Genesis records that Lamech, a fifth-generation descendant of Cain, took two wives, named Adah and Zillah. The terse reference to the world’s first bigamy carried no moral assessment of the innovation in human relations; patriarchs before the Flood took up Lamech’s practice, and King Solomon was reputed to have engaged in multiple marriage on a grand scale. Still, there were eventually dissenting voices in postbiblical literature of the ancient Jews. Strong reproof of primeval bigamy is made in the rabbinic commentary on Genesis in the Midrash Rabbah (perhaps compiled in the sixth century C.E.): “The men of the generation of the Flood used to act thus: each took two wives, one for procreation and the other for sexual gratification. The former would stay like a widow throughout her life, while the latter was given to drink a potion of roots, so that she should not bear, and then she sat before him like a harlot. . . . The proof of this is that Lamech took two wives.”
The account in Genesis (4:17–22), however, belies the charge that Lamech married twice to separate procreation from sexual pleasure, for each of his wives bore him children: Adah had two sons with confusingly similar names, Jabal and Jubal; and Zillah was the mother of a son, Tubalcain, and a daughter, Naamah. Each of Lamech’s children was remarkable for creativity in cattle raising, arts, or sciences. Genesis relates that Jabal was “the ancestor of those who dwell in tents and amidst herds”; that Jubal was the forerunner of “all who play the lyre and pipe”; and that Tubal-cain “forged all implements of copper and iron.” Naamah’s accomplishments are not detailed in Genesis, but according to Louis Ginzberg, ancient Jewish tradition derived her name, “the lovely,” from “the sweet sounds which she drew from the cymbals when she called the worshippers to pay homage to idols.” Temples became a family enterprise, for “Jabal was the first among men to erect temples to idols, and Jubal invented the music sung and played therein.”
In dark contrast to his children’s honored achievements is the remembrance of Lamech as a pathfinder in crime. On the basis of his brief appearance in Genesis, he can be seen as the prototypical embodiment of inherited criminality (passing down from his ancestor Cain) and was also the first to vaunt the murderous use of the metal weapons perfected by his son Tubal-cain. To crown his infamy, Lamech is also recognized as the earliest multiple killer and the father of feuds.
Once Genesis has completed its introduction of Lamech, his wives, and children, the prose narrative breaks off abruptly and a poem takes up the thread. Known alternatively as “the Song of the Sword” or “the Song of Lamech,” this jubilant outburst has been called the “first true example of biblical Hebrew style.” And Lamech said to his wives,
Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;
O wives of Lamech, give ear to my speech.
I have slain a man for wounding me,
And a lad for bruising me.
If Cain is avenged sevenfold,
Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.
E. A. Speiser, editor of the Anchor Genesis, notes that the poem “is generally viewed as the cry of a vengeful tribesman who has triumphed over his enemy” and speculates that, “if the song is tribal in origin, its ultimate source has to be sought outside historic Mesopotamia, possibly even to the south of Palestine.” The JPS [Jewish Publication Society] Torah Commentary suggests that “the Song of Lamech probably originally belonged to a larger poetic composition about the exploits of this hero.” Nahum M. Sarna, general editor of the Commentary, is attracted by the possibility that Lamech’s words constitute his “taunts, threats, and boastings, which are of the kind customarily uttered in ancient times by those about to engage in combat,” as in the story of David and Goliath.
However independent its origin may have been, the Song of the Sword, as inserted in Genesis, provides an essential link in the story of Cain and his descendants. The poem looks back to the punishment of Cain’s crime and anticipates further escalating violence that lay ahead for the family line until it was ultimately swept away in the Flood with which God exacted retribution for “man’s wickedness on earth.”
Although Lamech’s communication to his wives appears to reflect a key event in humanity’s widening evil, Adah and Zillah must have been left bewildered by their husband’s remarks unless he favored them with additional details that the Bible omits. Was Lamech boasting of his prowess in war? Calling into question Nahum Sarna’s comparison of the Song of the Sword to the confrontation of David and Goliath, the text of Lamech’s poem makes no reference to battle. There is, in fact, some adherence in interpretive literature to the theory that Lamech was confessing private acts of homicide. The “wounding” and “bruising” to which Lamech responded with lethal force may have been injuries suffered on a prior occasion, or Lamech may have acted in self-defense to ward off a current attack by an individual assailant. Sarna’s commentary appears to favor the former of these two possibilities: “Alternatively, Lamech may be describing some incident that has already taken place in which he actually shed blood to avenge a previously inflicted wound.”
