What's in a Name?

Finding the good in boring genealogies

Read or Listen: Genesis 5

You may not think of studying a genealogy as an important part of learning a trade, but there’s a few important things we can learn from this chapter that most folks only skim. We don’t have much immediate use for lists of ancestors in our day - knowing your mother’s maiden name is about the only fact that someone might keep tucked away in our memory, since it’s useful for security questions. So what can we learn from studying this list of names? 

For one thing, everyone only has one name. The names were not arbitrary labels like we have now, but they meant something - something about the time in which that child was born, or about his characteristics. If you open up a tool box, your tools have names as well. If it’s new enough to be named in English, some of them still make sense - like “screw-driver”.