The shortest life was followed by the longest, Methuselah begetting, at the advanced age of 187, Lamech,—strong or young man (Gesenius); overthrower, wild man (Furst); man of, prayer (Murphy),—continuing after his son's birth 782 years, and at last succumbing to the stroke of death in the 969th year of his age, the year of the Flood.
Lamech, by whom the line was carried forward, was similarly far advanced when he begat a son, at the age of 182, and called his name Noah,—"rest," from nuach, to rest (cf. Genesis 8:4),—not "The Sailor," from the Latin no, and the Greek ναῦ ς (Bohlen), but at the same time explaining it by saying, This same shall comfort—nacham, to pant, groan, Piel to comfort.
"Nuach and nacham are stems not immediately connected, but they both point back to a common root, nch, signifying to sigh, breathe, rest, lie down" (Murphy)—us concerning our work and toil of our hands.
To say that Lamech anticipated nothing more than that the youthful Noah would assist him in the cultivation of the soil (Murphy) is to put too little into, and to allege that" this prophecy his father uttered of him, as he that should be a figure of Christ in his building of the ark, and offering of sacrifice, whereby God smelled a sweet savor of rest, and said he would not curse the ground any more for man's sake, Genesis 8:21" (Ainsworth), is to extract too much from his language.
Possibly he had nothing but a dim, vague expectation of some good thing—the destruction of sinners in the Flood (Chrysostom), the use of the plough (R. Solomon), the grant of animal food (Kalisch), the invention of the arts and implements of husbandry (Sherlock, Bush)—that God was about to bestow upon his weary heritage; or at most a hope that the promise would be fulfilled in his son's day (Bonar), if not in his son himself (Calovius).
The fulfillment of that promise he connects with a recall of the penal curse which Jehovah had pronounced upon the soil. Because of the ground which the Lord—Jehovah, by whom the curse had Been pronounced (Genesis 3:17)—hath cursed.
The clause is not a Jehovistic interpolation (Bleek, Davidson, Colenso), but a proof "that the Elohistic theory is unfounded" ('Speaker's Commentary').