The Song of the Sword also leaves unresolved the number of Lamech’s victims. If, as many interpreters assert, Lamech claimed the lives of two victims, a “man” who had wounded him and a “lad” who had bruised him, he surpassed his ancestor Cain in villainy by becoming the biblical world’s first serial killer. Sarna, however, observes that the poem is constructed on the basis of parallelism, that it features couplets in which the second line may either restate the first in different words or express an independent but related thought. For example, “wives of Lamech” in line 2 are synonymous with “Adah and Zillah” in line 1; yet, “Lamech” in line 6 is a person distinct from “Cain” in line 5, but the names are related through kinship. Sarna suggests that if “man” and “child” are synonymous, the two expressions may refer to a single foe, and that Lamech may be crowing: “This man, my antagonist, is a mere child in combat!”
The final couplet of the poem establishes an enigmatic comparison between the crimes of Lamech and of his ancestor Cain. As suggested by “the Song of the Sword,” the alternative title given by tradition to Lamech’s poem, the murderer’s joy in his killings is enhanced by a sense of technological superiority, by his use of the metallic weapons invented by his son Tubal-cain. This supposition is confirmed by rabbinic commentary in the Midrash Rabbah: “This man [Tubal-cain] perfected Cain’s sin: Cain slew, yet lacked the weapons for slaying, whereas he was “the forger of every cutting instrument.” Having surpassed Cain in weaponry and, very likely, in number of victims, Lamech asserted in his poem’s finale that his life was entitled to even more heavily disproportionate protection against retaliation than was Cain’s. When the exiled Cain expressed fear that anyone who met him in his wanderings might kill him, the Lord promised that “if anyone kills Cain, sevenfold vengeance shall be taken on him.” Lamech boasts to his wives, “If Cain is avenged sevenfold, / Then Lamech seventy-sevenfold.” Lamech sets an inflated value on his own life and appears to forecast that a future attack on him will provoke a feud that will spiral out of control. The immoderation of violent impulse is accompanied by religious blindness. It was not a human being but God who imposed a promise of manifold revenge as a shield to Cain; this protection was granted after the world’s first murderer expressed his loneliness in having forfeited God’s care. Lamech, unlike Cain, arrogated to himself and his line the authority to forgive his own crimes and ordained an even more disproportionate vengeance for any reprisals. A Christian sermon published online in 2002 characterized Lamech’s sin as a usurpation of God’s grace.
By the arrival of the Hellenistic Age, Jewish writers began to reflect variant postbiblical Lamech narratives. Historian Flavius Josephus, born in Jerusalem in 37 C.E., appraised grimly the violence and wildness of Cain’s descendants: “even while Adam was alive, it came to pass that the posterity of Cain became exceedingly wicked, every one successively dying one after another more wicked than the former. They were intolerable in war, and vehement in robberies; and if anyone were slow to murder people, yet was he bold in his profligate behaviour, in acting unjustly and doing injuries for gain.” Still, Josephus appears to exempt Lamech from this sweeping condemnation and to reject the confession of crime conveyed by the literal words of the Song of the Sword. What Lamech disclosed to his wives, Josephus recounts, was his foreknowledge that he was to be punished for Cain’s murder of his brother Abel; the accuracy of this prediction was facilitated by Lamech’s great skill “in matters of divine revelation.” However, The Biblical Antiquities of Philo, a first-century C.E. work of an unknown Jewish author referred to as Pseudo-Philo, also exculpates Lamech of murder but only to tar his name with some unspeakable offenses against morality. Pseudo-Philo’s version of the Song of the Sword proclaims: “Hear my voice, ye wives of Lamech, give heed to my precept: for I have corrupted men for myself, and have taken sucklings from the breasts, that I might show my sons how to work evil.”
Many nonbiblical sources from ancient times through the Middle Ages concur in another interpretation of what Lamech confessed to his wives, namely that he had caused the death of two relatives in a tragic hunting accident. Robert Graves and Raphael Patai summarize the Lamech narratives that fall into this pattern:
Lamech was a mighty hunter and, like all others of Cain’s stock, married two wives. Though grown old and blind, he continued to hunt, guided by his son Tubal Cain. Whenever Tubal Cain sighted a beast, he would direct Lamech’s aim. One day he told Lamech: “I spy a head peeping above yonder ridge.” Lamech drew his bow; Tubal Cain pointed an arrow which transfixed the head. But, on going to retrieve the quarry, he cried: “Father, you have shot a man with a horn growing from his brow!” Lamech answered: “Alas, he must be my ancestor Cain!”, and struck his hands together in grief, thereby inadvertently killing Tubal Cain also.
