In Hebrew, Adam is both a man's name and a word for humankind
Genesis uses the Hebrew word adam in two ways. In its first chapter it means humanity, created male and female together; in the second it names a single man shaped from dust, with Eve made later. That double meaning, and those two different accounts, have fuelled centuries of interpretation across several religions.
Adam appears in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Gnosticism and the Bahai Faith, but each reads him differently. Christian teaching holds that his disobedience in Eden brought sin and death to all his descendants, remedied only through the crucifixion of Jesus. The Quran also has him eat from a forbidden tree and lose his garden home, yet he repents and is forgiven, a pattern offered as guidance for ordinary human failings; Islam calls him khalifa, a successor or deputy on earth. Gnostic writers took the darkest view, treating his physical body as a prison for a soul slipped into it by trickery.
Within Genesis itself Adam names the animals, is judged to a life of toil and a return to the soil, and fathers Cain, Abel and Seth. Chapter 5 gives his lifespan as 930 years. Outside those first five chapters he hardly appears in the Hebrew Bible, apart from heading a genealogy in Chronicles.
Rabbinic tradition wrestled with the two creation stories. One explanation gave Adam an earlier partner, Lilith, formed from dust like him; the two could not agree and she fled, and Eve was then made from his rib. Other rabbis suggested the first human was created with two faces, male and female, and later split apart because walking and talking were awkward. A midrash retold by Louis Ginzberg has God gathering dust of four colours from the corners of the earth.
Modern scholars mostly read the creation story as one of many ancient origin myths, compiled from several earlier traditions, which would explain its tensions. The majority date the final text of Genesis to the Persian period, the 5th century BCE, while a sizeable minority think its opening chapters came later still. Two researchers have reconstructed possible Canaanite parallels from tablets found at Ugarit, featuring a serpent and a lost immortality, though John Day calls those reconstructions speculative.
Source: Adam
