Adam #55

Adam is the ordinary Hebrew word for a human being or for humankind, and it is also used as the name of the first man. Whether a given occurrence is a common noun or a proper name is often a matter of context, and English translations sometimes disagree. The word is related to adamah, “ground,” and Genesis plays on that connection.

Biblical Usage

In Genesis 1:26-27 God says “Let us make man in our image” and creates him male and female. The Hebrew is adam, and here it clearly refers to humanity as a whole, which includes both sexes. Genesis 5:1-2 repeats this, saying that God “called their name Adam” in the day they were created. In Genesis 2:7 the LORD God forms the man from the dust of the ground, using the wordplay on adamah, and breathes into him the breath of life so that he became a living being.

In the early chapters the word usually carries the article (“the man”), and translations differ on where it becomes a personal name: many switch to “Adam” around Genesis 3:17 or 4:25, and it is unmistakably a name in Genesis 5:3-5. Psalm 8:4 uses the related phrase “son of man” (ben adam) to ask what a human being is that God pays attention to him.

Theological Significance

Paul reads the figure of Adam as representative. He says that death reigned from Adam to Moses, that Adam is a “figure of him that was to come” (Romans 5:14), and elsewhere calls Christ “the last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45). This pattern of a first Adam and a last Adam is basic to Christian teaching about sin and redemption. Readers differ on how to understand Adam’s historicity: some hold that Adam was a single historical person from whom all humanity descends, and others read the narrative as a story about humanity in general or as a figure whose role is symbolic. Because Genesis 1:26-27 applies the same word to all humanity as made in God’s image, the term has also been read as grounding the dignity of every person.