Genesis - Chapter 04 - Line 00106

Contemplative Summary

And to Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. Then it was begun to call upon the name of YHWH.

The rhythm of birth continues, but something shifts — from lineage to invocation, from flesh to sound. The Hebrew huchal liqro beshem YHWH — “then it was begun to call upon the name of YHWH” — marks the first tremor of sacred speech in the human field. Enosh, whose name means “mortal,” embodies awareness of fragility; through him, vulnerability itself becomes the opening through which the divine is named. What began as survival now turns toward reverence — the first communal breath rising into the unseen.

Yet the word huchal carries ambiguity: it may mean “it was begun,” or “it was profaned.” In that tension lives the truth of invocation — that every naming risks distortion, every attempt to hold the Infinite within syllables both reveals and veils. Still, the act itself transforms silence into dialogue, awakening the possibility of relationship between the finite and the boundless.

To contemplate this line is to stand at the origin of prayer — where voice first trembles into the sacred, where mortality learns to speak to mystery. Every time we name what is beyond naming, we continue this beginning: fragile, reverent, and alive with the sound of becoming.