Enosh: the son of Seth and grandson of Adam, whose name is simply the Hebrew word for a mortal human being.
Enosh belongs to the opening pages of the Bible's family history, and he shows up at three points that all say the same thing in different ways:
- He closes the short family list that follows Cain's murder of Abel, and his birth is the moment at which people begin to call on the name of the LORD (Genesis 4:26).
- He is the third generation of the formal genealogy that restarts the human story, where his life is counted out at 905 years (Genesis 5:6 to 5:11).
- He is the third name in the long genealogy that opens Chronicles, a list that runs Adam, Seth, Enosh and passes over Cain's line entirely (1 Chronicles 1:1).
The name is not decoration. It is spelled exactly like the ordinary Hebrew word for a human being (אֱנוֹשׁ), the word Hebrew poets favor when they want to underline how slight and short-lived a person is. So an ancient reader heard the child named something like "Mortal" or "Human." That hearing matters because of what the narrator reports in the very same breath: it was then that people began to call on the name of the LORD. Many readers take the pairing as deliberate, and read it as saying that it is mortal humanity, aware of how little it can hold onto life, that first learns to pray.
Because the name means what it means, Enosh has drawn attention out of all proportion to his seven verses. He is one of only two figures in these chapters whose name is plainly the everyday word for a person, the other being Adam (אָדָם), and some scholars argue that Enosh was the first man in an older form of the story, with Adam set in front of him later. Whether or not that is right, the effect in the text as it stands is clear enough: the family line that carries the promise forward is headed by a man called Mortal, and it is in his day that people start calling on the everlasting name.
Disputed
Whether the name lexically means "frail mortal" (from a supposed root meaning to be weak or incurable) or simply "human being," with any note of frailty coming from context rather than from the word itself.
- majorityThe noun is a poetic-register synonym for a human being; the frailty connotation is real but contextually activated, so the name means "human" and Genesis 4:26 supplies the mortality frame rather than the lexeme.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. enosh; D. J. A. Clines, Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. enosh; J. Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961)
- minorityThe noun derives from a Semitic root meaning to be weak or sickly (compare Akkadian enesu and the Hebrew adjective anush, "incurable"), so the name genuinely means "frail mortal."; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), Hebrew and English Lexicon, s.v. enosh (retaining Gesenius, while noting Noldeke's dissent, ZDMG 1886, 739); F. Maass, TDOT I:345-48; H. W. Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament (1974)
Whether Enosh was originally the first man of an older tradition, later displaced by the prefixing of Adam to the genealogy.
- majorityGenesis presents Adam as the first man and Enosh as the third generation, and the overlap between the family lists of Genesis 4 and Genesis 5 does not require that Enosh once occupied Adam's place.; C. Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary (1984), 339-42, 462-67; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word Biblical Commentary, 1987), 115-17
- minorityEnosh was the primal-man figure of an earlier form of the tradition, doubled when Adam was placed before him; the name, which is simply the word for a human being, is a trace of that older role, and the heavy overlap of names between Genesis 4 and Genesis 5 points the same way.; R. S. Hendel, The Text of Genesis 1-11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition (1998); R. S. Hendel, "Of Demigods and the Deluge," Journal of Biblical Literature 106 (1987): 13-26; J. Day, From Creation to Babel: Studies in Genesis 1-11 (2013)