King James Bible
"And Lamech said unto his wives, Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt."
Lamech summons his wives with emphatic repetition, demanding their attention through parallel commands. This formal, poetic address marks the first recorded instance of polygamy in Scripture and introduces what appears to be humanity's earliest preserved poem—a boastful song of violence. Lamech boasts of killing someone who merely wounded him, revealing an escalation of violence beyond Cain's murder. The Hebrew parallelism likely refers to one victim described two ways, and his disproportionate retaliation shows how sin's corruption has intensified through the generations since Eden.