adah

Genesis 4 follows the family of Cain down to Lamech, who took two wives. Adah is named first and Zillah (צִלָּה) second. This is the first time the Bible reports a man with more than one wife, and it comes at the close of a family line already marked by murder.

Adah is the mother of two of the sons Genesis credits with starting a whole way of living. Jabal, her firstborn, is remembered as the first to live in tents and keep herds, and his brother Jubal as the first to play the harp and the pipe. Their half brother Tubal-cain, born to Zillah, works bronze and iron. Between the two women, this one household is given the beginnings of herding, music, and metalwork.

Her name is written exactly like the everyday Hebrew word for putting on jewelry, and it is usually taken as a form of the word for the finery itself (עֲדִי), which is why it is often glossed "Ornament". Genesis never explains the name, so that reading stays a careful reconstruction rather than something the text says.

The last thing Genesis reports of her is that she was spoken to. Lamech gathers his two wives and recites a short, savage boast about killing a man who wounded him. It is the oldest piece of poetry in the book, and Adah is half its audience.

Genesis 36 opens its record of Esau's descendants by naming the wives he took from the women of Canaan. The first is Adah, daughter of a man called Elon who is described as a Hittite. She bears Esau his firstborn son, Eliphaz, and from there the chapter counts her grandchildren and the clan leaders descended from them, closing the list with the words "these are the sons of Adah".

There is a long-standing puzzle around her name. An earlier notice, in Genesis 26, also reports that Esau married a daughter of Elon the Hittite, but calls her Basemath (בָּשְׂמַת), and in Genesis 36 that name has moved to a different wife, a daughter of Ishmael. Two explanations have been argued for centuries: either the book preserves two older lists of Esau's marriages side by side without smoothing them together, or one woman was known by more than one name.

Calling her father a Hittite does not place her among the Hittites of the empire far to the north. In Genesis the word describes a local group living in Canaan, and Elon is an ordinary name in that region.

Her family line runs into some of the hardest history in the Bible. Amalek, born to her son Eliphaz by a secondary wife, becomes the ancestor of the people Israel fought from the wilderness onward. So the woman named here quietly stands at the head both of the clans of Edom and of the enemy Israel remembered longest.