Catholic Commentary
The Generation of Kenan
12Kenan lived seventy years, then became the father of Mahalalel.13Kenan lived after he became the father of Mahalalel eight hundred forty years, and became the father of other sons and daughters14and all of the days of Kenan were nine hundred ten years, then he died.
Genesis 5:12–14 records that Kenan lived seventy years before fathering Mahalalel, then lived another 840 years while having other sons and daughters, dying at age 910. The passage follows the formulaic genealogical pattern of Genesis 5, emphasizing both human fruitfulness and the inescapable reality of human mortality even across centuries of life.
Nine hundred and ten years of life end with the same three words as every human death: "and he died" — a bell-toll reminding us that no span of years, however extraordinary, ransoms us from mortality.
Genesis 5:12 — "Kenan lived seventy years, then became the father of Mahalalel."
Kenan (Hebrew: qēnān) is the great-grandson of Adam, son of Enosh, and grandfather of Jared. His name is related to the root qnh ("to acquire" or "to possess") and may carry the sense of "possession" or "lamentation," though precise etymology is disputed. The number seventy — the age at which Kenan fathers Mahalalel — is itself significant within the biblical numerical imagination: seventy becomes a recurring number of fullness and completeness across the canon (seventy nations in Genesis 10, seventy elders of Israel, seventy years of exile). That Kenan reaches paternity at what is, by antediluvian standards, a relatively young age underscores the vitality of this primordial generation. His son's name, Mahalalel (mahalal-El), means "praise of God" or "God is praised" — a theophoric name that quietly interrupts the genealogical list with an act of worship, reminding the reader that each new generation is not merely biological succession but a continuation of the human vocation to glorify God.
Genesis 5:13 — "Kenan lived after he became the father of Mahalalel eight hundred forty years, and became the father of other sons and daughters."
The formulaic structure — "X lived Y years after becoming the father of Z, and had other sons and daughters" — is the deliberate literary heartbeat of Genesis 5. The Septuagint (LXX) and the Samaritan Pentateuch offer somewhat different numbers here (the LXX gives 840 years, in alignment with the Hebrew MT), and patristic interpreters engaged seriously with these numerical variants as evidence of textual transmission. The phrase "other sons and daughters" is theologically dense: it affirms the fruitfulness commanded in Genesis 1:28 ("be fruitful and multiply"), and it also suggests that the named line — Kenan → Mahalalel — is a deliberate selection from a far broader human family. God's redemptive history is always a choosing within an abundance, not the manufacture of something from nothing. The eight hundred and forty years of post-paternity life further implies that Kenan would have been alive simultaneously with many subsequent generations, including potentially Enoch himself, creating an image of interlocking lives and shared wisdom stretching across centuries — a portrait of primordial community quite unlike the isolated nuclear experience of modern life.
Genesis 5:14 — "And all of the days of Kenan were nine hundred ten years, then he died."
The closing formula — "and he died" (wayyāmot) — falls like a bell-toll after each patriarch in this chapter, and nowhere does it sound more insistent than here. Nine hundred and ten years: an unimaginable span to modern ears, yet it ends with the same two words as every other life. St. John Chrysostom noted that the repetition of "and he died" in Genesis 5 functions as a persistent sermon — no length of life, however extraordinary, exempts a son of Adam from the wages of sin first announced in Genesis 2:17 ("in the day you eat of it you shall surely die"). The total of 910 years, while remarkable, falls short of Methuselah's 969 (Gen 5:27), and it is less than Adam's 930 — a subtle suggestion, noted by some patristic readers, that longevity itself is not the supreme measure of a life. The typological reading here is important: Kenan, whose very name may suggest possession or acquisition, lives abundantly and yet cannot possess immortality. Only One will break the rhythm of "and he died."
Catholic tradition reads Genesis 5 not as mythological padding but as sacred history bearing genuine theological weight. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms that the early chapters of Genesis, while employing figurative language, "affirm other truths which daily experience and reflection confirm: man is created by God; the human person is made for happiness; and sin entered the world through man's misuse of freedom" (CCC 390). Within this frame, the genealogy of Genesis 5 — and Kenan's entry within it — is the record of a humanity living under both the blessing of fruitfulness (Gen 1:28) and the curse of mortality (Gen 3:19).
St. Augustine, in The City of God (Book XV), treats the Sethite genealogy as the lineage of the civitas Dei — the City of God moving through history in tension with the city of man. Kenan belongs to this pilgrim city: he is fruitful, he is named, he is remembered, but he is not yet the fulfillment. His life points forward.
The great Dominican theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, treating the longevity of antediluvian patriarchs in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, Q. 97), argued that these extended lifespans served the providential purpose of accumulating wisdom and populating the earth before the gift of written law — a kind of providential scaffolding for salvation history. The name of Kenan's son, Mahalalel ("God is praised"), subtly supports this: even within the genealogical register, the human person's proper response to existence is the praise of God, an insight echoed in the Catechism's declaration that "the desire for God is written in the human heart" (CCC 27). Kenan's line, culminating centuries later in Noah and then in the Messiah himself (cf. Luke 3:37, where Kenan appears in Christ's genealogy), reveals that Providence works with patience through ordinary human generations, sanctifying time itself.
At first glance, a nine-hundred-year-old man fathering children in the antediluvian world seems utterly remote. Yet these three verses carry a startling challenge for the contemporary Catholic. We live in a culture that is simultaneously obsessed with longevity — anti-aging medicine, life-extension technology, the terror of death — and yet treats human life as disposable at its most vulnerable margins. Kenan's nine hundred and ten years end with the same two words as every human life: and he died. No achievement, no biological endurance, no accumulation of "other sons and daughters" changes that verdict. The Church's consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death (CCC 2258–2262) is rooted precisely in this biblical realism: life is a gift of finite duration, entrusted to us by a God who numbers our days. For the Catholic today, these verses invite a daily memento mori — not morbid despair, but the liberating acknowledgment that our days are counted, our names are known, and we are called to praise God (Mahalalel) within whatever span we are given, trusting that we too belong to a genealogy that ends not in death but in Christ.