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The Law of Lamech and Larry David

“Forget God’s will, let’s do what we like, but cross me at your peril.”

Larry David was co-creator and head writer for the first seven seasons of the legendary Seinfeld sitcom. Since 1999 he has produced and played himself in twelve intermittent seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm. There he appears as a real-life George Costanza, the Seinfeld character which he wrote to mirror his own egotism and neuroses.

On a recent long-haul flight I watched nearly three episodes of Enthusiasm, all that I could stomach and enough to get the basic idea. What stood out like a belch in a library was the show’s moral framework. In one episode when a husband and wife fail to conceive they together solicit their neighbour, played by Vince Vaughn, to impregnate her. As Vaughn relates this story his friends express mild surprise and a tinge of jealousy, but no ethical repugnance.

Yet side by side with this moral laissez faire, rude and ferocious personal indignation abounds. When a client refuses to pay David for breach of contract, when an acquaintance asks him alone not to use her pet-name, when Siri fails to understand his directions, these personal affronts outrage him.

We are shown exactly this species of ethical monstrosity within the first few pages of the Bible.

Lamech was a fifth-generation descendent of Cain. His life and moral framework is sketched in a few lines in the fourth chapter of Genesis:

Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah. . . . Lamech said to his wives,

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.

Note that Lamech is the first recorded polygamist. Though God had established marriage to be monogamous – “the two shall become one flesh” – Lamech takes two wives.

Note next Lamech’s murderous rejection of lex talionis, the law of equivalent retribution. When a young man wounds him he repays him by killing him.

He then aggravates the crime by crowing about it to his wives in the so-called “Song of the Sword.” How they must have enjoyed his singing. If God had threatened seven-fold vengeance to anyone who killed Cain, Lamech will outdo God by executing seventy-seven-fold vengeance upon anyone who harms him.

Both Lamech and Larry David are consummate artists. Hebrew Scholar Robert Stallman describes how the Song of the Sword begins in good form and ends in intentionally arresting disintegration. David’s sitcoms introduce and interweave multiple themes and characters which all resolve in perfect cadences. In both cases the genius of the works’ forms serves to highlights the dystopia which they convey. They offer us, as Luther said of Erasmus’s Freedom of the Will, “dung on a golden plate.”

The analyses of Calvin, Baur, and Stallman point to the violence and ferocity of Lamech’s song. Tremper Longman draws attention to its “disproportionate justice”, Kenneth Mathews to its “disparagement of human life”, Laurence Turner to its manifestation of “the disorder of human existence”, and Marilynne Robinson to its “vindication of vengeance.”

While all true, Lamech’s song serves more fundamentally to represent humanity’s post-Fall moral framework: “Forget God’s will, let’s do what we like, but cross me at your peril” – the same execrable ethic presented by Larry David’s sitcom.

We were created by God in his image to love and obey him. We were not to write our own laws, which is what eating from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil entailed. We were to live by God’s laws which reflect God’s nature. This would leave us shameless, fearless, blissful.

Lamech and Larry David put God out of the frame. They write their own moral code, the fruit of their fallen nature. They will allow themselves and others anything, but they will viciously retaliate for any affront to their person.

This God-less system is as stable as hydrogen and oxygen. When two self-regulated beings are straining to fulfil their own suite of desires and come into contact, the tiniest spark will detonate them. In the end the strongest must prevail, which is the sinister side to Lamech and David’s vicious and oblivious egocentrism. When we displace God’s law with our own law, the law of the jungle prevails. The young man that Lamech murdered was, after Abel, just the second recorded victim of fallen humanity’s autonomy. The earth became “corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.” Billions more victims have suffered since.

There is nonetheless something grotesquely humorous about Lamech and what Delitzsch called his “Titanic arrogance.” The incongruity of his hypersensitivity to the personal affronts of others, expressed in a repulsively murderous and bragging ditty sung to the very two women who are the evidence of his depravity and sexual licentiousness, evokes a grim smile. This too is the essence of Larry David’s humour: the incongruity of his own repulsive egotism, stinginess, libertinism, and misanthropy, coupled with his hair-trigger wrath for the faux pas of others.

What heightens the humour is David’s gnawing inner rage. The paradox of wealth, fame, and the freedom to do as he pleases lives side-by-side with flawless unhappiness. In fact, he is wretched precisely because he lives as he pleases.

In Genesis, Lamech the bigamist, violent and ridiculous, is presented as the fruit of the Fall and the natural progeny of Cain. He is a waypoint on the pathway of humanity’s descent and the impending Deluge. And he points forward to the immediate need for the lex talionis of Sinai: “But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”

But if Moses’ law served to teach that all human beings bear the imago dei no matter their age, wealth, health, or position, and if it has served ever since to restrain excessive vengeance, it was still only a stepping stone toward a transcendentally greater ethic, the command to forgive. In what appears to be a direct denunciation and rectification of Lamech’s threat of seventy-seven-fold vengeance Jesus demands that his disciples forgive “not seven times, but seventy-seven times.”

For Christ’s disciples, personal vengeance must be displaced by interminable forgiveness. For that is what they have received. Thus, Paul urged the Ephesian church to “be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”

Lamech and Larry David are sick jokes, a black mirror to our fallen world. In them we may see ourselves, the rejectors of God’s good law and the authors of our own morality. For sin is not just breaking the rules, it is making the rules. Man acts as if he were the creator of his own moral order.

What is our moral order? “Forget God, do what you please, but offend or oppose me at your peril.” We see this order in every violent blow, every angry outburst, every bitter wish for the harm of the other.

We dreamt that autonomy and self-protection would reap happiness. But amidst Enthusiasm’s absurdity and moral wreckage, Larry David shows us in himself the abysmal gnawing misery of this order.

The Torah corrects our broken ethic and teaches us to love our neighbour and administer justice fairly. But the Torah could never release our hearts from the slavery of autonomy, or forgive us for having, like Pilate’s soldiers, spat into the face of God.

Basil of Caesarea said that “the sin of Lamech requires for its cure not a Flood, but him who himself takes away the sin of the world.” The despised Christ has done what the Torah could never do.

Praise God, as John knew, that he “loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood.” He “was crushed for our iniquities” and suffered the just penalty for our cosmic treason. He has given us a new beginning, “the new creation has come, the old has gone, the new is here!” He has commanded us and freed us to forgive those who have trespassed against us.

Jesus Christ takes Lamechs and Larry Davids and frees them from wretched autolegislation and egotism, that they may as sons and daughters rejoice in “the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake.”

With Christ we are loved, forgiven, reordered, and made happy.

– Campbell Markham