Adam


Adam is the name given in Genesis 1–5 to the first human. Adam is the first human being aware of God, and features as such in various belief systems.
According to Christianity, Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden by eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This action introduced death and sin into the world. This sinful nature infected all his descendants, and led humanity to be expelled from the Garden. Only through the crucifixion of Jesus, humanity can be redeemed.
In Islam, Adam is considered Khalifa on earth. This is understood to mean either that he is God's deputy, the initiation of a new cycle of sentient life on earth, or both. Similar to the Biblical account, the Quran has Adam placed in a garden where he sins by taking from the Tree of Immortality, so loses his abode in the garden. When Adam repents from his sin, he is forgiven by God. This is seen as a guidance for human-life, who sin, become aware of their mistake, and repent.
In Gnostic belief systems, the bodily creation of Adam is viewed in a negative light. Due to the underlying demonization of matter, Gnostic cosmologies depict the body as a form of prison of Adam's soul. This soul would have been transferred by Sophia onto the creator of the material world, who in turn is tricked into blowing the soul into a body.

In Mythology

The character existed in Canaanite mythology and the Ugaritic texts. He is portrayed as the firstborn son of El, being a literal God akin to Enki, who lived in the Garden of the gods, one such God was called Hauron, who is portrayed as the first sinner and was demoted to being a shedim, being thrown down Mount Ararat, where the gods resided. In revenge, he transformed into a Serpent to poison the Tree of life, which Adam is sent down to defend, before being bitten, ultimately losing his immortality.
Several Ugaritic epithets of Hauron were also found to be identical to the Arabic designation for the Devil, Iblis in Islam.

Composition of the Adam narrative

In Genesis, the name "Adam" is given to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, the Hebrew word adam is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as "humankind". tells of God's creation of the world and its creatures, including the Hebrew word adam, meaning humankind. In God forms "Adam", this time meaning a single male human, out of "the dust of the ground", places him in the Garden of Eden, and forms a woman, Eve, as his companion. In Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and God condemns Adam to labour on the earth for his food and to return to it on his death. deals with the birth of Adam's sons, and lists his descendants from Seth to Noah.
In the entire Hebrew Bible, Adam appears only in chapters 1–5 of the Book of Genesis, with the exception of a mention at the beginning of the Books of Chronicles where, as in Genesis, he heads the list of Israel's ancestors. The majority view among scholars is that the final text of Genesis dates from the Persian period, but the absence of all the other characters and incidents mentioned in chapters 1–11 of Genesis from the rest of the Hebrew Bible has led a sizeable minority to the conclusion that these chapters were composed much later than those that follow, possibly in the 3rd century BCE.

Usage

Mankind—human being—male individual

The Bible uses the word in all of its senses: collectively, individually, gender nonspecific, and male. In Genesis 1:27 "adam" is used in the collective sense, and the interplay between the individual "Adam" and the collective "humankind" is a main literary component to the events that occur in the Garden of Eden, the ambiguous meanings embedded throughout the moral, sexual, and spiritual terms of the narrative reflecting the complexity of the human condition. Genesis 2:7 is the first verse where "Adam" takes on the sense of an individual man, and the context of sex is absent; the gender distinction of "adam" is then reiterated in Genesis 5:1–2 by defining "male and female".

Connection to the earth

A recurring literary motif is the bond between Adam and the earth : God creates Adam by molding him out of clay in the final stages of the creation narrative. After the loss of innocence, God curses Adam and the earth as punishment for his disobedience. Adam and humanity are cursed to die and return to the earth from which he was formed. This "earthly" aspect is a component of Adam's identity, and Adam's curse of estrangement from the earth seems to describe humankind's divided nature of being earthly yet separated from nature.

