1. This is the book. The Hebrew sefer, which some render as “record,” is anything written down, presumably in the form of a scroll. In any case, the introductory formula clearly announces this as a separate document.

Adam. The lack of a definite article would seem to indicate that the term is being used as a proper name. But the two subsequent occurrences of ʾadam, here and in the next verse, equally lack the definite article and yet clearly refer to “the human creature” or “humankind.” God’s calling “them” by the name ʾadam (verse 2) is also an explicit indication that the term is not exclusively masculine, and so it is misleading to render it as “man.”

3. in his likeness by his image. Adam, then, replicates God’s making of the human being (with the order of “likeness” and “image” reversed) in his own act of procreation.

22. And Enoch walked with God. This cryptic verse has generated mountains of speculative commentary, not to speak of two whole books of the Apocrypha. The reflexive form of the verb “to walk” that occurs here is the same form used for God’s walking about in the Garden. Instead of the flat report of death, as in the case of the other antediluvians, the euphemism “was no more” (literally “was not”), which is also applied to Joseph, merely supposed by his brothers to be dead, is used. “Walked with” surely implies some sort of special intimate relationship with God, but what that might be is anyone’s guess. This is one of several instances in the early chapters of Genesis of a teasing vestige of a tradition for which the context is lost. Enoch is the seventh generation from Adam, and some scholars have seen an instructive analogy in a Mesopotamian list of kings before the Deluge, in which the seventh antediluvian king, a certain Enmeduranki, is taken up to sit before the gods Shamash and Adad, and is granted preternatural wisdom. Shamash is the sun god, and the biblical Enoch lives as many years as the days of the solar year.

29. This one will console us. As usual, the sound-play on the name Noah, which lacks the final mem of the word for “console,” naḥem, is loose phonetic association. What the nature of the consolation might be is a cloudier issue. Rashi’s proposal that Noah was the inventor of the plow has scant support in the subsequent text. Others, more plausibly, have linked the consolation with Noah’s role as the first cultivator of the vine. The idea that wine provides the poor man respite from his drudgery (see Proverbs 31:6–7) is common enough in the biblical world. Wine, then, might have been thought of as a palliative to the curse of hard labor, which is also the curse of the soil: the language of Genesis 3:17–18 is explicitly echoed here.

the pain of our hands’ work. Most translations render this as “our toil, our work,” or something equivalent. But the second term, ʿitsavon, does not mean “labor” but rather “pain,” and is the crucial word at the heart of Adam’s curse, and Eve’s. Given that allusion, the two terms in the Hebrew—which reads literally, “our work and the pain of our hands”—are surely to be construed as a hendiadys, a pair of terms for a single concept indicating “painful labor.” It should be noted that the “work of our hands” is a common biblical collocation while “pain of our hands” occurs only here, evidently under the gravitational pull of “work” with which it is paired as a compound idiom. Equally noteworthy is that the word ʿitsavon appears only three times in the Bible (other nominal forms of the root being relatively common)—first for Eve, then for Adam, and now for Noah.