Fear No Fear

(All scripture from the World English Bible, ebible.org, all rights reserved)

“Kenan lived seventy years, then became the father of Mahalalel. Kenan lived after he became the father of Mahalalel eight hundred forty years, and became the father of other sons and daughters and all of the days of Kenan were nine hundred ten years, then he died.“
(Genesis 5:12-14)

Mahalalel means ‘praise of God’. It’s from the noun מהלל (mahalel), praise, and the word אל (‘el), God. The underlying root words express the ideas of approach and negation, acts of wailing and pointing, and may point toward the steadiness of the oak or terebinth trees.

Adam was 395 years old when Mahalalel was born. They would have had 535 years to interact before Adam died. Kenan died 305 years after Adam, 193 years after Seth, 95 years after his own father, and 1,235 years after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden. Kenan was 662 years when his great-grandson Enoch was translated. He was 731 years when Noah was born and died 421 years before the Flood. These were LONG lived people, and they had HUNDREDS of years to interact with each other if they chose to do that.

Like his forefathers before him, Kenan did not only have one child, but many. Both sons and daughters were born to him during the just over nine hundred years that he lived.

Human beings were getting used to the idea of death. It was becoming a ‘normal’ thing.