Genesis 4:22b "[…] and the sister of Tubalcain was Naamah.”
Tubalcain’s had a sister. Her name was Naamah, and she is the only daughter mentioned in the genealogy of Cain, and the fourth woman mentioned by name in the Bible. Her name means pleasantness, but comes from the root-word pleasure. No further information is given about her. Why is her name recorded in Scripture without any explanation or commentary?
Naamah is also the last name to appear in Cain’s genealogy. Why? And why does the record of Cain’s lineage end so abruptly? You may be thinking “I know! They were wiped out in the flood!” But as the next chapter reveals, there were at least another eight or nine generations that followed Naamah’s before the flood came.1 So why does Cain’s genealogy stop short with the story of Lamech, his two wives Adah and Zillah, and their children, and Naamah in particular? Tuck that question away, as some relevant data will be forthcoming in a couple of chapters. In any case, if Naamah lived up to her name, she was no doubt a fascinating and attractive personality. Pleasantness rooted in pleasure instead of principle, however, is like a vapor that quickly disappears. What kind of pleasantness do you desire and seek after? The pleasant externals of selfish pleasure, or the pleasant dispostion of a noble character and a heart transformed by Divine Love and the grace of salvation?
1 If we count Adam as the first generation, Lamech, Naamah’s father, is the 7th generation, paralleling Enoch in the line of Seth. Enoch was Noah’s great grandfather, and Noah’s sons were married men before the flood came, so that makes a total of four generations. But Noah was 500 years old before he had children (Genesis 5:32). Considering that the median generational gap in the first seven generations of the descendants of Seth in Genesis 5 was 95.38 years, that means Noah and his wife waited over five times longer than the average before having children, which means that there were likely a total of eight or nine generations from Naamah until the flood.↩
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