Jubal: the son of Lamech whom Genesis names as the ancestor of everyone who plays the lyre and the pipe, making him the Bible's first musician.
Jubal is named once, in a short list of the people who started the crafts of civilization. Genesis 4 follows the family line of Cain down to Lamech, and Lamech's sons each begin something the world has kept doing ever since:
- Jabal, the first to live in tents and keep livestock
- Jubal, the ancestor of everyone who plays the lyre and the pipe
- Tubal-cain, the first to forge tools of bronze and iron
Jubal is not described as playing anything himself. He is the father of the players, which is the passage's way of saying that all later music traces back to him.
The name is built to be heard. All three brothers' names are made from the same three Hebrew consonants, so they rhyme: Jubal, his brother Jabal (יָבָל), and his half brother Tubal-cain (תּוּבַל־קַיִן). Those consonants belong to a common verb meaning to bring, lead, or carry something along (יָבַל), so the name reads roughly as "he is brought forth." More to the point, it sounds almost exactly like the Hebrew word for the ram's-horn blast (יוֹבֵל). Genesis has given the father of music a name that rings like a horn. The ancient historian Josephus already noticed the echo in the first century.
Most scholars therefore call this a speaking name: a name chosen so its sound fits the man's work, closer in force to "the sound that is brought forth" than to "musician." What the name meant to whoever first gave it is a separate question, and a smaller group of specialists in ancient names reads it as a shortened way of saying "God has brought forth a child," a form common in the second millennium BC. Both can be true at once: an old family name that the storyteller heard as a horn call and put to work.
There is a sting in the placement. These gifts, herding and music and metalwork, all appear in the cursed line rather than the promised one, and the very next thing Lamech does is boast about killing a man. Genesis presents culture as a real good that arrives tangled up with human violence.
Disputed
What the name Jubal is meant to convey: whether it was coined to echo the ram's-horn trumpet, whether it is an archaic shortened birth-name whose musical echo is only a later literary effect, or whether its origin should be left open.
- majorityThe name is deliberately shaped to evoke the ram's-horn trumpet, so that it announces Jubal's vocation as the father of musicians before the verse states it.; U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part I: From Adam to Noah (Magnes, 1961), 233-240; N. M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary, 1989), 37; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word Biblical Commentary, 1987), 111-114; V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17 (NICOT, 1990), 239-240; K. A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26 (New American Commentary, 1996), 287-288
- minorityThe name is an archaic shortened birth-name of the second-millennium West Semitic type, something like "(the god) has brought forth a child"; the echo of the ram's horn is a literary effect the narrator activates rather than the name's actual origin.; M. Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemitischen Namengebung (Kohlhammer, 1928); R. S. Hess, Studies in the Personal Names of Genesis 1-11 (AOAT 234, Neukirchener, 1993), 49-52
- minorityThe shared root and the pattern of culture-founding brothers are accepted, but the specific link to the ram's horn is not endorsed; the name's significance comes from the vocation the text assigns it, not from an independently recoverable etymology.; C. Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Continental Commentary (Fortress, 1984), 326-330; E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible, 1964), 34-37