1 Chronicles 1:2

קֵינָן מַהֲלַלְאֵל יָרֶד׃

2 Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared.

קֵינָן "Kenan" is a name related to Cain; both names can mean “smith” or craftsman; sometimes the name is thought to indicate “settlement” or “civilization.”

מַהֲלַלְאֵל Mahalalel’s name means “Praise of God;” it’s the first name in the Bible to contain a reference to God (the -el suffix). It isn't hard to recognize the “praise” element in his name, which sounds very similar to the word hallelujah.

יָרֶד The name Jared means “descend” or “descent.” By the time he was born, Adam was over 500 years old. Seth was over 300.

While Adam's descendants were settling down and praising God, Cain's line (unmentioned in Chronicles) was also at work. About the time Jared was born, Cain's line produced it's own Lamech (Genesis 4:18-24), a man filled with venom and hatred, whose terrible “sword song” pits in the face of God and rejects God's will toward marriage (he has married more than one woman). Lamech promises to take justice into his own hands and be eleven times more vengeful that God.

   Adah and Zillah, listen to me;
      wives of Lamech, hear my words.
   I have killed a man for wounding me,
      a young man for injuring me.
   If Cain is avenged seven times,
      then Lamech seventy-seven times.

The three men in our text carried God's promise of a Savior from sin—the promise of the protevangel in Genesis 3:15—from one generation to the next. Their families put their trust in God, and waited for the time when one man would provide the one sacrifice for all mankind's sin.

That sacrifice would wait until the advent of Jesus Christ. But in the mean time, Jared was about to become the father of a man who would call the world to repentance, and remind the world that there is more to God's creation than this one world, this one universe, and this one brief lifetime.