Adam | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

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Adam and Eve Summary

Adam

ADAM is the designation and name of the first human creature in the creation narratives found in the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament). The word adam may refer to the fact that this being was an "earthling" formed from the red-hued clay of the earth (in Hebrew, adom means "red," adamah means "earth"). Significantly, this latter report is found only in Genesis 2:7, where the creator god enlivens him by blowing into his nostrils the breath of life. Here the first being is clearly a lone male, since the female was not yet formed from one of his ribs to be his helpmate (ʿezer ke-negdo; Gn. 2:21–23). In the earlier textual account of Genesis 1:1–24a, which is generally considered to be a later version than that found in Genesis 2:4b–25, God first consults with his divine retinue and then makes an adam in his own "form and image": "in the form of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gn. 1:27). If the second clause is not simply a later qualification of a simultaneous creation of a male and a female both known as adam (see also Gn. 5:1), then we may have a trace of the creation of a primordial androgyne.

Later ancient traditions responded to this version by speculating that the original unity was subsequently separated and that marriage is a social restitution of this polarity. Medieval Jewish Qabbalah, which took the expression "in the image of God" with the utmost seriousness, projected a vision of an adam qadmon, or "primordial Adam," as one of the configurations by which the emanation of divine potencies that constituted the simultaneous self-revelation of God and his creation could be imagined. And because Adam is both male and female according to scriptural authority, the qabbalists variously refer to a feminine aspect of the godhead that, like the feminine of the human world, must be reintegrated with its masculine counterpart through religious action and contemplation. Such a straight anthropomorphic reading of Genesis 1:27 was often rejected by religious philosophers especially (both Jewish and Christian), and the language of scripture was interpreted to indicate that the quality which makes the human similar to the divine is the intellect or will. Various intermediate positions have been held, and even some modern Semiticists have preferred to understand the phrase "image of God" metaphorically; that is, as referring to man as a divine "viceroy" (in the light of an Akkadian expression), and this in disregard of clearly opposing testimony in both Mesopotamian creation texts (like Enuma elish) and biblical language itself (cf. Gn. 5:1–3).

According to the first scriptural narrative, this adam was the crown of creation. Of his creation alone was the phrase "very good" used by God (Gn. 1:30f.). Moreover, this being was commissioned to rule over the nonhuman creations of the earth as a faithful steward (Gn. 1:29–2:9). Out of regard for the life under his domain, this being was to be a vegetarian. In the second version (where the specifying designation ha-adam, "the Adam," predominates; cf. Gn. 2:7–4:1), the creature is put into a divine garden as its caretaker and told not to eat of two trees—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life, that is, the two sources of knowledge and being—under pain of death (Gn. 2:15–17). This interdict is subsequently broken, with the result that death, pain of childbirth, and a blemished natural world were decreed for humankind (Gn. 3:14–19).

This primordial fault, which furthermore resulted in the banishment of Adam and his companion from the garden (Gn. 3:22–24), and the subsequent propagation of the human species as such (Gn. 4:1ff.), has been variously treated. The dominant rabbinic tradition is that the sin of Adam resulted in mortality for humankind and did not constitute a qualitative change in the nature of the species—it was not now set under the sign of sin as it was in the main Christian tradition, beginning with Paul and exemplified in the theologies of Augustine and John Calvin. For Christian theology, the innate corruption of human nature that resulted from Adam's fall was restored by the atoning death of a new Adam, Jesus (cf. 1 Cor. 15:22). In one Christian tradition, the redemptive blood of Christ flowed onto the grave of Adam, who was buried under Calvary in the Holy Sepulcher. The typologizing of Adam in Jewish tradition often focused on him as the prototype of humankind, and so the episode in Eden was read as exemplary or allegorical of the human condition and the propensity to sin. In this light, various spiritual, moral, or even legal consequences were also drawn, particularly with respect to the unity of the human race deriving from this "one father"—a race formed, according to one legend, from different colored clays found throughout the earth. In addition, mystics, philosophical contemplatives, and Gnostics of all times saw in the life of Adam a pattern for their own religious quest of life—as, for example, the idea that the world of the first Adam was one of heavenly luminosity, subsequently diminished; the idea that Adam was originally a spiritual being, subsequently transformed into a being of flesh—his body became his "garments of shame"; or even the idea that Adam in Eden was originally sunk in deep contemplation of the divine essence but that he subsequently became distracted, with the result that he became the prisoner of the phenomenal world. For many of these traditions, the spiritual ideal was to retrieve the lost spiritual or mystical harmony Adam originally had with God and all being.

Apocryphal books about Adam and his life were produced in late antiquity and in the Middle Ages, and the theme was also quite popular in Jewish and Christian iconography, in medieval morality plays, and in Renaissance art and literature. Well known among the latter is John Milton's Paradise Lost, illustrated by John Dryden. Michelangelo's great Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel, the Edenic world in the imagination of the modern painter Marc Chagall, and the agonies of loss, guilt, and punishment seen in the works of Franz Kafka demonstrate the continuing power of the theme of Adam's expulsion from Eden.