Adam

Adam is the first human being of the Genesis narratives, and the opening chapters give not one account of his making but two, set side by side. In the first (Genesis 1), God creates humankind, male and female together, in the divine image on the sixth day. In the second (Genesis 2-3), God forms a single man from the dust of the ground, breathes life into him, sets him in the garden of Eden, and later fashions the woman from his side. Scholars of the Hebrew Bible generally assign the two accounts to different sources woven together, which is why they differ in order and emphasis.

The name itself is a play on words. Hebrew adam means humankind or man in the collective sense, and it echoes adamah, the ground or soil from which he is taken; the creature of earth is named for the earth. Through much of the second narrative ha-adam, the man, reads less as a personal name than as the human, the representative figure.

The story of the garden, the two trees, the command, the serpent, the eating, and the expulsion into a life of labour and mortality, is among the most influential narratives in the world, and each of the traditions that inherited it read it in a markedly different way.

Judaism reads the garden narrative without the doctrine that later became central to Christianity. Adam's disobedience brings mortality and hardship into human life, and rabbinic tradition reflects at length on his stature, his naming of the animals, and his role as the ancestor of all, but classical Judaism does not teach an inherited guilt transmitted to his descendants.

Christianity made Adam a pivotal theological figure through the letters of Paul, who set him against Christ: as in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive, Christ being the last Adam. On this typology Augustine built the doctrine of original sin, the idea that Adam's fall corrupted human nature itself, a condition passed to all humanity and healed only in Christ, which became foundational for Western Christianity and was contested in the East and later at the Reformation over its details.

Islam honours Adam (Adam) as the first human and the first prophet. The Qur'an tells how God taught him the names of all things, commanded the angels to bow before him, and how Iblis refused and was cast out; Adam and his wife are tempted and eat, but in the Qur'anic telling they repent and are forgiven, and no doctrine of inherited sin follows. Each new life begins, in this reading, in a state of original purity.