And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the LORD.
Called his name Enos - or Enosh; i:e., man, weak, frail mortal. The name was a suitable designation to be bestowed by a pious father on a son who, he believed, inherited a fallen and corrupt nature, and it exhibits a state of family feeling in striking contrast to the pride and self-confidence of the Cainites.
Then began men to call upon the name of the Lord. "Men" does not occur in the original. The verb is in the indeterminate or impersonal form, 'they began,' or 'it was begun' to call, etc. "The name," as used in Scripture, expresses the attributes of the person to whom it is applied-in fact, his being, character, works. "To call upon the name of the Lord," denotes to believe in, to trust, honour, and obey Him. Viewed in this light, the worship of the Sethites, which, besides the offering of typical sacrifices, probably consisted in praises and prayers to the Mediatorial Lord, was a solemn declaration of their faith not merely in the God of nature and providence, but also of grace. [This clause has been rendered in several different and even opposite ways, the difficulty being caused by the use of the verb chaalal (H2490), which bears these independent meanings-to bore through, to perforate or pierce, to lay open, to turn from a holy to a common use - i:e., to defile or profane, and finally, to begin.] The margin of our English Bibles reads, 'then began men to call themselves by the name of the Lord.' The Bishops' Bible (1568) has: 'then began men to make invocation in the name of the Lord:'-He having, according to their theory, revealed at that period the fact that Himself would be the Redeemer of men.
Onkelos translates the clause, 'then the children of men ceased to invoke the name of the Lord.' And some others, 'then began men to profane or blaspheme the name of the Lord.' Dr. Benisch has embodied in his new translation the view of Jewish writers, which is this, 'then it was begun to call idols by the name of the Eternal.' According to this last interpretation, which is adopted by many Christian authors also (Heidegger, Van Dale, Archbishop Tenison Selden, Raleigh, Owen's 'Boyle Lecture'), idolatry was introduced in the antediluvian world by the posterity of Cain, if not Cain himself, who, perhaps confounding the sun with the resplendent light established at the East of the primeval paradise, commenced the Zabian worship of the heavenly luminaries, designating the sun as Baal - i:e. "Lord."
A grammatical objection has been urged against such an interpretation of the passage before us, which makes it scarcely admissible (Kitto's 'Cyclopaedia,' under the article 'Noah'). Besides, it is inconceivable that Cain and his sons, of whom, in all probability, he had several before his removal to the land of Nod, however practically irreligious, yet 'living,' as has been remarked, 'so near the Fountain-head of revelation, having conversed with those who had witnessed the rise and first development of man's marvelous history, endowed with that quick, intuitive science which, in the operations of external nature, revealed to them the agency of an Invisible Spirit, and witnessing the wondrous manifestations of God's love and power, with the active ministry of his messengers of light, could fall into atheism, or any other species of speculative unbelief.' If, therefore idolatry was introduced by the Cainites, it must have been at a date posterior to the days of Enos.
Discarding this view, then, we pass to the third interpretation, which supposes that there existed an analogy between the invocation of Yahweh in the days of Enos and the establishment of the Jewish theocracy, God at that period manifesting Himself more clearly than He had previously done to the Sethites as an elect and consecrated people. The symbolical purity of that race, indicated by the distinction of animals into clean and unclean (Genesis 7:2), the name bestowed on the Sethites, "the sons of God," which was the designation afterward applied to Israel, "the presence of the Lord" in the emblem of the resplendent flame between the cherubim, and the privilege of access they enjoyed to the place where the Divine Being manifested Himself, are assumed as betokening that they were taken, in the days of Enos, into a covenant relation with God, and received a special revelation of His character as the Lord the Redeemer. But there is not a shadow of evidence to support the idea of this new and special dispensation with the Sethites. The second, or marginal rendering, which has received the sanction of many Biblical writers of note, bears that the worshippers of the true God, in an age of irreligion and rapidly increasing corruption, stood aloof entirely from their apostate contemporaries; and being distinguished by their adherence to certain rites and observances, as well as by a style of character and conduct corresponding to their religious views, were known as a separate class, who had obtained the designation of the Lord's people. In this sense the phrase, 'call themselves by the name of the Lord,' is synonymous with the expression in James 2:7, 'that holy name х to (G3588) epikleethen (G1941) ef' (G1909) humas (G5209)] which is pronounced upon or given to you.' The interpretation adopted in the authorized version gives a natural and consistent translation of the original, from which there seems no good reason to depart; because the original words, "call upon the name of the Lord," are used in the sense they usually bear in Scripture, that of performing a solemn act of worship.
