This page was migrated in August 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net, and significantly revised.
1 August 2022 Navigate 'up to the Genesis index: index-genesis.
Both share the story of a man, having a son, who has another son, and so on. Here is a string of fathers and sons from each chapter:
Genesis 4: ʔDM[1], QYN, ḤNWK, ʕYRD, MḤWYʔL, MTWŠʔL, LMK, and LMK has three sons. Genesis 5: ʔNWŠ[1-1], QYNN, MHLLʔL, YRD, ḤNWK, MTWŠLḤ, LMK, and LMK is the father of Noah, who has three sons.
If you swap the third and fifth names in the list from Genesis 4, now we have a list of close parallels, all in order except for that single swap we did:
Notice that the list of names is even closer in the Hebrew spelling than in the traditional English translations. Seeing, for example, "Cain and Kenan", one might not realize they differ by just one repeated letter. Likewise, "Irad" and "Jared" also differ by just one letter. In any case, the similarity is too striking to be explained by chance.
Given that the Pentateuch is known to be filled with doublets, the conclusion is clear: this is another one of those doublets. These are two versions of the same story, the story of a man named 'human' and his string of descendants.
These two genealogies are then stitched together by the addition of some extra characters: Seth, a second son of Adam who appears after Cain's murder of Abel, and Noah, the focus of the Flood story.
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