The horn sighted by Tubal-cain was, of course, the “mark of Cain” God imbedded in the first murderer’s forehead. In an essay entitled “Jewish Folklore: East and West,” Louis Ginzberg cites a variant means of Cain’s death: when Lamech’s son and hunting guide “discerned something horned in the distance, he turned Lamech’s arm upon it, and the creature fell dead.” Ginzberg emphasizes two “genuinely folkloristic elements” in the story: “The horned Cain as well as the giant Lamech—who but a giant could crush a man to death?—are taken from the popular belief of Jews and Christians that the Cainites were monsters and giants.”
One of the medieval Genesis commentaries exploring this version of the Lamech story was the work of Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki) (1040–1105 C.E.). Here it is stated (in accord with the account in the Midrash Tanchuma) that Lamech’s wives separated from him when they heard of his responsibility for the deaths of Cain and Tubal-cain. Lamech tried to appease them by arguing that he had acted inadvertently and without premeditation in shooting Cain and in mortally wounding his son and hunting guide, Tubal-cain. The spurned husband also made a self-serving interpretation of the divine promise that Cain, if murdered, would be “avenged sevenfold.” Lamech explained to his spouses that the number seven referred to the number of generations for which Cain’s punishment for killing Abel was to be postponed. Lamech inferred from this divine leniency that his own case would be treated even more favorably: “If in the case of Cain who killed with premeditation the punishment was suspended for him until the seventh generation [when he died in the hunting calamity], in the case of myself who slew inadvertently, does it not necessarily follow that it should be suspended for me until many seven generations?”
Rashi, however, did not insist on the veracity of the hunting story because he observed, in all fairness, that it was at odds with a cosmic explanation provided in the Midrash Rabbah.
According to the Midrash Rabbah, Lamech’s wives forswore their marital duties not because of any misdeed on his part but because the world was coming to an end. “Tomorrow a flood will come,” they told him in chorus. “Are we to bear children for a curse?” God’s wrath against His Creation is not my fault, Lamech answers. He turns the boast of the Song of the Sword into a rhetorical question: “Have I slain a man for my wounding—that wounds should come on his account! And a young man child for my bruising—that bruises should come upon me!” In simpler terms, Lamech is asking why, though innocent of violence, he should be “wounded” or “bruised” by denial of sexual relations. To allay his wives’ fears of the Deluge, Lamech proposes that his guiltlessness should induce the Lord to withhold the destruction of the world: “Cain slew, yet judgment was suspended for him for seven generations; for me, who did not slay, surely judgment will wait seventy-seven generations.” The egocentricity of this contention is breathtaking: Lamech suggests that because of his asserted innocence, God will suspend for seventy-seven generations His decreed annihilation of the sinful human race. The fallaciousness of Lamech’s argument is noted in a rabbinic citation included in the Midrash: “This is a reasoning of darkness: for if so, whence is the Holy One, blessed be He, to exact His bond of debt [i.e., to enforce his judgment levied against all humanity]?”
Even if the Midrash is justified in rejecting Lamech as a self-appointed redeemer of humanity, this version of his tale brings him close to the experience of the modern age. Those who have lived under the shadow of nuclear catastrophe and terrorist attack can feel affinity with the man who tried to pacify his wives’ fears about the imminence of a Deluge.
The Song of Lamech received extremely divergent revisions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by prophets of two revealed offshoots of Christianity. In Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heavenly Secrets (1749), Lamech’s song does not describe actual events but is to be understood as an allegorical representation of religious doctrine. By contrast, Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith, in The Book of Moses, not only accepts murder by Lamech as literal fact but darkens the crime by relating it to a prior Satanic oath.
