The Art of Genealogies

We are not normally excited about genealogies, and I think that is because we do not think anything is there. When you are watching a movie or reading a novel and you turn to the next chapter, you do so because you think something surprising is going to happen, or you are going to learn something, or something interesting is going to transpire. But with genealogies, we think, “Well, it is just a list of names; there is nothing really there.”

Now, that may be true of our modern genealogies, but it is not true of the genealogies in the Bible. You see, the genealogies in the Bible are just as careful and crafted pieces of literature as the stories or poetry in Scripture.

Genealogies are this wonderful literary tool that allows an author to cover a long stretch of time in a short amount of narrative space. But more than that, it is not merely about covering time; it is a tool for characterization. That is, it explains the character of a family, what they are essentially like. So it is not just about these individual people in the family, but characterizing the family as a whole: what is this family like?

I want to show you some remarkable things about genealogies in the Bible, and specifically with the genealogies in Genesis chapters 4 and 5. But to do that, we have to bring the story up to that point.

Two Families in Conflict

In Genesis 1, God creates the heavens and the earth, He creates man and woman, and He puts them in this special place, the Garden of Eden. He tells them they can eat from all of the trees except for this one tree. Well, the serpent enters, and Adam and Eve decide to listen to the voice of the serpent instead of God’s voice, and they sin.

Then God comes and confronts them. During His confrontation, He says something very interesting: He says He will put hostility between the serpent and the woman. He does this because when Eve decided to listen to the serpent, it is as though they formed a relationship, a friendship—or Eve decided to listen to a new king. So God had to come and break up that relationship. He puts hostility between the woman and the serpent.

But He also says, “I will put hostility between your children”—that is, the children of the serpent, the descendants of the serpent, and the children of the woman. This is not talking about physical children; it is talking about moral or spiritual children. You see this later in the Bible. In the Gospels, for instance, John the Baptist says to some of the Pharisees, “You brood of vipers!” Or Jesus says, “You are of your father the devil.” When you listen and act in the same way as these figures, you belong to their family. So God puts hostility between the woman and the serpent, and between each of their children. Throughout the rest of the Bible, we will follow these two families, these two lines: the descendants of the woman and the descendants of the serpent, the righteous line and the wicked line.

In the next chapter, Genesis 4, you get the story of Cain and Abel. In the latter half of that chapter, you get the first genealogy: the genealogy of the Cainite, serpentine line. Then in the next chapter, Genesis 5, you get a genealogy of the godly Sethite line, from Eve’s other son, Seth. So you get these two lines: a righteous line and an evil line, a serpentine line and a righteous moral line.

Echoes and Matching Names

I want to show you something fascinating in these genealogies. If you look at the two genealogies side by side, just let your eyes meander over them and see if you notice anything.

You may notice that there are several very similar names, and there are actually some identical names between the two lists. So what is going on? Why are there so many similar names? What is our author doing?

To understand this, we have to see how it links up with a theme that has already started to develop across the narrative, and it goes like this: in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, but we corrupted it. And if we corrupted it, we are going to need another one; we are going to need this creation redeemed. God made man and woman, and we corrupted that too, so we are going to need another, a second Adam.

We see later in Cain’s genealogy that the first metalwork and the first music originate right there in this serpentine line, seemingly implied for nefarious reasons. So we are going to need another metalwork, and our music will need to be redeemed. You see this dynamic throughout the rest of Genesis, where the firstborn does not inherit time and time again; instead, it is the younger son who inherits the promise. You have this recurring theme where the first one is corrupt or stepped over, and you need it to be redeemed—you need a second one.

The Redemption of First Things

We can see how this pattern plays out across the biblical story. Already in Genesis, we see with Noah that we receive a new heavens and a new earth, a cleansed and redeemed world. We see later in the Bible, in the New Testament, that Paul will call Jesus a second Adam.

Or consider a wonderful Old Testament conclusion, or partial conclusion, to this pattern with metalwork. The very same metal, bronze, that is introduced here in the Cainite line comes up again many times—I think something like thirty-plus times—when it is used to build God’s house, the tabernacle. Or consider the music: the two musical instruments mentioned here in Genesis 4 are mentioned again in the climactic song in the Book of Psalms, Psalm 150, as if to declare: this is the great redemption of music.

What is happening is that these first things have been corrupted and need redemption; they require this second, redeemed occurrence. And we see that directly in our text. We have these first names in this evil, serpentine line, and they repeat again in the godly line because they are being redeemed. You see, God redeems even names. God redeems music, metalwork, and names; that is what He is doing.

Imagine if some of our own paradigmatic evil names, like Adolf, were transposed and redeemed so that someone could actually be named that again. Imagine if that name could carry the same sort of moral melodiousness as a name like Teresa. That would be an extraordinary work of transformation.

That is what our author is doing here with these genealogies. And that, once again, is why the Bible is art.

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