One of Adam’s very first actions involved naming all of the different creatures. Parashat Bereishit relates: “And the LORD God formed out of the earth all the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that would be its name. And the man gave names to all the cattle and to the birds of the sky and to all the wild beasts” (Bereishit 2:19-20). According to these verses, naming the animals was not merely a technical matter, rather those names defined each one of the animals. The animals’ names expressed the essence of what that animal was. A few chapters before language becomes a stumbling block with the story of the Tower of Babel, we find that questions of language and name-calling are key issues.
In his Guide to the Perplexed, Maimonides discusses the matter of names and describes the complexity of the Hebrew language in this area. Maimonides points out that two disparate things may share a single name, even though they are not related in any way. Take, for example, the Hebrew word “yad” that is a homonym, in that it means both a human hand and a memorial stone (e.g., Yad VaShem). Another class would be words that encompass a general category. The Hebrew word “rahit” (furniture), relates to a large number of objects that are all different. There are also words that are borrowed to create metaphors, so the word shu’al (fox) names an animal, but also may be used to describe human characteristics. In describing these word usages, Maimonides comments that fools do not recognize these differences and assume that there is a single meaning to the word. Precision in language is central to communication, but even more central to fully understanding the world, to understanding the Torah and the words of the prophets, and even the direction of human events.
Chapter 4 of Sefer Breishit closes with the birth of Shet and his being named. “Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, meaning: God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel, for Cain had killed him.” This is followed by a strange report of the child born to Shet: “And to Seth, in turn, a son was born, and he named him Enosh. It was then (huhal) that men began to invoke the LORD by name.”
What is the meaning of “invoking the LORD by name”?
Rashbam understands the word “huhal” to mean that that was when they began to do so, i.e., previously it had not been done. It was during the period of Enosh – the third generation of humankind – that people began to turn to God in prayer, that is, to use their ability to speak to stand before God. Rashbam mentions specifically that people prayed because of their troubles, but it is also possible that at this moment in history there was a sense of separation from God – as evidenced in the name Enosh, meaning “man” – that created a need for people to pray to Him.
R. Yosef Bekhor-Shor offers an alternative approach, writing that: They began to combine the Heavenly Name with their own, as we find with names such as Mehuya-el, Methusa-el and Mahalal-el. This suggests that man makes use of his children’s names to express a sense of partnership with God in the act of creation by means of giving birth. The Torah offers a place of honor to the tradition of expressing this connection with God in the insertion of His Name in those of man’s children.
In contrast with these positive understandings of the verse “It was then (huhal) that men began to invoke the LORD by name,” Rashi suggests that the word “huhal” shares the root of “hulin,” i.e., profane matters. This approach, which is based on rabbinic midrashim, rejects the suggestion that we are celebrating new beginnings, and suggests that we are now moving towards a coarse and profane world. The Torah pauses to inform us that in the generation of Enosh, people “began calling the names of men and the names of idols after the name of the Holy One, blessed be He — making them the objects of idolatrous worship and calling them Deities.”
Bereishit Rabbah points out that we find three places where the root heh-het-lamed indicates rebellion. The Mekhiltah further describes the punishment meted out in response to this “invoking the LORD by name.”
When did they call in His Name? In the days of Enosh, son of Shet.
As Scripture relates: “It was then (huhal) that men began to invoke the LORD by name.”
At that moment, the oceans rose up and covered one-third of the world.
The Omnipresent said to them: You have performed a new act, calling yourselves by My Name,
I, too, will perform a new act, and will call Myself by My Name, as is said: “Who summons the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the earth— His name is the LORD!” (Amos 5:8).
(Mekhilta d’Rashbi, Yitro, Parsha 6)
According to this midrash, in retaliation for man’s flooding the world with gods and idol worship, God floods the world with the ocean waters. In Bereishit Rabbah, this is described as a slow, incremental process, with God raising the sea level each time He is angered by the actions of man, until finally the Flood is brought upon them.
We can see a connection between the sin and the punishment. Those midrashim describe a process of profaning God’s Name during the generation of Enosh. During that period, the names of God and man became mixed together. This is not to suggest that man claimed to be God – although later, at the Tower of Babel, God will be forced to confuse man’s language because they will challenge His authority – nevertheless, creating confusion between God’s Name and names of man is a terrible sin. It appears that the seeds of the rebellion against God are planted here, in the language games being played – in the parallel, shared names used by man.
Language connections create thought patterns that threaten the clear divisions that God established during Creation. These include fundamental distinctions between sacred and profane, between what is above and what is below, between sea and land, between man and animal. Calling different things by general, all-encompassing names acts as a conceptual flood – everything appears to be the same, there are no differences or distinctions. And, in response, the world is flooded by the oceans.