The Swedenborg Foundation describes Swedenborg’s Heavenly Secrets as a “systematized explanation of the spiritual import contained within the imagery, fable and history of the Old Testament.” In his introduction to the work, Swedenborg tells of the divine origin of the revelations he received regarding the “spiritual and heavenly things” underlying the literal words of the scriptures: “Of the Lord’s divine mercy it has been granted me now for some years to be constantly and uninterruptedly in company with spirits and angels, hearing them speak and in turn speaking with them. . . . I have been instructed in regard to the different kinds of spirits; the state of souls after death; hell, or the lamentable state of the unfaithful; heaven, or the blessed state of the faithful; and especially in regard to the doctrine of faith which is acknowledged in the universal heaven.” In Swedenborg’s teachings, a crucial process that prepares the way for acceptance of true faith is the emptying of an outworn faith from the afflicted soul. This course of spiritual transformation is accomplished by what Swedenborg refers to as “vastation.” Swedenborg teaches that a church “in process of time departs from the true faith and finally ends in no faith. When there is none it is said to be ‘vastated.’ . . . The reason why the new light or ‘morning’ does not shine forth until the church is vastated, is that the things of faith and of charity have been commingled with things profane; and so long as they remain in this state it is impossible for anything of light or charity to be insinuated.” The Song of Lamech, in Swedenborg’s reading, is not a tale of double murder, as a literal reading would suggest, but a parable of the arrival at a state of faithlessness or vastation: “That by ‘Lamech’ is signified vastation, or that there was no faith, is evident from the . . . verses . . . in which it is said that he ‘slew a man to his wounding, and a little one to his hurt’; for there by a ‘man’ is meant faith, and by a ‘little one’ or ‘little child,’ charity.” In this interpretation, typical of Swedenborg’s symbolic reading of the biblical text, the loss of two lives comes to mean the annihilation of adulterated faith and charity to make ready for the light to shine forth from a “New Church.”
Joseph Smith, first prophet of the Mormon Church, recorded in The Book of Moses revelations made to him in 1830. In the words of God, spoken “unto Moses at a time when Moses was caught up into an exceedingly high mountain,” both Cain and his descendant Lamech are denounced as creatures of Satan. Cain “loved Satan more than God” and took a secret oath to do the archfiend’s bidding. In return, Satan promised that very day to deliver Abel into his hands. Swearing his obedience, Cain took the occult appellation of Master Mahan: “Truly I am Master Mahan,” Cain said. “I am the master of this great secret, that I may murder and get gain.” Glorying in his wickedness, he murdered Abel and defended his crime before God with the words “Satan tempted me because of my brother’s flocks.” Lamech followed the example of his ancestor in both diabolism and murder. He entered into “a covenant with Satan, after the manner of Cain, wherein he became Master Mahan, master of that great secret which was administered unto Cain by Satan.” Lamech’s great-grandfather, Irad, learned of the infernal oaths of Cain and Lamech and began to reveal their secret to the “sons of Adam.” In anger over the disclosure, Lamech killed Irad, “not like unto Cain [who murdered] his brother Abel, for the sake of getting gain, but he slew him for the oath’s sake.”
Joseph Smith’s revelation attributes this new family violence to a “secret combination” that was operative “from the days of Cain.” The Lord “cursed Lamech, and his house, and all them that had covenanted with Satan.” Cain and malefactors in his line had not kept God’s commandments, and their works were “abominations [that] began to spread among all the sons of man.” The Book of Moses substitutes for the Song of the Sword Lamech’s confessions to his wives of his pledge to Satan and the murder of Irad. Shocked by what they heard, they “rebelled against him, and declared these things abroad, and had not compassion.” As a result, “Lamech was despised, and cast out, and came not among the sons of men, lest he should die.” It was in the misdeeds of Cain and Lamech that the “works of darkness began to prevail among the sons of men,” bringing God’s “sore curse” on the Earth.
Poetry and Drama of Lamech through the Centuries
An old song vexes my ear,
But that of Lamech is mine.
—Lord Tennyson, Maud
When the Lamech theme has been pursued in poetry or drama, a striking feature of all the works is what they omit. Like the Genesis passage that originated Lamech’s story, as well as the commentaries and legends it inspired, the subsequent poems and plays of Lamech do not elaborate the circumstances or motivation of the vengeful acts suggested by a literal reading of the Song of the Sword. Perhaps the very minimalism of the biblical portrait has inhibited imaginative retouching. Murray H. Lichtenstein, in an essay on biblical poetry, has accurately characterized Lamech’s song as a “tantalizingly terse vignette” that “succeeds admirably in drawing with precision and economy the emotional contours of an outspoken personality who would have otherwise been relegated to a silent slot in the genealogy that precedes the passage.”
Perhaps the notion of Lamech as an “outspoken personality” is the key to his impenetrability. When his heart is examined, what lies there for certain—except braggadocio? William Ian Miller, in his study of retaliation, Eye for an Eye, notes that we must trust the veracity of Lamech’s exploits “to his own boast to his wives, who for all we know might have been rolling their eyes.” Due to lack of insight into Lamech as killer, the poets and dramatists have adopted other strategies. Medieval authors have often chosen the legendary theme of Lamech’s killing of Cain. More recent works have focused on such motifs as rivalry between Lamech’s children and the end of the curse that afflicted Cain and his descendants.
