Adam meaning

Meaning

Red, One From The Soil, Beginning

Etymology

From the root דמם (dmm), to begin, to produce.

Related names

• Via דמם (dmm): Adamah, Adami-nekeb, Admah, Admin, Adummim, Akeldama, Damascus, Dimnah, Dumah, Edom, Elmadam, Madmannah, Madmen, Madmenah, Obed-edom

There are one man (as tradition dictates) and one town named Adam mentioned in the Bible.

Adam the town was situated in the territory of Manasseh, on the Jordan, close to Zarethan. It's where the waters of the Jordan collected in a heap, so that Israel could pass over on dry land (Joshua 3:16).

Adam the man is the husband of Eve and the first human male according to tradition (Genesis 2:20). Here at Abarim Publications, however, we see all that slightly different — see further below for a discussion of what the story of Adam and Eve is about to someone who doesn't know it from an English language children's bible but rather from the original.

But even to non-Hebrew speakers who still actually know the story, it is clear that God first created the dust of the earth, then gathered that dust into a vital composition, and then breathed into that composition his breath, so that Adam became a living being (Genesis 2:7). Much later, God promised Abraham that his offspring would be like the dust of the earth; like that elementary material from which God made all living things (Genesis 13:16). Later still, the apostle Paul explained that all those who are of faith are Abraham's offspring (Galatians 3:7). And indeed, God literally repeats Genesis 2:7 when he makes the church: he creates believers like the dust of the earth. Then he gathers them into a vital composition. Then he releases into them his Spirit and the church becomes a living being (Acts 2).

In the New testament, Adam (Αδαμ) is mentioned by name 9 times; see full concordance. He is referred to as the set of which all members die, and Jesus as the sub-set of Adam in which all members shall be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22). The first Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit (1 Corinthians 15:45).

What follows may be a bit elaborate, but the bottom line is that contrary what tradition dictates, the Biblical model organizes reality according to sets and subsets. The largest set of living creatures is precisely that: living things (or perhaps living things that have a body made from the 'dust of the earth' — to distinguish these from angels, if you will). Eve was called the "mother of all life" (אם כל־הי; Genesis 3:20). The word for mother is pretty much the same as that for nation, and the term "all-life" means precisely that: the whole of life, or the biosphere. This phrase כל־הי occurs six more times in the Bible and always denotes the whole of life (Genesis 8:21, Job 12:10, 28:21, 30:23, Psalm 143:2 and 145:16).

For a closer look at the most dominant Biblical sets and subsets, see our article on the name Hebrew.

The name Adam is the same as the noun אדם ('adam), which is used to mean man(kind) in the sense of a creature made from earth:

The name Adam is obviously a touch complicated. Most directly, it means Acre Man, but since the word for acre is distilled from the action of producing agricultural crops, the name Adam really means Produce (as noun). But that root that covers the action of producing is also the same as the root that covers redness. That means that Adam is also Red Man. Since red is the color of blood (2 Kings 3:22) and also since the name Adam is the word דם (dom), meaning blood, with an aleph in front of it, and alephs sometimes appear in front of words without essentially altering the meaning, Adam also means Blood Man. And since blood is the seat of the breath (or life), Adam is also Life Man.

All in all, the name Adam is probably best interpreted as Living Creature or rather the corporeal part of a living creature. The name Adam simply means Corporeal One or Dustling; prior to receiving breath, Adam was quite literally a corpse (Genesis 2:7).

A name that may be a playful reference to the name Adam is Javan, Mud Man.

Everybody is more or less familiar with the story of Adam and Eve, our ultimate ancestors who, naked in the Garden of Eden, were seduced by the snake and hence plunged the world into darkness. Or so it is commonly thought. What is not commonly emphasized is that this familiar story is a caricature, a children's Bible's version of an original Hebrew story that is a great deal more serious and a great deal more accurate. Let's have a look.

In English we often use a plural where in Hebrew we use a singular, specifically when discussing the qualities or experiences of a category of sorts. For instance, in English we may come to report that our crop was eaten by locusts or our city was sacked by Midianites, whereas in Hebrew we would declare that our crop was eaten by the locust, and our city was sacked by the Midianite. The name Adam is simply the Hebrew word for man or human, and this ordinary word occurs many hundreds of times in the Bible, from Genesis 1:26 to Malachi 3:8.

Hebrew has no capital letters, so in Hebrew the "name" Adam is indistinguishable from the common word for man. That means that no Hebrew reader has any reason to suppose that the story of Adam is about some specific individual. To a Hebrew reader, the story of Adam is not about some man, but rather the man. In Hebrew, the story of Adam is the story of humanity.

