Adam begets Seth, in his own likeness
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ἔζησεν δὲ Ἀδὰμ διακόσια καὶ τριάκοντα ἔτη, καὶ ἐγέννησεν κατὰ τὴν εἰκόνα αὐτοῦ καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἰδέαν αὐτοῦ· καὶ ἐπωνόμασεν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Σήθ.
The genealogy’s formula now begins in earnest, and it will repeat, with variations, nine more times: so many years lived, a son begotten, so many years more, other sons and daughters, and death. Here at its first instance the formula pauses to make its point explicit: Adam begets “according to his own image and according to his own likeness” (κατὰ τὴν εἰκόνα αὐτοῦ καὶ κατὰ τὴν ἰδέαν αὐτοῦ), deliberately echoing v.1’s “according to the image of God” (κατ’ εἰκόνα θεοῦ). The divine pattern stamped on humankind at creation is now, itself, transmitted onward, from father to son — the first human inheritance the text names is not property but likeness itself. This general note about the LXX’s numbers is worth flagging here, at the first figure given: across this chapter, the Greek text’s year-counts for “when he begot his son” and “years he lived after” are well known to diverge from the parallel figures preserved in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, while (for most patriarchs, not all) summing to a similar or identical total lifespan — one of the oldest and most studied differences between the Greek and Hebrew Bibles’ chronologies of the world before the Flood.
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