The long scriptural poems in Old English that were for centuries attributed to Caedmon (fl. 670) are now regarded to be of unknown authorship. A poem based on Genesis revises the biblical original of the Song of the Sword to identify Cain as Lamech’s victim: “Then to his two beloved wives, Adah and Zillah, Lamech rehearsed a tale of shame: ‘I have struck down a kinsman unto death! I have defiled my hands with the blood of Cain! I smote down Enoch’s father, slayer of Abel, and poured his blood upon the ground. Full well I know that for that mortal deed shall come God’s seven-fold vengeance. With fearful torment shall my deed of death and murder be requited, when I go hence.’” The poet does not specify whether Cain was the victim of a hunting accident, as in the noncanonical tradition of antiquity, or whether he was struck down willfully. Murder, however, seems to be on the poet’s mind, for his Lamech believes that the killing will subject him to “God’s seven-fold vengeance” that was assured by the protective mark of Cain.
Edmund Reiss has noted that a few of the medieval cycle plays dealing with Noah’s ark and the Deluge insert a scene showing Lamech killing Cain. Reiss pays particular attention to the “version of the Noah story contained in the Middle English Ludus Coventriae [The Coventry Play]—now generally called the N-Town Cycle.” In a brief interlude of The Coventry Play (edited by K. S. Black), blind old Lamech, led to the hunt by a youthful guide, recalls his past prowess in archery and asks the boy to guide his hand so that he can show the skill that he retains. He shoots Cain, mistaking him for a beast, and beats the guide to death with his bow. Fearing divine wrath, he flees the scene of the double killing.
For death of Cain I shall have sevenfold
More pain than he had that Abel did slay.
These two men’s deaths full sore bought shall be.
Upon all my blood God will avenge this deed.
Wherefore, sore weeping, hence will I flee
And look where I may best my head soon hide.
As these lines echo, Noah and his family enter the ark. Noah mourns the “dreadful flood” that will punish the sins of man’s “wild mood,” sinful living, and lechery.
St. Jerome linked Lamech’s bigamy with his two homicides as analogous instances of excesses unrestrained by morality. In a letter to Salvina, a court lady, he wrote in 400 C.E.: “The accursed and blood-stained Lamech, descended from the stock of Cain, was the first to make out of one rib two wives; and the seedling of digamy [a legal second marriage] then planted was altogether destroyed by the doom of the deluge.” Uninfluenced by the Church father, however, Geoffrey Chaucer repeatedly satirized Lamech’s two marriages while overlooking the double murder imputed to him by Genesis. The Wife of Bath, in the prologue to her tale in The Canterbury Tales, is an expert on marriage, having been led to the altar five times since she was twelve. She defends her inclination to wedlock with scriptural references to polygamy, including the fashion-setting example of Lamech: “In sooth, I will not keep me chaste wholly; when my husband is departed from the world, anon some other Christian man shall wed me. For then, the apostle says, I am free, a God’s name, to wed where I list. He says that it is no sin to be wedded; better it is to be wedded than to burn. What reck I though folk speak shame of cursed Lamech and his bigamy? Well I wot Abraham was an holy man and eke Jacob, so far forth as I know, and each of them had more wives than two, and eke many another holy man.” The example of Lamech is also well-known to a learned falcon in “The Squire’s Tale”; the talking bird refers to a feathered suitor who had a “bearing so like a gentle lover, so ravished with bliss, as it seemed, that never Jason, nor Paris of Troy . . . nor any man else since Lamech was, who first of all began to love two.”
The most amusing reference to Lamech in Chaucer’s work is found in the unfinished poem “Anelida and Arcite.” There the poet proclaims Lamech, rather than his shepherd son Jabal, to be the inventor of tents. Instead of serving as mobile homes for the tenders of flocks, the poem suggests that tents were originally devised to conceal Lamech’s trysts: “Lamech was the first patriarch who loved two women, and lived in bigamy; and unless men lie, he first invented tents.”
In Lamech, ou Les Descendants de Caïn, a French verse drama by Charles Brifaut (poet, dramatist, opera librettist, and member of the French Academy), the curse of Cain continues to play itself out in the destinies of Lamech and sons Tubal-cain and Jabal. Although capable of losing his temper, the Lamech imagined by Brifaut makes no allusion to the violent events mirrored by the Song of the Sword. Having reached old age, Lamech may have forgotten the bloody confrontations he bragged about in his youth, or perhaps they never happened.
