Adam and Eve, the names of the first pair of human beings in the account of the creation given in the book of Genesis. 'Adam' is strictly a generic name, applicable to both man and woman, as used in Genesis, chapter i.; but it came to be a proper name used with the article, as in chapters ii., iii., and iv. The origin of the name is uncertain, but is usually connected with the Hebrew root Adam, 'to be red.' It is often derived from Adamah, 'the ground,' but this is taking the simpler from the more developed form. The Assyrian equivalent is Adamu, 'man,' used only in a general sense, not as a proper name. This is connected by Sir Henry Rawlinson and Professor Sayce with Adamatu, 'red skins,' the Assyrian word by which the dark-skinned Accadians of primitive Babylonia are designated in the bilingual tablets. Eve is the Hebrew Havvah, which name, according to Gen. iii. 20, Adam gave her as the 'mother of all living.' Literally the word means 'life.'
The early part of Genesis contains two somewhat different accounts of the creation of Adam. In the earlier account (i. 26 30), the creation of man and woman is given after the creation of the animals; in the second account (chapter ii.), the creation of Adam is mentioned before that of the animals, and the forming of Eve afterwards. The first narrator is commonly called the Elohist, from his use of the name Ēlohim for 'God'; the second, the Jehovistic, from his using the name Jehovah Elohim. The Elohist narrator simply states that God created man in his own image. Man is created at the close of the six days' work as the lord of the whole lower world, for whom all things are made. The Jehovistic narrator gives a detailed account of Paradise, the original sin of Adam and Eve, their subjection to the curse, and expulsion from Eden (q.v.). It is, in Ewald's phrase, the 'history proper of the creation of man.' The first condition of Adam and Eve is one of innocent simplicity. They are placed in Eden, where they are allowed to taste freely of the fruit of every tree save one. Temptation comes from without, through the serpent's persuading Eve that the divine prohibition is really intended to keep human beings from becoming as wise as God. Eve yields to the temptation, and leads Adam also into her sin; and thus the moral consciousness of man awoke, and spiritual death passed upon mankind. Adam and Eve are then driven out of Paradise, and prevented by the cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way, from returning 'to take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.' Adam lives 930 years; has three sons, Cain, Abel, and Seth, then sons and daughters.
Such is the form of the story which has usually been interpreted by orthodox Jews and Christians as a narrative of literal history, notwithstanding many difficulties about the anthropomorphic details and the admitted uncertainty of the point where the literal ends and the figurative begins. Many of the later Jews explained the story as an allegory. Philo, the foremost writer of the Alexandrian school, explains Eve as the sensuous part, Adam as the rational part, of human nature. The serpent attacks the sensuous element, which yields to the temptation of pleasure, and next enslaves the reason. Clement and Origen adapted this interpretation somewhat awkwardly to Christian theology. Augustine explained the story as history, but admitted a spiritual meaning superinduced upon the literal; and his explanation was adopted by the Reformers, and indeed generally by the orthodox within the Romish and the various Protestant churches alike. More modern critics have sought to separate the kernel of history from the poetical accretions, and attribute the real value of the story, not to its form, but to the underlying thoughts. Martensen describes it as a combination of history and sacred symbolism, 'a figurative presentation of an actual event.' The narrative may be regarded as embodying the philosophy of the Hebrew mind applied to the everlasting problem of the origin of sin and suffering; a question the solution of which is scarcely nearer us now than it was to the primitive Hebrews. It is not the form of the story which is material here, but the substance and the meaning; and the elemental truth of the fall of man by misuse of his free-will remains a religious fact, apart altogether from the historical form in which the fact is stated. In the Pauline theology Adam stands as the covenant head or federal representative of the whole human race in contradistinction to Christ, 'the second man,' 'the last Adam.' See FALL.
Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian accounts.—The fundamental ideas of pantheism and emanation, which formed the basis of the great religions of the ancient world, were perfectly consistent with a vague theory of the origin of man, which explained him as having issued somehow from the very substance of divinity itself by a kind of spontaneous generation—a development of the chain of emanations—rather than as the result of a free act of a creative will. Such is the account in the Sanchoniathon, a fragment of a Phoenician cosmogony that has reached us in a Greek version. Egyptian accounts explain that the fertile slime left by the Nile, under the vivifying influence of the heat of the sun's rays, sprouted into the bodies of men; or as expressed in mythological form, men sprung from the eye of the sun-god. This emanation produced the material body, but a later demiurgic process moulded the form to beauty and communicated to it a soul. Various nations were thus formed by different goddesses: the Egyptians—the highest race in the world—were moulded by the supreme demiurge, Khnum. One very detailed Babylonian account of the creation is preserved in the Greek of Berosus (q.v.). According to it there was a time when there was nothing but darkness and an abyss of waters, inhabited by a monstrous brood of composite creatures, over which presided a woman named Omoroça ('the sea,' Tiamat). Bel cut this woman asunder, making of her lower half the earth, and of her upper half the heavens, while he destroyed all the creatures within her. He next cut off his own head, on which the other gods kneaded the blood as it gushed out with earth, and from it formed men. Hence it is that they are rational and partake of divine knowledge. Next he formed, in the same way, the animals, then the stars, the sun, the moon, and the five planets. Here, leaving out the polytheistic element, the facts follow the same order as in the narrative of the Jehovistic author of Genesis.
