It is easy to understand the incident: a boy slaps and insults his elder and the man, forced by honor and perhaps self-protection, kills the young man (Gen. 4:23-24). Lamech kills the boy for striking him, and promises he will take seventy-seven-fold vengeance should anyone else dare to insult him. If the number is literal, he would kill 490 more rather than suffer the humiliation of unrequited insult. But this is not a limited number or a finite amount, as in Hebrew idiom seventy-times-seven is infinite. We have passed from the realm of quantification into the realm of pure drive. While radical evil, or the presumption the evil is in ontological competition with the good, is clearly a lie, Lamech demonstrates that this lie can be enacted.
Cain needs God to protect him, but Lamech takes up the work of God, even imitating and going beyond God in his own protection: seventy times more than the divine vengeance God promises for Cain. It is divine-like righteous indignation he serves, not God’s, but the obscene superego. As Paul and Freud describe, there is a split in the ego in which the superego is representative of the law, authority, God, but which is taken up into the self. This is not exactly self-worship, as what is served is death-dealing, fearful, shameful, and punishing in the experience. It is the sense in which one never feels adequate, never enough, never complete, and there is continual striving to achieve adequacy, life, fullness of being. This is a result of the self-diminishing superego or unconscious sense of having to gain life through serving the father, the law, or the masochistic orientation to death. It is a drive toward death, not only in murder but in the pursuit of life through death. Honor is gained through revenge, life is established through the power of death. In presuming a divine-like vengeance Lamech would establish justice, he will be justice, and he will spend himself in absolute servitude to the violence that has gripped him. Where Cain feared he would be avenged for Abel’s murder, Lamech is willing to spend his life in service of vengeance, the punishing law he would enact. He would be the law, the punisher, the judge, and the exactor of righteousness. Clearly the realm in which he is keeping account is symbolic, and the law he serves is larger than himself. What will come to be called “the law of sin and death” does not serve life but death. Soon the entire earth will take up and serve the law of Lamech: “Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence” (Gen. 6:11).
Lamech has assurance and even pride (perhaps religious pride), that he has done what was necessary, so he pens a little poem for his wives explaining his heroism (he has taken two wives, clearly an innovator in the realm of passion). In his poetic flourish he waxes hyperbolic about the impact of the slap, describing it as a “wound.” In the flesh a slap may not amount to much, but in the symbolic world of wounded pride and shame, a slap is a wound to the ego. The boy may as well have severed a limb, as Lamech is wounded spiritually and personally. No matter the age of the boy, as the greater his youth the greater the wound to Lamech’s dignity, and the greater the humiliation if the price of this offence is not exacted. This sort of evil deserves death or annihilation in payment.
Lamech may be describing a double homicide, as he has killed both a man and a boy, but more than likely it is the boys slap, that in his rhetorical flourish has become a wound, and the boy takes on an ominous manliness. This boy-man cannot simply be slapped in return, as the wound to Lamech is greater than the blow to the flesh. It has taken on symbolic weight; thus Lamech’s call for infinite revenge and the immediate death of the boy, signals passage into the symbolic. The symbolic is the realm of death drive, no longer subject to or explainable by the finite. Something as delimiting as “an eye for an eye” or “a tooth for a tooth” is only for the finite and fleshly, but with Lamech the wound is clearly spiritual. The boy has offended one of divine-like status and for an infinite offense an infinite payment is necessary. The superego is an all-consuming deity, and no hint of wounded pride can go unpunished, and no punishment will ultimately satisfy.
Clearly there is delusion at work in Lamech’s presumption of divine dignity and revenge (the lie of the serpent continues). Gaining God-like status by being interpolated into the law, being the law, enacting justice, is “life” through the law. “Life” is the wrong word, as with the letter of the law, there is an incapacity for dying (a deadness not subject to mortality) taken up in identity through the symbolic order. The imagined self (the ego) is striving for life (dignity, pride, or substance). The struggle of Lamech to eternally revenge his wounded dignity, is on the order of the struggle Paul describes as the self-antagonistic body of death.
The split objectifies the self, which is the psychological reality of Adam and Eve, in shame seeing themselves through the eyes of another. In the experience of shame, the objectified self is at once alienated (from God and self) and the struggle is pursuit of life (self) in the midst of shame and death. The symbolic, the law, the knowledge of good and evil, or simply language, is the medium of pursuit. Honor and pride, in the case of Lamech, constitute the symbolic (law), or superego (a function and creation of this law) he serves. Though it seems we are dealing in the realm of morality, the entire engagement is one of immorality, antagonism, and aggression. While it is obviously aggression against the other, the boy, it is also an inward violence turned outward (masochism turned outward in sadism). The price of serving this law is a life oriented to death.
As bizarre as the story of Lamech might be, it rings true with human experience of shame, anger, and revenge. While we may not want to own up to it, the story is not unfamiliar. On the other hand, what seems impossible, is Jesus’ counter to the story of Lamech: “Then Peter came and said to Him, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven’” (Matt. 18:21-22). Jesus poses the opposite, and seemingly incomprehensible ideal of infinite forgiveness, of forgiving seventy-seven-fold. Combined with his recommendations in the Sermon on the Mount, to love the enemy (Matt. 5:44), to turn the other cheek (Matt. 5:39), to joyfully suffer persecution (Matt. 5:11-12), this all seems highly implausible. The act of turning the other cheek alone, given the history following in the wake of Lamech’s revenge, poses a profound countermeasure to the cycles of revenge.
The two alternative actions arise from two different worlds and experiential resources. The pure evil of Lamech is posed against the pure goodness, grace and mercy of God in Jesus’ account. Lamech’s infinite revenge is a lying form of radical evil (an absolute evil) which experientially is the resource of murder or murderous anger. Jesus counters the infinite negative with the (actually existing) infinite God he incarnates. The lying infinite may seem more within our reach and realm of experience. Lamech’s revenge is more or less normalized in continuous war and violence of the world and inward struggle with pride and shame, while Jesus’ command of infinite forgiveness seems beyond human capacity. Jesus’ infinite forgiveness calls, not on the lying transcendence of the law (which transcends life only in its deadness) but His is a living transcendence and resource. Lamech’s infinite revenge or radical evil, is a lying impossibility but it is a lie that poses itself in our existential experience of unquenchable anger and shame. What we learn in Christ is that the power of evil can be broken, not by exhausting human effort, but through participation in the divine life.
As in the Lord’s prayer forgiveness is divine, and to be perfect like the heavenly Father is to forgive as He forgives (Matt. 5:48). Forgiveness is limitless in that it never capitulates to revenge, but also because it is a participation in God’s perfection (Matt. 5:48). God’s love and mercy are boundless and directly counter the negative infinity of evil. God is an infinite resource for goodness made available in Christ, as alien as this goodness may seem: “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust” (2 Pet. 1:3–4). Christ provides the existential and experiential reality of participating in God, restoring the divine image through becoming partakers of the divine nature. In this manner we escape the seemingly infinite lust that consumed Lamech.
Lamech stands at the head of long traditions of manly honor, machismo masculinity, knightly sensibilities, samurai spirit, laying down one’s life in violence, in which blood must be spilt that honor be restored. Jesus poses the opposite, and seemingly incomprehensible ideal, of forgiving seventy-seven-fold and then makes this seeming impossibility a reality through pouring out his life in his disciples.