Noach What Kind of Father Was Lamech?

Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age. (Genesis 6:9)

At the birth of his son, Lamech predicts: "This one will provide us relief from our work and from the toil of our hands, out of the very soil which the Lord placed under a curse" (Genesis 5:29). Noah's name, Noach, heralds comfort for a beleaguered world. His great accomplishment—the saving of humanity—will inspire Midrash Tanchuma to acclaim, "Before Noah's birth, what was reaped was not what had been sewn. Where wheat or barley was sewn, thorns and thistles were reaped. But after Noah was born, the earth returned to orderly growth. What was sewn was reaped...."

Such eloquent testimony aside, Lamech's announcement is worrisome. What is promised is more daunting than restoring nature's harmony, more far-reaching than righting the order made wrong by human beings; Noah is, in effect, enlisted to rearrange the very nature of humanity. As Karen Armstrong puts it, he is charged to do nothing less than "... reverse the curse of Adam's sin and bring relief to both humanity and the afflicted earth."

Unfazed, endowed with decency and attuned to God's will, Noah augurs hope as devastation looms. His father appears prescient.

Once the flood rampages and the waters recede, God, relenting of His promise to destroy the world, renews life through Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Now Noah can finally do what his name actually suggests: rest. (The etymology is askew; Noach more properly means "rest," not "relief" or "comfort" as Lamech's naming implies. This is only a curiosity and not yet an agitation. After all, Noah has indeed provided comfort and relief and is justified in unwinding inside his tent.)

Still — startlingly — as Noah rescues humanity, he cannot save himself. Once inside that tent, Noah becomes undone: "Noah, the tiller of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk, and he uncovered himself within his tent" (Genesis 9:20-21). Whatever "uncovered" means—the speculations abound—Noah is done, spent morally and physically, his impressive resume in shambles. Why could Noah save humanity, but not himself? Why does he unravel so quickly, unbound from any moral compass or psychological core to hold himself at bay?

Is it, as Rashi and others hint, that while Noah is more decent and less corrupt than his peers, he is - more ordinary than he appears—at ease following God's instructions, yet ill equipped to internalize the implications?

Or, does his personal undoing (mirrored in the telling actions of his son Ham, who deliberately stares at and then almost gleefully tells of his father's uncovered nakedness), in fact, belong at Lamech's feet—or, more precisely, with his fathering? Perhaps the undone son possesses insufficient internal paternal ballast to buoy himself when storm tossed and adrift. Maybe too much is expected of a son, by a father who provides too little.

Regarding fathers and sons, most especially what fathers do for sons, we begin not with Noah, but rather with Freud. And not with Freudian analysis, but rather with the childhood story Freud often told about himself and his father:

“And now, for the first time, I happened upon the youthful experience which even to-day still, expresses its power in all these emotions and dreams. I might have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his views on the things of this world.

Thus it was that he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born into happier times than he: "When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts, 'Jew, get off the pavement!" "And what did you do?" "I went into the street and picked up the cap," he calmly replied.

That did not seem heroic on the part of the big, strong man who was leading me, a little fellow by the hand. I contrasted this situation, which did not please me, with another, more in Harmony with my sentiments—the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barcas, made his son swear before the household altar to take vengeance on the Romans. Ever since then Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies.”

No wonder that Freud—by then in his seventies and summing things up in Civilization and Its Discontents —would observe, "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as a need for a father's protection."

We know of Jacob Freud's parental inadequacies from his son's observations. Yet, how can we claim that Lamech, likewise, cannot be a "big strong man," holding his son firmly hand in hand?

While the biblical text is mute on Lamech's paternal ways, Leon Kass, an astute contemporary observer of biblical personalities and events, paints a picture of Noah. He sees Noah as a son without a proper father, and as a father who, in coming unglued in front of his sons, can no longer claim paternal authority.

Noah's drunkenness robs [him] - of his dignity, his parental authority, and his very humanity. Prostrate rather than upright, this newly established master of the earth has, in the space of one verse, utterly lost his standing. Worse, instead of escaping from his origins, Noah in fact returns to the shameful naked condition of the aboriginal state: "he was uncovered in his tent." Stripped of his clothing, naked, exposed and vulnerable to disgrace, he appears merely as a male, not as a father—not even as a humanized, rational animal. Noah will not be the last man who degrades and unfathers himself as a result of drink. Paternal authority and respectability are precarious, indeed.

So there it is: Noah, stripped of any patina of civility, shorn of any claim to the mantel of fatherhood, is reduced to his animal self. Flat on his back, Noah is back to the origins he cannot escape—his father and his father's ways.

Who, then, was Lamech, and how might the son be like die father?

While the Bible is circumspect on Lamech, the Rabbis, perhaps intuiting in the son's eventual undoing something of the ways of, the father, are not. Noting Genesis 4:19 ("Lamed' took to himself two wives"), they remark on the male ways of that generation: Men would invariably take two wives at a time—making of the first almost a widow, while turning the second into something of a harlot. In other words, Lamech literally turns his back on one wife and uses the second one, more or less, for sexual pleasure alone. So Lamech was no standup man—not for his women, not for his son. Given what Noah observed at home as a young man, need we wonder more about his moral compass?

This doesn't mean, however, that Lamech is without a certain kind of discernment. As fathers often do, he knows his son well. He understands, specifically, that Noah has the stuff inside to be counted on, to bear any burden out in the larger world—and, indeed, he will become the protecting father to the mass of humanity. Nonetheless, tire father, knowing something about himself, is well aware that his son—this world-class hero-to-be—is possessed of an internal hollowness. As great as Noah will be in the world, he will be just as suspect at home.

So, indeed, Noah is no standup father to his own sons, and eventually he becomes a first-class fool at home. Perhaps Lamech was prescient; he sensed that Noah could be heroic, kind, and decent for all the world to see, and, yet, inside his tent for none but his own sons to know, his son will be unable to stand up straight—neither as a man nor as a father.

Lamech, knowing himself to be a bit crooked with his women, also knows he cannot be straight with his son. He therefore deliberately twists his son's name: Noah is the one who can never rest (and will be always taunted by having a name that suggests that he is restful, perhaps the very reason he becomes twisted); but Noah can be the one to bring relief and comfort for all humanity. Indeed, this is no misnaming at all; rest is about stability, normality, and continuity— achievements for which Noah lays the foundation by saving humanity. Nevertheless, these are accomplishments beyond the reach of his character, yet they are not necessarily beyond the double meaning of his name.