Now what, in essence, makes humanity? What specific quality sets the man apart from the animal? After all, man, as the Bible widely admits, is an animal too (Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10). What is it then, exactly, that got made in Genesis 2:7 from the previously created "dust" of the earth?

In Hebrew, things that mostly occur in pairs or clusters tend to be described by feminine words, whereas things that mostly show up alone tend to be known by masculine words. In Hebrew, in general and on average, femininity tends to refer to multitudinousness whereas masculinity tends to denote solitariness (which is one reason why God is masculine). That said, the noun אדם ('adam) meaning man is the masculine version of the feminine noun אדמה ('adama), meaning land or acre. It's the word that is translated with "earth" in Genesis 2:7, where it says that God created אדם ('adam) out of the dust of אדמה ('adama). That means that in Hebrew the story of Adam tells of the very close relationship of humanity with geography, and even declares that humanity (whatever that is) comes from the land and rises from the land or is formed by merit of the qualities of the land. That means that in Hebrew, the story of Adam implies that humanity arose from among the animals when early Homo sapiens began to change the land as much as the land began to change Homo sapiens.

But what is the soul of humanity? The soul of any physical animal is in its physical blood (Genesis 9:4), and since man is an animal, his soul too is in his blood. But humanity is not an individual quality: it's a collective quality. A human individual on their own is nothing more than a breathing, eating animal. Humanity is society. Humanity is what happens when individuals interact with individuals, and share and trade and communicate with individuals, and all individuals become integrated elements of some greater unity that exceeds the scope and comprehension of any single one. Humanity is to humans what a beehive is to bees. Indeed, what makes a man if not his interaction with others? Just like physical blood flows between physical cells, so the soul or "blood" of mankind flows between the individuals (Luke 17:21).

The story of the creation of Adam is not about the formation of the physical body of one single human, but rather of the "body" of humanity that — wholly alike the much later "body" of Christ — consists of many human individuals interacting and learning from each other and forming each other and building things and developing language (hence Adam names the animals). The story of the creation of Adam is not a mythological or variant version of the story of how the biological Homo sapiens may have evolved physically over millions of years, but rather explains how humans stopped being mere smart animals-among-the-animals and began to emerge from the animal world, when the complexity and sophistication of their culture began to rise beyond those of any other animal.

As noted above, our noun אדם ('adam) without the leading א ('aleph) is the masculine noun דם (dam), meaning blood. That noun made feminine results in the verb דמה (dama), meaning to imitate, and imitation is precisely what formed our language, our cultures and our norms. Imitation is what allows large groups of individuals to gravitate upon a common center, from which in turn each individual identity comes to derive (Ephesians 3:15).

The name Eve is identical to the noun חוה (hawwa), meaning tent village: the most primitive form of human settlement that doesn't make use of naturally occurring shelters such as trees or caves. Humanity began to assert itself when proto-humans began to take twigs and large leaves out of their natural context in order to construct synthetic shelters for themselves. By this time, their levels of cooperation gave them exceptional confidence. Humanity had taken their first steps upon the road of technology: a road with great promises but also exceptional danger.

Six hundred million years ago, the first multicellular creatures began to be entirely different from single cellular creatures, even tightly knit colonies of single cellular creatures. That's when physical blood first began to flow. Entirely likewise, Adam began to be when he began to be a multicellular mind: a single unified mind that emerged in the form of a single language from the identical mentalities of multiple different "cellular" individuals that "spoke" that first proto-language — speakers who, despite their individuality and their individual expressions founded their minds upon the same set of identical words that sat in their minds like DNA in cells.

The story of the creation of Adam is not the story of Adam's physique or even his celebrated intellect or his sapiens. The story of the creation of Adam is the story of the creation of human language: that particular part of us that truly sets us apart from all the animals of the biosphere. And so, the entire rest of the Bible and all the adventures of the descendants of Adam, tells only of the evolution of human language.

The Bible tells how God created humanity by creating the most rudimentary manifestation of human language (Adam): how it bore humanity's precious consciousness (Noah), how it began to favor quality and efficiency (Abraham) over quantity and accumulation (Joktan). It tells how the Hebrew language emerged within the territories controlled by Egypt, within an enslaved administrative class that developed a kind of writing that was as rigidly systematic as mathematical notation would much later be and as organic as any living earthly speech (Moses and the Exodus). It tells how human language and the rudiments of alphabetic script began to be ready to receive law, the principle of law, the understanding that only a willing and collective surrender to common rules can result in a perfectly functioning society.

Language, narrative and script continued to develop throughout the period of the Judges and the first skirmishes with the Philistines, but the alphabet was perfected with vowel notation at the time of David, whose son Solomon would build the Temple of YHWH. From that central temple, the alphabet was exported all throughout the known world and was adapted into Greek first and then Latin. Without the Hebrew alphabet, there would not have been a Greek golden age or a Roman empire. There would not have been a Europe as we know it today, and you would not be reading these Latin-scripted words from a computer screen.