Another account, deciphered from the cuneiform inscriptions, has a striking resemblance to the story in the first chapter of Genesis, but it is questioned by Sayce whether this account was translated into Assyrian from an older Accadian document, or in its present form is older than the 7th century B.C. Unfortunately only portions of it exist. It would appear that in these inscriptions the events of each of the days' work were recorded on a special tablet, and that the numbers of the tablets generally followed the same order as the days of creation in Genesis. Thus, the first, which gives an account of Chaos and the generation of the gods, corresponds closely with the first two verses of the first chapter of Genesis, even to the same word being used in both narratives as the name of the Chaos. The fifth tablet, giving the creation of the heavenly bodies, is the most recognisable portion, and is closely parallel to the fourth day of creation in Genesis; while the seventh corresponds with the sixth day. Another tablet refers to the creation of man, ascribing it to Hea, as in all the references in other inscriptions. George Smith interpreted one of the inscriptions which he discovered as a Babylonian version of the story of the fall, but Delitzsch pointed out that this reading was erroneous, and Oppert afterwards proved that it was really a hymn to the Creator Hea. No legend of the fall has as yet been found, but the serpent frequently occurs; and from his epithets is evidently an embodiment of moral evil. An archaic Babylonian gem represents a tree, on either side of which are seated a man and woman, with a serpent behind the latter, and their hands are stretched out towards the fruit that hangs on the tree; but Schrader warns us that here there is not the slightest indicated reference to what constitutes the specific feature of that narrative—the presentation of the fruit by the woman to the man. The palm may be recognised as the prototype of the ‘sacred tree’ as represented on the Assyrio-Babylonian monuments. Some-what similar mystic trees were the Haoma of the Iranians, and the Soma in India.
The religion of Zoroaster is the only one of the ancient religions other than the Jewish which ascribes the creation to the free-will of a personal god, distinct from primordial matter. Ahura-mazdâ, the good and great god, creates the universe and man in six successive periods of a year. The first man is Gayômaretan. In the Pellevi Bundêhesh, the cosmogony goes further. Here both a man type and a bull type are formed, who live for 3000 years on the earth, until the latter is destroyed by Angrômainyus, representing the evil principle. Next the man also falls, but from his body after forty years springs a stalk, from which blooms a creature of double body, both male and female, which Ahuramazdâ divides into two, and so forms Maschya and Maschyâna, the couple from whom descend the whole human family.
It was a common opinion that man was created both male and female in one body, and that the two sexes were separated to form man and woman. This is taught by many of the Rabbis, and is suggested by Aristophanes in the Symposium of Plato, to explain the passion of love, which is merely a craving of the incomplete and imperfect for its original completeness and perfection. Lenormant endeavours to show that this is borne out by Gen. i. 28, and chap. v. 2, and the interpretation has the authority of Jewish tradition, as well in the Targums and Talmud, as in scholars like Moses Maimonides, and Eusebius of Cæsarea.
Greek, Polynesian, Zulu, and other accounts.—An ancient Greek account represents Prometheus as making the first man out of earth, or clay and water, and then quickening him with fire stolen from heaven; but earlier accounts limit his work to the latter function, and make men spring up out of the soil. Hesiod describes man in his primitive state as free from sickness and evil before Prometheus stole fire from heaven, and Pandora, who corresponds to Eve, brought miseries to the earth. Prometheus gives man the capability of knowledge; his daring theft is for man the beginning of a fuller and higher life. Æschylus regards Prometheus as the representative of humanity, led into misery by his self-will, until he submits to the higher will of God. This corresponds with the story of Genesis, save that in the latter the spiritual features are clearer and more distinct.
In Scandinavian mythology, the gods draw the first men from the trunks of trees. In many primitive mythologies, the first man is synonymous with the deity, himself his own creator. The theory of family manes, carried back to tribal gods, leads us naturally upwards to a divine ancestor, or first man. Among the Polynesians, men are sprung from the divine Maui, the Raratongan Tiki, the Tii of the Society Islands, whose son Taata (‘man’) precisely represents a Polynesian Adam, the ancestor of the human race. In the mythology of Kamchatka, one of the sons of Kutka, the creator, is Haetsh, the first man, who after his life on earth descends into Hades to be lord of the under world. The Brazilian tribes refer their origin to Tamoi, the grandfather, the first man, who after living on earth and teaching men to till the soil, ascended to the sky, there to receive the souls of his descendants as they die. The Hindu Yama is not only the first created man, but the first who died, the ‘first to show us the way when our course is run, and our sun sets in the far west.’ In later Indian theology, he becomes also the awful Judge of the dead, who assembles the souls of men in a house appointed to them for ever. The supreme god of the Dacotah Indians is the creator Unkayhee, who after he had finished the making of the world, took one of his own divine offspring, and grinding him to powder, sprinkled it upon the earth. This produced many worms which matured into infants to become full-grown Dacotahs. Similarly, the Jouskeha of the Iroquois was at once creator of the world and father of the human race; and the gods of the Quiches of Guatemala, Tohil, discoverer of fire, Avilisa and Kacavitz, were apotheosised men, who were actual progenitors as well as ancestral deities. The Zulus carry their worship of the manes of the dead back into tribal deities (Unkulunkulu), and beyond these to the original race deity and creator, the First Man—he who ‘broke off in the beginning,’ the Old-old-one, the great Unkulunkulu.