In the Hebrew Bible

Genesis 1 tells of God's creation of the world and its creatures, with humankind as the last of his creatures: "Male and female created He them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam ...". God blesses mankind, commands them to "be fruitful and multiply", and gives them "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth".
In, God forms "Adam", this time meaning a single male human, out of "the dust of the ground" and "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life". God then places this first man in the Garden of Eden, telling him that "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die". God notes that "It is not good that the man should be alone" and brings the animals to Adam, who gives them their names, but among all the animals there was not found a companion for him. God causes a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and forms a woman, and Adam awakes and greets her as his helpmate.
, the account of the Fall: A serpent persuades the woman to disobey God's command and eat of the tree of knowledge, which gives wisdom. Woman convinces Adam to do likewise, whereupon they become conscious of their nakedness, cover themselves, and hide from the sight of God. God questions Adam, who blames the woman. God passes judgment, first upon the serpent, condemned to go on his belly, then the woman, condemned to pain in childbirth and subordination to her husband, and finally Adam, who is condemned to labour on the earth for his food and to return to it on his death. God then expels the man and woman from the garden, lest they eat of the Tree of Life and become immortal.
The chiastic structure of the death oracle given to Adam in forms a link between man's creation from "dust" to the "return" of his beginnings.
deals with the birth of Adam's sons Cain and Abel and the story of the first murder, followed by the birth of a third son, Seth., the Book of the Generations of Adam, lists the descendants of Adam from Seth to Noah with their ages at the birth of their first sons and their ages at death. The chapter notes that Adam had other sons and daughters after Seth, but does not name them.

Post-Biblical Jewish traditions

Body

retells a midrash that God himself took dust from all four corners of the earth, and with each color, created Adam. The soul of Adam is the image of God, and as God fills the world, so the soul fills the human body: "as God sees all things, and is seen by none, so the soul sees, but cannot be seen; as God guides the world, so the soul guides the body; as God in His holiness is pure, so is the soul; and as God dwells in secret, so doth the soul." According to Jewish literature, Adam possessed a body of light, identical to the light created by God on the first day, and the original glory of Adam can be regained through mystical contemplation of God.

Adam, Lilith and Eve

The rabbis, puzzled by fact that Genesis 1 states that God created man and woman together while Genesis 2 describes them being created separately, told that when God created Adam he also created a woman from the dust, as he had created Adam, and named her Lilith; but the two could not agree, for Adam wanted Lilith to lie under him, and Lilith insisted that Adam should lie under her, and so she fled from him, and Eve was created from Adam's rib. Her story was greatly developed, during the Middle Ages, in the tradition of Aggadic midrashim, the Zohar and Jewish mysticism. Other rabbis explained the same verse as meaning that Adam was created with two faces, male and female, or as a single androgynos being, male and female joined back to back, but God saw that this made walking and conversing difficult, and so split them apart.

Eve's fault in the Fall

The serpent approached Eve rather than Adam because Adam had heard the word of God with his own ears, whereas Eve had only his report; Eve tasted the fruit and knew at once that she was doomed to death, and said to herself that it was better she trick Adam into eating so that he too would die, and not take another woman in her place. Adam ate the fruit unaware of what he was doing, and was filled with grief. When Adam blamed Eve after eating the forbidden fruit, God rebuked him that Adam as a man should not have obeyed his wife, for he is the head, not her.

Adam and the winter solstice

An Aggadic legend found in tractate Avodah Zarah 8a has observations regarding Roman midwinter holidays, and the talmudic hypothesis that Adam instituted the custom of fasting before the winter solstice and rejoicing afterwards – an observance that devolved into Saturnalia and the Calends.

Children of Adam and Eve

Adam withdrew from Eve for 130 years after their expulsion from Eden, and in this time both he and Eve had sex with demons, until at length they reunited and Eve gave birth to Seth. A 2nd-century BCE Jewish religious work, the Book of Jubilees, tells how Adam had a daughter, Awân, born after Cain and Abel, and another daughter, Azura, born after Seth, and they had nine other sons; Cain married Awân and Seth married Azûrâ, thus accounting for their descendants. The Life of Adam and Eve and its Greek version the Apocalypse of Moses recount how Adam repented his sin in exile and was rewarded by being transported to the heavenly paradise, foreshadowing the destiny of all the righteous at the end of time.