What Does Genesis 5:11 Mean?
And all the days of Enosh were nine hundred and five years, and he died.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and he died.THE KEY
Even 905 years do not make a life exempt from death.
THE MEANING
The verse holds a very long life within a finite measure: Enos reaches 905 years, and then he dies. Your years, however many, remain within that same human boundary.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that enough years can make a life exempt from death.
THE ROOT
וַיָּמָת
wayyāmōṯ
GROWS FROM
מות
m-w-t
To die; death.
“died” in this verse is wayyāmōṯ. The root connects the act of dying with death itself, a link English can make seem like a single closing event. The genealogy’s repeated refrain places extraordinary length and ordinary human mortality under the same ending.
ALSO GROWS
mûṯ: To die.
מוּת
The root verb names the event that closes Enos’s counted years.
māweṯ: Death.
מָוֶת
The related noun makes explicit the condition toward which “he died” points.
mēṯ: Dead; a dead person.
מֵת
This form shows the root also names the state that follows the act.
THE PATTERN
A long measure of life remains bounded by death.
And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.The days of our years, in them, are seventy years, or with strength eighty years; yet their span is toil and emptiness, for it is sheared away swiftly, and we take wing.And as it is laid up for people to die once, and after this, judgment.THE THREAD
And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.Adam’s “died” comes from the same Hebrew root מות (m-w-t, to die) as Enos’s. The repeated ending makes each life in the genealogy part of one shared human measure.
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