the quality of the art that we produce. Does the literary, musical, artistic or filmic brilliance of a piece of work justify it's propagation regardless of the subject matter? We had a discussion along similar lines at a recent staff conference and the common consensus was that even if Lamech's poem is brilliant we wouldn't want to fill the earth with his work.

I'm always in two minds when we get to lists of names and genealogies in the Bible. On the one hand I get to try and pronounces all those brilliant names (and briefly consider some of them as potential kids names), but on the other hand it's hard to see the point of them at times. With the one in this passage there is the added complication of the fact that most of them live into their 900's. Are we supposed to take these numbers literally or not? I'll leave that one up to you to decide for yourself. Regardless of the actual length of these guys lives we don't get much of an idea about how they lived or what their characters were like with the exception of Enoch who has the strange distinction of not dying in the usual way because God took him out of the world at a younger age than his fellows.

Then we get another Lamech who seems to be an early prophet when he declares that his son Noah will bring relief to humanity. I bet he didn't have a clue what was coming next and you wonder whether he thought his son was a bit nuts when he started building a boat in the middle of dry land.

Part of my hope in reading through the Old Testament this way is that I'll get a greater sense of God's revelation to humanity and in particular his character. We've already seen in these first few chapters that he delights in making good things and relationships. We also see that there is a price to be paid for disobeying him, but that in the midst of any punishment that he gives there is provision for the sinner. It's still difficult to read of his decision to wipe out humanity with the exception of Noah and company and it's still a struggle to comprehend this God of ours.