Genesis - Chapter 04 - Line 00103

Contemplative Summary

And Lamech said to his wives: “Adah and Zillah, listen to my voice — wives of Lamech, give ear to my word: for I have killed a man for my wound, and a youth for my bruise.”

The first human poem spoken aloud enters the text in the voice of Lamech — sharp, rhythmic, filled with power and unease. The Hebrew shma’an qoli, ha’zenah imrati — “hear my voice, give ear to my word” — summons not dialogue but declaration. This is not confession but performance, a proclamation of pain turned into identity. The words ki ish haragti lefitzi — “I killed a man for my wound” — reverberate through layers of justification and pride; the second line, vayeled lechabburati — “a youth for my bruise” — doubles the echo, amplifying the cycle of reaction. His voice vibrates with the memory of Cain, the wound becoming lineage.

Here, violence becomes self-aware — a mirror held to its own logic. Lamech names injury as cause, but his speech itself becomes contagion, the spoken vibration that keeps the field disturbed. Adah and Zillah, addressed yet silent, witness the resonance of unhealed pain turning language into weapon.

To contemplate this line is to hear the dangerous beauty of voice unbalanced — how speech can create as much as it destroys. Within every human sound lies this choice: to amplify the wound or to transform it. Even now, the echo of Lamech’s call waits in us — asking whether the next word spoken will repeat the pattern, or release it.