Genesis chapter 5 gives the account of the genealogy of Adam. It begins with him and ends with Noah and his sons. It lists how old each was when the next in the list was born as well as how old each was when he died. Noah and his family being the exception as this chapter leads us into the account of the flood.
Names in ancient Israel were important. They were not given casually or lightly. In a blog post titled Why Bother Reading the Lists in the Bible?, One For Israel points out, “The first thing to point out is that Hebrew names all have meanings – often rich, deep spiritual meanings. When you know what the meanings of the names are, there are often great insights into the passage itself, or even another message that God wants to convey.” It is no coincidence that they shared exactly what I saw while studying this list of names even before reading their blog post. “When looking at the meanings of the names in the genealogy in Genesis 5, Chick Missier found something rather remarkable. He made a note of the meaning of each of the names in the list in Genesis and found that it seemed to be telling the story of the gospel!” You can’t help but get excited when you see confirmation of what you were reading and seeing. The story of Yeshua is threaded throughout the entire Bible.
The list provided in the One For Israel blog lists a single word or phrase for each name, but digging into the Brown Driver-Briggs Hebrew Lexicon, most of them provided an even more rich context by not just looking at the meaning for the proper noun itself, but for the nouns and verbs or the root of that same word.
For instance, the proper noun for Adam simply means “man”. But a closer look gets a little more specific. It also means first man, red, ruddy, feeble, earthy, and mortal. The amazing thing I saw within their definitions was that it showed we are “sinful”, yet “made in God’s image”. Yeshua said in Revelation 22:13, “I am the Alef and the Tav, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” He became earthly, mortal, and feeble. His blood ran red upon the cross and He became sinful on our behalf so that we could become like Him, without sin. Yeshua is called “the last Adam” in 1 Corinthians 15:45. “In fact, the Tanakh says so: Adam, the first man, became a living human being; but the last “Adam” has become a life-giving Spirit.” As Adam was the first man of this natural world, so Yeshua is the first man of the eternal.
Comments