As we discuss at length in our article on the name Jesus, even the story of Jesus matches so marvelously the Hebrew Bible because it too is about language, and not about physical human individuals. The story of the conflict of Jesus with the "Jewish" (i.e. Hellenized) elite is about the vast superiority of the Hebrew language over the Greek one, and how the Hebrew language allows for a mind that knows God while the Greek language allows for a mind that only knows of God at best.

Adam and Eve, the story tells us, were naked: ערום ('erom), from the verb עור ('ur), to be exposed. The pun here is that our word ערום ('erom), naked, is spelled identical to the adjective ערום ('arum), meaning cunning or shrewd: precisely the quality in which the serpent excelled among the animals:

The signature difference between cunning (ערומ, 'arum) and wisdom (חכמה, hokma) is that wisdom is oriented toward collectivity and cooperation, whereas cunning is oriented toward self-preservation and competition:

The verb גלה (gala) means to expose, uncover, remove or to go into exile, which suggests that the Garden of Eden was also a place of exile: a state of technological and linguistic nakedness resulting in a humanity-wide diaspora due to a lack of binding principles, a unifying culture or a single satisfactory language. Wisdom rather than cunning has given humanity language and thus law, science, technology and cities to live in protected from wild beasts and natural elements.

Our English words technology, textile and text all derive from the Proto-Indo-European root "teks-", meaning to weave, and from that same root comes the word τεκτων (tekton), which describes what Jesus did for a living (namely being an assembler, not a carpenter). All this explains why Adam and Eve were "naked": they had no textile, technology or text to wrap themselves in and separate themselves from the natural wilderness. In Biblical jargon, a naked person is a person who is all emotion: nothing but an animal who has no access to the social webs and networks from which one spins one's humanity (Mark 14:52, Luke 8:27, John 21:7, Acts 19:16, 2 Corinthians 5:3).

In our article on the important Greek word ελευθερια (eleutheria), meaning freedom-by-law, we demonstrate that freedom is an acquired skill that comes from abiding to law. Freedom of speech is achieved only after one masters the rules of one's language. The freedom to play any tune comes only after one masters the rules of music. And freedom to traverse the city during rush hour only comes after one has mastered the rules of traffic. Bondage comes from a lack of rules. Freedom comes from rules. It's precisely this principle that J. K. Rowling used in her delightful description of Dobby's manumission: house-elves obtain their freedom when their master gives them clothing (Galatians 5:1, Isaiah 61:10). And it's precisely the same reason why God gave Adam and Eve clothing: to set them on the road to the freedom of which the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:2) is the final manifestation.

The central Tree in the Garden of Eden was not a "knowledge tree" as is sometimes said, but an ethical tree: it's the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and has to do with telling the difference between these two. Also contrary to common perception, there was nothing inherently wrong with that Tree. It was created along with the rest of Paradise, very good, perfectly virtuous and wonderful: good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable to make wise (Genesis 3:6). The word for "wise" used here, namely שכל (sakal) also refers to a personal cunning, a mental faculty that gives one an edge over one's competition. And there's the catch: when one is driven by love and concern for all living things, and one refrains from judging and especially from judgments based on one's own personal tastes, one assumes inclusivity and stewardship over all that the Creator deemed worthy of existence. The fruits of the Tree were not forbidden to do what they were designed to do, which is to be good for food (for animals). But they are forbidden for human consumption. Eating these fruits results in competition, in favoritism, in judgment and ultimately in factions, war and finally holocausts: all forbidden or ungodly activities: Romans 2:11, Matthew 7:1, James 4:12; also see Genesis 12:3, Proverbs 3:5, Isaiah 11:3 and 45:23.

Finally, and perhaps somewhat predictably: the word for snake, namely נחש (nahash) is identical to the word for bronze: the first of the metals made by man. As the story tells, the lures and promises of metallurgy drove humanity away from the natural splendor from which our kind emerged, and plunged us into a world of warfare and pollution.

So no, the Hebrew story of Adam and Eve is not the same as the English story of Adam and Eve. And these words are not restricted to this story but rather pervade the whole rest of the Bible, and bind issues that are utterly loose in English and create patterns that don't exist in English. And these are not the only words that do that. They all do that.

The Hebrew Bible is a completely unique universe of ideas that cannot be compared to any translation in any language, including Greek. This is why people who are actually serious about the Word of God learn Hebrew. In any other language, one can know of God, but only in Hebrew we can know God and share in his reality (2 Peter 1:4).