Later Jewish, Gnostic, and Moslem Versions.—In Rabbinical and Moslem theology, the first man has hardly more than a place of precedence in Hades or in heaven. Yet even here we find traces of the universal tendency to deify an ideal ancestor; for the Rabbinical Adam is a gigantic being reaching from earth to heaven. Rabbi Jehuda says that as he lay stretched out on earth he covered it completely. Eve’s proportions were correspondingly large. When he was first created, the angels stood in awe of him, and all creatures hastened to worship him. Then God caused a sleep to fall on Adam, and removed a portion of every limb. Thus he lost his vast stature, but remained perfect in every part. His first wife was Lilith; but she fled from him when Eve was created. At the marriage of Adam and Eve, who were of course endowed with every grace, angels were present, some playing on musical instruments; while the sun, moon, and stars danced together. The happiness of the human pair excited envy among the angels, and the seraph Sammael tempted them, and succeeded in bringing them to their fall. The Targum of Jonathan makes Eve created from the thirteenth rib of Adam’s right side; and thus he was furnished with one rib more than any of his descendants. According to the Koran, all the angels paid homage to Adam, except Eblis, who, on account of his refusal, was expelled from Paradise. To gratify his revenge, he tempted them to sin. In the system of the Christian Gnostics,
Adam, the primal man, stands as earthly representative of the Demiurge, and ranks as one of the highest Æons.
Some have tried to establish from the double account of the creation in Genesis that there were two creations of man—the first, a defective race which peopled the whole Gentile world; the second, Adam, from whom the Jews were specially descended. The argument for the pre-Adamite creation will be found in a curious book published in 1655 by Isaac de la Peyreire, a converted Jew, who afterwards, for safety's sake, recanted his errors at Rome.
Science and the Unity of Man.—The question of the unity of man has caused much controversy. The old chronology was set aside when geology and archaeology made it manifest that man existed on the earth many thousands of years ago. This discovery removed the chief difficulty of the monogenists, who had to account for the great varieties in the present races of men as having sprung from one common stock within a limited period of time. The polygenists pointed to the remarkable permanence of type, in spite of the differentiating conditions of climate and circumstance, to prove that such races as the Negroes, Mongolians, and Whites were distinct species—each sprung from a separate origin in its own region. But fuller knowledge of savage man has demonstrated the essential identity in the working of his mind as well as the structure of his body with the most cultured races; and experience has shown that all the present races, in spite of form and colour, are capable of forming crossed races of every combination. Moreover, the modern doctrine of evolution, or the development of species, has confirmed the monogenist theory in insisting against constituting separate species where the differences are moderate enough to be accounted for as due to variation from a single type.
The question of the original unity or diversity of language is not, however, necessarily identical with that of the unity of the human race. For, even allowing mankind to have descended from a single pair, language might not have originated till long after they had passed away; and the formation of language may not have taken place at once, but may have been a gradual process going on for ages. However this may be, the faculty of speech is still one grand mark of distinction between man and the brute; and the fact remains that no anthropoid ape has ever raised himself to the level of articulate-speaking man.
The story of Adam has been a rich subject both in literature and art. It was frequently treated by the medieval painters, and formed the material of many mysteries and other poems. Of more modern works, it is enough to mention the splendid epic of Milton, Paradise Lost. Here Adam and Eve are the archetypal man and woman, sketched with outlines that can only be compared for grand simplicity with Michael Angelo's two frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, of Adam and of Eve coming into life.
See Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871); Darwin's Descent of Man (1871); Haeckel's History of Creation (trans. by Ray Lankester, 1876); Peschel's Races of Man (trans. 1876); Baudissin's Studien zur Semitischen Religionsgeschichte (1876–78); De Quatrefages' The Human Species (trans. 1879); Professor Sayce's edition of George Smith's Chaldean Account of Genesis (1880); vol. i. (1882) of Lenormant's Les Origines de l'Histoire d'après la Bible; Schrader's Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament (2d ed. 1883; Eng. trans. vol. i. 1885); Sayce's Introduction to the Science of Language (2d ed. 1883); and Eichthal's Mélanges de Critique Biblique (1886).