Genesis Chapter 5

Seth’s line carries God’s image and promise through ten generations, ruled by death, broken by Enoch’s translation, and closing in hope with Noah.

Genesis 5:1-2

Creation Recalled

Genesis 5:3-5

Adam: Image Passed On, Death Fulfilled

Genesis 5:6-20

Seth to Jared: The Line Continues

Genesis 5:21-24

Enoch Walks with God

Genesis 5:25-32

Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah

Genesis 5:1

“This is the book of the generations of Adam” marks a fresh beginning in Genesis. The heading echoes 2:4, where the generations of the heavens and the earth were introduced, and it is the only such heading in the book described as a “book,” a written record. Cain’s descendants were listed in 4:17–24 without any ages or years; now the line through which the promise will run receives a full, dated account. The difference in treatment is itself a statement about which family history matters for the purpose of God.

Before tracing a single descendant, the verse goes back to the source: “In the day that God created man.” Every other genealogy in Scripture begins with someone who was born. This one begins with a man who was made. Adam had no father but God, which is why Luke, reading the line from the other end, closes his genealogy of Jesus with the words “which was the son of God” (Luke 3:38). The human story is anchored in a deliberate act of the Creator, not in an unknown past.

“In the likeness of God made he him” repeats the dignity of Genesis 1:26–27 at a point where the narrative has already shown disobedience, expulsion from the garden, and a brother’s murder. The repetition is pointed. Sin had marred humanity, yet it had not cancelled what God made humans to be. Later Scripture still treats every person as bearing God’s likeness (Genesis 9:6; James 3:9), and that conviction stands at the head of a record dominated by death.

The Greek Old Testament renders the heading with the phrase that opens Matthew’s Gospel: “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ” (Matthew 1:1). The first book of generations follows the descendants of a created man into the grave. The second traces the ancestry of the Son, who is Himself “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15) and in whom the likeness lost in Adam is restored.

Study Links

Cross References

Genesis 2:4Genesis 1:26-27

Word / Phrase Notes

סֵפֶר תּוֹלְדֹת אָדָם (sefer toledot ’adam) — the book of the generations of Adam

Sefer refers to any written document, whether a scroll, a tablet, or even a short legal deed such as a bill of divorce. Toledot comes from the verb for begetting and denotes what was produced from someone, here Adam’s descendants. In Genesis the formula introduces the account that follows rather than summarizing what precedes. The Greek translation, biblos geneseōs, is the phrase Matthew uses to open his record of Jesus’ ancestry.

Genesis 2:4

בִּדְמוּת אֱלֹהִים (bidmut ’elohim) — in the likeness of God

Genesis 1:26 used two terms, image and likeness; this summary uses only demut, likeness, which stresses resemblance or correspondence. The two words overlap in meaning and should not be pressed into separate parts of human nature. The point is that humanity was made to reflect its Maker, and the next verse shows that likeness being carried forward.

Genesis 1:26Genesis 9:6