Early in the first act of the play, Lamech’s wife, Noéma, who combines his two biblical spouses, reveals a grievous loss early in her marriage. An unknown elderly kidnapper stole her infant son, Tubal-cain, from her arms, overcoming her defensive struggles with the oracular words: “Stop! Marked by the deadly seal, this child belongs to me. Tremble lest he remain with you.” This enigmatic warning establishes a theme of secret interplay between two mysterious figures: the kidnapper, who will ultimately reveal himself to be the wandering Cain, and the stolen child, who, unaware of his name and birth, will grow up to be a warrior and sword forger who is called Coreb. The meaning of the oracle pronounced at the time of the abduction will be revealed only when its disclosure cannot avert disaster.
Mirroring the primal discord between Cain and Abel, a potentially deadly quarrel arises between Jabal and his unrecognized brother. Both of the young men are in love with Lamech’s niece, Saphira. Jabal grew up with Saphira and regarded her as a sister before she became his beloved. Although the match received the blessing of Jabal’s parents, Coreb (Tubal-cain) objects furiously. Having defeated the attack of Abel’s kinsmen on Lamech’s domain, Coreb claims Saphira’s hand as his reward and threatens to murder Lamech and Jabal when they persist in making arrangements for the shepherd’s wedding.
Cain appears as an old man emerging from a forest; he is dressed in a tiger’s skin, and long hair disguises a part of his features. He has initial success in dissuading Coreb from taking precipitous revenge; Coreb is frightened because he thinks he sees in the old man “the living anger of the Almighty.” Jabal reacts to the newcomer more in curiosity than fear, asking him to reveal his face, and identifies the community as the “inheritance of Cain.” The stranger is touched by the sympathy of Jabal and Saphira for the world’s first murderer, but the pursuit of a jealous God is unrelenting: the water and dates that the young people offer him “rebel.”
Despite Cain’s intervention, the dangerous rivalry of Lamech’s sons mounts in intensity, and Coreb pursues his murder plans. Cain warns the young soldier of the unforgiving fate of murderers and, pressing him in his arms, expresses the wish: “If only some friendly voice, by a cry of terror, had, / When I was about to strike, restrained my fury.” By degrees, the old man reveals to Coreb (Tubal-cain) the secret of his birth in the accursed line of murderers and the reason for his kidnapping.
I approach, I observe, and my alarmed eye
Sees crime expressed in the forehead of the infant;
His features prophesied his dark destiny,
I snatch him from the arms of his astonished mother.
Astounded by the gradual revelation of his family ties, Coreb (once again restored to his identity as Tubal-cain), recedes from his murder plans, but only for the moment. Noéma finds the corpse of her husband, Lamech, lying in the woods, the victim of Tubal-cain. The biblical swordsman has died by his son’s sword. Cain, in his final speech, foresees that ever-increasing crime will lead humanity to extinction in the Flood.
From now on we will see, surpassing each other in crime,
One sacrificed by the other, both executioners and victims,
Mortals rushing into this disastrous field
Until the day, fatal day when on these wretched humans
God unleashing the floods of his slow vengeance,
All will die engulfed under an immense storm.
But, bearing the future of a new universe,
The ark where Noah is enclosed rests on the seas.
Rudyard Kipling, a Freemason since he joined an Indian Lodge in 1885, devoted some of his fiction and poems to Masonic themes. He was aware that all three of Lamech’s sons have been celebrated as discoverers of the sciences in the “Legend of the Craft,” with which the traditional history of Masonry begins. Kipling’s poem “Jubal and Tubal Cain” sings of the sibling rivalry between two of Lamech’s sons, Jubal the musician and Tubal-cain. The poem recalls the feud in which Lamech is sometimes said to have taken the lives of two foemen with weapons invented by Tubalcain. That deadly conflict, Kipling suggests, was no more bitter than the clash between fraternal temperaments.
Jubal sang of the golden years,
When wars and wounds shall cease—
But Tubal fashioned the hand-flung spears
And showèd his neighbours peace.
New—new as the Nine-point-Two [the largest gun carried by a heavy cruiser],
Older than Lamech’s slain [victims]—
Roaring and loud is the feud avowed
Twix’ Jubal and Tubal Cain!
Even though the two creative brothers have apparently not inherited their ancestors’ murderous instincts, they appear to share the fierce competitiveness of Cain and Lamech.
