Lamech

AI summary: This Lamech matters because the cross references present him as a striking portrait of civilization developing without moral healing. He takes multiple wives, boasts of retaliatory violence, and leaves behind one of the earliest recorded poems in Scripture, but it is a poem of threat rather than praise. His household is culturally productive and morally dark. Taken together, the material presents this Lamech as a Cainite figure whose life dramatizes the spread of pride and violence.¹

The fifth in descent from Cain. He was the first to violate the primeval ordinance of marriage (Gen. 4:18-24). His address to his two wives, Adah and Zillah (4:23, 24), is the only extant example of antediluvian poetry. It has been called “Lamech’s sword-song.” He was “rude and ruffianly,” fearing neither God nor man. With him the curtain falls on the race of Cain. We know nothing of his descendants. ³