Since this clause, however, cannot mean that divine service was then for the first time celebrated, since Adam, Abel, and Seth had long before called upon the name of the Lord, it must either denote that the public worship of God had begun in the days of Enos to be attended to with greater zeal, more heart-felt devotion, and deeper solemnity by the godly portion of mankind; or it must point to the circumstance of a considerable number of Cainites, who, as a family, had long abjured all connection with the paradisiacal altar, returning to the pure faith, and being permitted to mingle with the descendants of Adam in the worship of the true God. Whichever of these various interpretations we adopt, the clause intimates that the public profession of religion had reached a crisis. Designed as an introduction to the sequel of the antediluvian history, it serves, if we adopt the last view of its import, to throw some light upon the obscure passage (Genesis 6:2) with which it seems closely connected, and which describes the ultimate issue of the union between the Sethites and the family of Cain.-It remains only to notice that the occurrence of the divine names in two consecutive verses (Genesis 4:25-26) shows the groundlessness of the theory which maintains that passages distinguished by the use of different designations for the deity were written by different authors.
Assuming this public invocation of the name of the Lord to have been begun when Enos was in the hundredth year of his age, the interval from this date to the 480th year of Noah's age comprises a period of about 1,200 years, according to the chronology of the present Hebrew text, but of nearly 1,600 years according to that of the Septuagint.
Remarks: Only three sons of the numerous progeny of Adam (Genesis 5:4) are mentioned by name; and whether the rest were consigned to oblivion from want of extraordinary incidents in the lives of any of them, the painful episode of Cain's violence to Abel, and the subsequent mission of Seth, as conservator of the true religion, are sufficiently important of themselves to suggest the reasons of their being so particularly noticed. The two events being closely connected in their bearing on the antediluvian congregation, the narrative is constructed on the principle of giving a full detail of the first as preparatory to the announcement of the second; and hence, among all the incidents that chequered the family history of the first pair, the account of one religious solemnity, with its accessories, has alone been preserved, apparently with the view of showing the grounds on which Cain was deprived of the privileges of primogeniture, and of establishing, by the divinely appointed substitution of Seth, the parentage of the future Redeemer.
Although there had not been as yet an authoritative or formal promulgation of the moral law, its obligations were written on the heart of man; and hence, in the absence of all specification of the duties of the second table, the conscience of Cain, which accused him of guilt in murdering his brother, told him also that he deserved the penalty of death for the crime. The apprehensions he expressed of falling by the hand of some blood-avenger, imply the existence of a considerable population in the world at the period of his being sentenced to banishment; and this, we can perceive, might well be the case without the necessity of resorting to the theory of a pre-Adamite race of men. Indeed, this theory, which has no basis of fact to rest upon, is totally unnecessary for any of the purposes on account of which it has been resorted to in this chapter. It could not prevent marriage with a sister in the first age; because, assuming that contemporary races of men had been created in different centers, the men of the primitive generation must of necessity have married with the female members of each first man's family, until it had increased so far as to establish a relationship with the other races at a distance.
Then, as to the foundation of the city which Cain built, it is evident that the citizens who inhabited it were his own descendants, who, at the advanced period when that community was formed, had become a numerous clan. For to suppose that it was composed of an inferior race of men, over whom Cain by his violence or talent for government had acquired the ascendant, as is done by McCausland ('Adam and the Adamites'), is inconsistent with the fear and alarm that he expressed. The blood-avengers of whom he was afraid were, perhaps, the sons of Abel (for what is to hinder us supposing, as we have done-see the note at Genesis 4:5 - that Abel was married and had a family) and the other members of Adam's family, who by that time must have been pretty numerous; because his sons and daughters, mentioned in next chapter (Genesis 5:4), may have been born before as well as after the birth of Seth; and as the latter event, which seems to have taken place soon after the death of Abel, occurred in the 130th year of Adam's age, a sufficient interval of time, whether we reckon by the Hebrew or the Septuagint chronology, had elapsed to allow the human progeny to multiply to the extent of several thousand souls.
