One of the games that people play is “Ain’t It Awful,” according to psychiatrist Eric Berne. His book Games People Play was still popular when I began training in counseling and psychotherapy in 1982.

Therapists have to manage clients to prevent them from using sessions to play “Ain’t It Awful” rather than working to improve difficult situations and implement changes. You’ve played Ain’t It Awful. We all have. Most of us, unless we work for ourselves, play Ain’t It Awful with co-workers, commiserating about stupid decisions management made at work.

I enjoy Ain’t It Awful when I am talking and hate the game when I am the listener. I know it’s not fair, but it’s the truth. I have a limited capacity for listening to people speak hatefully about anyone or anything.

I can’t listen to most talk radio because it is all hate all the time. I certainly can’t stand to read much hateful talk. So it was a bit of a problem when I was reading Genesis chapter 4 today and came to the part about Lamech.

Lamech was apparently the first man in the Bible to practice polygamy. The Bible does not call him out for making his life more complicated than any husband before him, so I won’t either, but I did not like Lamech as soon as he opened his mouth.

Lamech said to his wives:

“Adah and Zillah, hear my voice;

you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say:

I have killed a man for wounding me,

a young man for striking me.

If Cain is avenged sevenfold,

truly Lamech seventy-sevenfold” (Genesis 4:23-24).

Maybe no one else would listen to him, so Lamech called for his wives to listen. Then he bragged how he killed a young man for wounding him. He ignored the law of retaliation that limited vengeance to life for life, wound for wound, bruise for bruise (Exodus 21:23-25). He killed a man for wounding him. He claimed he was more important than his ancestor Cain whom God protected from would-be killers.

The Bible is pretty consistent about ending stories about bad guys with their being killed, but there is not another word about Lamech after he finishes bragging to his wives. I have accepted that hateful people get by with a lot nowadays, but it disturbed me that the Bible had nothing to say about Lamech’s sin. But then I dug a little deeper and learned that it did.

Lamech was born in the seventh generation after Adam in the line of Cain. His being number 7 may signify the completion of the line of Cain, which God wiped out in the flood because of their pervasive hatefulness. Noah, who survived the flood with his family, was from the line of Seth, the third son born to Adam and Eve. Lamech was doomed while he was bragging and the Bible did not even bother to spell it out.