The Bible as Mirror: Trump and Lamech

Last updated on: March 23, 2017 at 4:24 pm by John C Holbert

The Bible as Mirror: Trump and Lamech 2017-03-23T16:24:40-05:00 John C Holbert

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A gold star in Bible trivia if you even know who Lamech is, and another star if you can tell us where he is to be found in the Hebrew Bible. The answer to the first is that Lamech was son of Mathushael, who himself was son of Mehujael, and so on, as Genesis 4:17-19 reveals to us. None of this of course has anything to do with a vibrant faith, but it can surely fill your Bible with those coveted gold stars! Lamech,_holding_a_farming_implement,_points_at_a_child;_down_Wellcome_V0034207

The important matter is that old Lamech, as obscure as he is, has much in common with the 45th president of the USA, Donald J. Trump. This is so for two reasons that a closer look at this tiny story will reveal. First, the text.

Lamech had two wives, Adah and Zillah (another example, as if any more were needed, that the Bible is not the place to go to find support for the traditional American family). These two women become the mothers of three originators of crucial activities in an ancient culture: Adah bears Jabal, the ancestor of all who live in tents and have livestock, and Jubal, the ancestor of all musicians. It might appear strange that the text would concern itself with the origin of musicians in antiquity, but music then was the way to memory and history. Without music, no tribe could root itself in its important past. Hence, music, says this story, is as crucial as tent dwelling and animal husbandry. Lamech’s second wife, Zillah, gives birth to Tubal-cain, the forger of bronze and iron tools, critical implements for any ancient agricultural and pastoral society.

But then the text turns to Lamech himself and his particular bluster (Gen. 4:23- 24):

“Lamech said to his wives:
‘Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; wives of Lamech, listen to what I say:

I have a killed a man for wounding me, a young boy for even touching me!
If Cain is to be avenged seven times, then Lamech seventy times seven!

Listen very carefully to what this monstrous man says here. He is boasting to his wives, those women who have born sons to him, that he has in his violent life “killed for a wound.” Well, one might say in this very ancient tribal culture that a wound deserves a response, and if that response leads to the death of the one who caused the wound, it is no more than to be expected in a time of rough justice after all. But the second line of the shouted couplet goes well beyond a simple boast. Lamech claims that he has murdered “young boys” even for touching, or perhaps “bruising” him. The word used for boy usually refers to a boy under the age of ten, but can even include infants in its use. In other words, Lamech murders all who dare wound him or bruise him or touch him!

And if that were not terrible enough, he demands a full and complete revenge against those who would do any of these things to him along with all others who oppose his brutishness. “If Cain is to be avenged seven times” (as YHWH decreed at Gen. 4:15), then the boastful Lamech will be avenged “seventy-seven times”: in other words, Lamech demands whole sale genocide if anyone dare touch him in any way whatever! Lamech is the ultimate example of a man who never forgives and never forgets, and hopes that the entire world will collapse if he does not get the revenge he desperately desires and imagines he deserves.

And that brings us once again to Donald Trump. He is seemingly incapable of admitting error, seemingly averse to letting criticism go, no matter how trivial it may be, and seemingly desirous of letting all manner of things fall to pieces, even things he claims devoutly to want, if he is not judged right in all things. And here are the examples that prove the point.

On the campaign trail he relished mocking all sorts of people, from a disabled reporter, to a tough female journalist, to all of his competitors for the presidency, even to war heroes, calling them losers for being captured and tortured by our enemies. And after becoming president (horror of horrors!), he continued these appalling ways. He has named members of the press who dared criticize and question him “enemies of the American people,” naming their reports as “fake news” instead of the real news that only comes from his mouth. He has recently tweeted that his predecessor, Barak Obama, “wire tapped” his Trump Tower offices before the election, and refuses to back down from the claim, though there is precisely no proof whatever, let alone apologize for slandering the former president. He is, in short, a modern Lamech, blustering and boasting of his prowess to gain revenge, to grasp the upper hand, to ascend to the mountaintop on the backs of all who dare get in his way. That is the first way that the ancient monster, Lamech, is very like the 45th president.

The second way that Lamech and Trump resemble one another is perhaps even more terrifying. The story of Lamech is placed in a most strategic point in the ongoing saga of Genesis. After YHWH God creat The_Flood_(Die_Sintflut,_Suendflut)by_Lesser_Ury(3561574020) es the universe good and harmonious and wonderfully balanced, humanity proceeds to muck it all up, first by eating of the forbidden fruit of divine knowledge and then by committing one of the world’s most heinous crimes, fratricide, done by the very first two brothers in history against one another! After the murderer, Cain, is cursed to wander the earth, fearful of imminent death at the hands of all whom he meets, he ironically “settles in the land of Nod,” but since Hebrew Nod means wandering, he in fact settles no where until he builds the world’s first city. And from his loins eventually springs this Lamech, a man who moves humanity even further on the road to destruction. His demand for ultimate revenge, for the complete annihilation of everyone if he does not get what he wants and desires, leads inexorably to the cataclysmic flood, unleashed on a world where Lamech is the model for a humanity gone decidedly evil.

Surely Donald Trump is not inherently evil, we may want to say, but just as surely he cannot represent any model of behavior that anyone might emulate, but rather represents, we hope, some aberration in the march toward hope and harmony Donald_Trump's_hair_from_behind,_2007 and a future of unity for all of the world. His constant talk of “America first” is the very antithesis of what many of us think America can be in the world created and loved by the God of us all. So, Lamech is alive and living in the White House. It is a ghastly reality that we must resist with every fiber of our lives. In this case the Bible’s mirror reflects a hideous portrait of continuous revenge and terrible loathing of all who dare question and disagree. Yet, question and disagree we must lest this awful, lying president lead us to some modern equivalent of the flood, drowning us all in a cataclysm we cannot bear to imagine.

(Images from Wikimedia Commons)

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