Dr. Patrick states that he knew of two individuals in England who in eighty years had 367 descendants. Hamilton ('Pentateuch and its Assailants') mentions the offspring of President Edwards in America, who had a family meeting in January, 1852, a century after the death of their great ancestor, when it was found that their number amounted to about two thousand. 'A very simple calculation,' he adds, 'will show that from the first human pair, allowing the birth of a male only every second year, nearly three thousand persons might have sprung when alive and vigorous; and these, including the descendants of Abel, who may well be imagined disposed to resent and avenge the murder of their progenitor, might have been scattered over a considerable extent of country at the time of Abel's death, enough to account for the fears of Cain.'-The brief sketch here given of the state and habits of the Cainite family confirms the view formerly exhibited (see Remarks on Gen
2) of the original condition of man as that of a social being. The foundation of a city by the oldest son of the first man before we read of pastoral encampments, the erection of permanent houses previous to that of fragile and moveable tents, the cultivation of the soil, together with the storing of grain as seed for a future crop, the rearing of cattle for use in various ways, the rights of private property, the knowledge of iron, and the inventions made both in the useful and the fine arts, indicate a more or less advanced state of society even in the sixth generation, and completely overthrow the favourite theory of those infidel philosophers who delight in representing man as at first a hunter, and in the lowest stage of barbarism:
`When wild in woods the noble savage ran.'
With this Mosaic account of the state of the arts at so early a period, the Phoenician, Egyptian, and Greek traditions exactly correspond; because they all bear that agriculture, the raising of cattle, the arts, and metallurgy, were introduced by the first men, and in the pre-historic ages. It is not, however, a full and particular history that is contained in this chapter, of the industrial activity and resources of the antediluvian world, because no mention is made of the carpenter, the tailor, the shoe-maker, the weaver, and various other departments of labour which were undoubtedly pursued in primitive times. Such a regular and comprehensive view of the progress of society at that early period was entirely foreign to the purpose of the sacred historian. His leading design in the selection of these historical anecdotes was to record what bore favourably or perniciously on the interests of true religion; and accordingly, in noticing a few of the primeval inventors in art, it is believed that he confined himself to the mention of those only who, through the ignorance or superstition of admiring posterity, were elevated to the rank of divinities in pagan mythology.
Jubal was the Ju-baal of the Phoenicians, Jabal and Jubal the Pan and Apollo of the Greeks and Romans; Tubal-cain, or, as some write it, Tu-bal-cain = Vulcan; and Naamah, or in Greek, Nemaneo, a name of Athene = Minerva (Bunsen). To the people whose religious instruction Moses had more immediately in view, those objects of Pagan worship were well known, and his enumeration of their names in the genealogy of the Cainite family served the important purpose of perpetuating the memory of their human origin, as well as of their total want of any title to the divine honours that were paid to them. 'Primitive and what we call universal history,' says Schlegel, 'does not properly commence with the first man, his creation, or ulterior destiny, but with Cain-the fratricide and curse of Cain. The preceding part of the sacred narrative regards, if we may so speak, only the private life of Adam, which, however, will always retain a deep significancy for all the descendants of the first progenitor. The origin of discord in man, arising from his disobedience to God, and the transmission of that mischief to all ages and all generations is, indeed, the first historical fact; but on account of its universality, it forms at the same time a psychological phenomenon; and while, in this first section of sacred history, everything points and refers to the mysteries of religion, the fratricide of Cain, on the other hand, and the flight of that restless criminal to eastern Asia, are the first events and circumstances which properly belong to the province of history.
Under two different forms doth sacred tradition reveal to us the primitive world; or, in other words, there are two grand conditions of humanity which fill the records of primitive history. On the one hand, we see a race, lovers of peace, revering God, blessed with long life, which they spend in patriarchal simplicity and innocence, and still no strangers to deeper science, especially in all that relates to sacred tradition and inward contemplation, and transmitting their science in the old or symbolic history, if we may believe the Sagas of Gentile nations, "on the columns of Seth," signifying, no doubt, in the language of remote antiquity, very ancient monuments, and, as it were, the stony records of sacred tradition. On the other hand, we behold the race of Cain, represented from its origin as one attached to the arts, versed in the use of metals, disinclined to peace, and addicted to habits of warfare and violence; active, energetic, and inventive; but irreligious and sensual, proud, wicked, and violent. This discord, arising from the opposition of feelings and principles between two religious parties, under far other forms than anything we witness; this hostile struggle between the two great divisions of the human race, forms the whole tenor of primitive history.' It was in one word, a contest between religion and impiety, conducted, however, on the mighty scale of the primitive world, and with all those gigantic powers which the first men possessed>.