The murder charges against Lamech are expunged in George Eliot’s narrative poem “The Legend of Jubal,” published in 1870. In Cain’s “young city,” established by him in exile, “none had heard of Death save him, the founder.” In Eliot’s telling, it becomes Lamech’s tragic lot to introduce death to the community after generations of innocence; by pure accident he takes the life of one of his children.
. . . hurling stones in mere athletic joy,
Strong Lamech struck and killed his fairest boy,
And tried to wake him with the tenderest cries,
And fetched and held before the glazèd eyes
The things they best had loved to look upon;
But never glance or smile or sigh he won.
As the “generations” looked on in amazement, ancient Cain explained the unprecedented calamity that they had witnessed.
“He will not wake;
This is the endless sleep, and we must make
A bed deep down for him beneath the sod;
For know, my sons, there is a mighty God
Angry with all man’s race, but most with me.
I fled from out His land in vain! ’tis He
Who came and slew the lad. . . .”
In this passage Cain makes a thoroughgoing defense of Lamech’s guiltlessness. The world’s first murderer, living on among several generations of his progeny, has never before disclosed human mortality, the murder of Abel, or the causative link between violence and death. The impermanence of life is due to “Jehovah’s will, and He is strong; / I thought the way I travelled was too long / For Him to follow me; my thought was vain!”
In “The Song of Lamech,” Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough devised a comforting backstory for Lamech’s biblical outcry—a narrative of forgiveness and reconciliation among Cain, his parents, and his murdered brother, Abel. The family peace lifts the curse of Cain and gives promise that Lamech’s violent acts will not initiate a new chain of reprisal.
The first lines of Clough’s poem echo the beginning of the Genesis poem: “Hearken to me, ye mothers of my tent; / Ye wives of Lamech, hearken to my speech.” Immediately thereafter, however, it becomes plain that Lamech will not address his spouses alone. “Adah,” he asks, “let Jubal [conflated here with his brother Jabal] hither lead his goats”; Tubal Cain is to “hush the forge,” his sister Naamah is to ply her wheel nearby, and Jubal is to touch his instrument’s string before his father begins to speak. What Lamech has to say concerns the entire family: “Hear ye my voice, beloved of my tent, / Dear ones of Lamech, listen to my speech.”
Lamech’s tale begins by recalling how Adam and Eve attempted to persuade Cain not to go into exile after the murder of Abel. The contrite Eve acknowledged that if she had cursed Cain she had sinned, and Adam joined their forgiveness to that he deemed proffered by the dead Abel: “He that is gone forgiveth, we forgive: / Rob not thy mother of two sons at once; / My child, abide with us and comfort us.” Cain brooded on his parents’ entreaty through the night, but when the sun rose he announced that he must go into exile just as his parents were banished from Eden.
Cain’s “years were multiplied,” and his heirs reached several generations. In old age he lived alone, and once, at nightfall, he met Adam in the field. His father asked him a probing question: “My son, hath God not spoken to thee?” Cain replied that his dreams were “double, good and evil,” bringing “terror to [his] soul by night, and agony by day.” Abel’s daytime apparition stood as “A dead black shade, and speaks not neither looks, / Nor makes me any answer when I cry. . . .” In “visions of a deeper sleep,” however,
Abel, as whom we knew, yours once and mine,
Comes with a free forgiveness in his face,
Seeming to speak, solicitous for words,
And wearing ere he go the old, first look
Of unsuspecting, unforeboding love.
Cain told Adam that the pardoning vision appeared three nights before, and his father responded that on the very same night he saw Abel in his sleep. Abel asked him to visit Cain in his land of exile and to tell his brother that Abel wished to see him. Abel’s phantom further enjoined Adam to “lay thou thy hand, / My father, on his head that he may come; / Am I not weary, Father, for this hour?” Adam responded with a magical touch upon the head of Cain, who “bowed down, and slept, and died.” A deep sleep fell on Adam, and “in his slumber’s deepest he beheld, / Standing before the gate of Paradise / With Abel, hand in hand, our father Cain.”
Having finished his story of ancestral reconciliation, Lamech returns to the words of the Song of the Sword. Lamech’s two killings are confessed, but, as in the King James Version, have not been committed in retaliation for prior injuries; it is Lamech’s own homicides that have caused him “wounding” and “hurt.” Moreover, unlike the Song of the Sword, in either the traditional Hebrew text or the King James translation, Clough’s poem does not end on Lamech’s warning of disproportionate revenge against any foes who may seek to punish him. Instead, Lamech assures his family that the safety and rest granted at last to Cain will ensure the future security of Lamech and his line.
