Sin’s Dire Effects

 Genesis 4:1-6:8

            Once Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden, sin’s effects accelerate quickly. Eve bears a son. The major English versions (New International and English Standard) both translate her comment that she has borne a son with the Lord’s help. In Hebrew it may be a bit more ambiguous; literally she exclaims, “I have born a man—the Lord!” It seems to me she thought she’d borne the promised one who would crush the serpent’s head in that first generation. How wrong she was! Sin took hold in Cain and led him to murder his brother. That is 0-60 acceleration in, like 3 seconds. And it gets worse. Among Cain’s descendants, Lamech marries two woman (the first explicit breaking of what Genesis 2: 24 intended) and boasts of his violence, retaliating out of all proportion to the injury given and avenging himself to excess.

            The climax is in Genesis 6. There we have the odd story of the “sons of God” marrying the “daughters of men.” Whacky theories abound about what’s going on there, but I favor the boring explanation: powerful men, probably in some kind of ruling caste, forcibly taking women in marriage, perhaps in some kind of a harem arrangement. There’s no mention of violence in these verses, but there is the Lord’s exasperated, “I will not contend forever” and his observation that “every inclination of the thoughts of human hearts was only wicked all the time.” That’s a lot of absolute terms, reflecting how thoroughly depraved  our race had become.

            Two thoughts about the Lord’s statement that the humans’ days would be 120 years. First, it may be a reflection on the extraordinary lifespans of Genesis 5, namely, that the Lord is intentionally shortening them. (The genealogy is clearly stylized: there are 10—only 10—generations; Enoch lives 365 years, the same number of days as a year; Lamech—different Lamech—lives 777 years, which seems pretty stylized around the previous Lamech’s statement in 4:24. I don’t think there’s any doubt that human lifespans were much longer than we’re accustomed to; I also don’t think we know all the conventions and metaphors the genealogy might be trying to communicate to us.) Second, the 120 years may be a warning about when the flood would come on the earth, which is our topic in tomorrow’s reading.