Hear ye my voice, Adah and Zillah, hear;
Ye wives of Lamech, listen to my speech.
Though to his wounding did he slay a man,
Yea, and a young man to his hurt he slew,
Fear not ye wives nor sons of Lamech fear:
If unto Cain was safety given and rest,
Shall Lamech surely and his people die?
It is in these words of peace that Arthur Clough takes leave of the Lamech tradition.
Bibliographical Notes
For the Genesis text and commentary, I relied principally on JPS [Jewish Publication Society] Torah Commentary: Genesis, the Traditional Hebrew Text with the New JPS Translation, commentary by Nahum M. Sarna (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 36–39, 38 (“first true example of Hebrew biblical style”). Other sources for text, commentary, targums, and apocrypha include: Midrash Rabbah, vol. 1, ed. and trans. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon (London: Soncino Press, 1951), 194–95; The Anchor Bible: Genesis, intro., trans., and notes E. A. Speiser (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), 37; Chumash with Targum, Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi’s Commentary Bereshith (Genesis), trans. A. M. Silbermann, with M. Rosenbaum (Jerusalem: Silbermann Family, 1984–85); 19–21; Metsudah Midrash Tanchuma: Bereishis I (Genesis), ed. Yaakov Y. H. Pupko, trans. and ann. Avrohom Davis (Lakewood, N.J.: Israel Book Shop, 2005); 58–61; Targum Onkelos to Genesis, trans. Moses Aberbach and Bernard Grossfeld (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982); 44–46; Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, trans. with intro. and notes Michael Maher (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992); 34–35; The Book of Jubilees: or, The Little Genesis, trans. Robert Henry Charles (Berwick, Maine: Ibis Press, 2005), 56.
Lamech’s song draws “contours of an outspoken personality,” wrote Murray H. Lichtenstein, in “Biblical Poetry,” in Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, ed. Barry W. Holtz (New York: Touchstone, 1984), 119–20.
In examining Hebrew myths I turned to Louis Ginzberg’s The Legends of the Jews, vol. 1 (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998), 117–18; and his “Jewish Folklore: East and West,” in On Jewish Law and Lore (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962), 61–62, wherein he states: “English, French, Italian, and Spanish artists vied with one another to depict the widely spread legend of the blind Lamech going to hunt under the guidance of his son Tubal Cain.” Also valuable in my research was Robert Graves and Raphael Patai, Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1964), 108.
Sources of classical literature valuable in this study are Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 2006), 11; Philo Judaeus, “Questions and Answers on Genesis, I,” in Works, trans. C. D. Yonge (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993), 807; [Pseudo-Philo,] The Biblical Antiquities of Philo, trans. M. R. James (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917), 78–79.
Two prophets of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century offshoots of Christianity modify the Lamech tradition: Emanuel Swedenborg, Heavenly Secrets (Arcana Caelestia), vol. 1 (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1967), 248–50; and Joseph Smith, “The Book of Moses,” in The Pearl of Great Price (Salt Lake City, Utah: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1928), 1, 12–14.
Lamech’s story appears in centuries of poetry and drama: [Caedmon,] “Genesis Book XVIII,” http://poemhunter.com (accessed Sept. 17, 2006; site discontinued); Ludus Coventriae: or, The Plaie Called Corpus Christi, Cotton Ms. Vespasian D. VIII, ed. K. S. Block (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), xv, 39–43; Edmund Reiss, “The Story of Lamech and Its Place in Medieval Drama,” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1972): 35; Geoffrey Chaucer, The Complete Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. John S. P. Tatlock and Percy Mac-Kaye (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 157–58, 238–50, 356–61; Charles Brifaut, Lamech, ou Les Descendants de Cain (1820), in Oeuvres de M. Charles Brifaut, vol. 4 (Paris: Diard, 1858), 295–385, 302, 347, 349, 384; Rudyard Kipling, “Jubal and Tubal Cain,” in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1940), 555; George Eliot, “The Legend of Jubal,” in The Spanish Gypsy, The Legend of Jubal, and Other Poems, Old and New (New York: Thomas Nelson, 1915), 383–425, 386, 388–89; Arthur Hugh Clough, “The Song of Lamech,” in The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough (Oxford, England: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), 50–53.
The cited Christian sermon on Lamech’s usurpation of God’s Grace is “Lamech: The Biblical second murderer and the usurpation of Grace,” http://www.maxpages.com/oreoblues/Lamech (accessed Oct. 30, 2002; site discontinued).
I have also quoted from William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), 24 (Lamech’s wives “might have been rolling their eyes”).