People of the Bible

Adam

The patriarchs and matriarchs · The beginning · Appears in Genesis 1 to 5 · Also known as the first man

Adam is the first man in the Bible, formed by God from the dust of the ground and given the breath of life. Placed in the garden of Eden to tend it, he and his wife Eve disobeyed God, and through that first sin death entered the world. His name means man, and in Scripture he stands for the whole human race.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.Genesis 2:7 (KJV)

The first man

The Bible opens with God forming Adam from the dust of the ground and breathing into him the breath of life, so that man became a living soul. He is made in the image of God, male and female, and given dominion over the works of God's hands. Set in the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it, Adam is given honest work in a world called very good, and a single boundary: he may eat of every tree but one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and in the day he eats of it he shall surely die.

God brought the animals to Adam to see what he would call them, and he named them all, the first act of human wisdom and rule. But among all the creatures there was found no companion fit for him, and God said it was not good that the man should be alone. So God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam and made a woman from his side, and Adam received her with the first recorded human words of joy: This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. They were naked and unashamed, at peace with God, with each other, and with the world.

Made in the image of God

Before the fall, Scripture lingers on the dignity God gave to man. Adam was made in the image and likeness of God, male and female created he them, and God blessed them and gave them a calling: to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, and to have dominion over every living thing. Humanity was crowned, in the words of the psalm, with glory and honour, set as God's steward over the works of his hands. Work itself was a gift and not a curse, for Adam was placed in the garden to dress it and to keep it before ever sin entered the world.

God also gave Adam companionship and rest. Marriage was instituted in Eden when God said it was not good that the man should be alone and made the two one flesh, so that a man should leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. And God hallowed the seventh day and rested, setting a rhythm of work and rest into the very fabric of creation. This is the world as it was meant to be, and every longing for meaningful work, for faithful love, and for true rest is a memory of the garden and a hope for its restoration.

The fall and its shadow

Into that peace came the serpent, more subtle than any beast of the field, who questioned God's word and promised that eating the fruit would make them as gods. Eve saw that the tree was good for food and pleasant to the eyes, took of the fruit, and gave to her husband, and he ate. At once their eyes were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and hid themselves from God among the trees. The trust was broken, the shame had begun, and the whole shape of the human story changed.

When God called, Adam did not repent but deflected, blaming the woman, and through her, God: The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree. God pronounced the hard consequences of their sin upon the serpent, the woman, and the man, and told Adam that in sorrow and sweat he would eat bread until he returned to the dust. Yet even here God showed mercy, clothing the guilty pair with coats of skins, the first death in Scripture covering the first sinners. He sent them out of Eden and set cherubim and a flaming sword to guard the way to the tree of life.

His character and struggle

Scripture draws Adam plainly, without flattery, and his struggle is the struggle of us all. He was made upright and given real responsibility, real work, and real companionship, and he was capable of wonder, naming the creatures and receiving his wife with delight. Yet when tested he did not stand, and his first instinct after sin was to hide and then to shift the blame onto his wife and even onto God. He is not a distant villain but a mirror, the first of a race that carries both the image of God and the wound of sin.

Outside the garden the story continues in sorrow. Adam and Eve's firstborn, Cain, murdered his brother Abel, and grief entered the family. Yet God gave them another son, Seth, and men began to call upon the name of the LORD. Adam lived a long life and died, as God had warned, and the refrain of the genealogy that follows tolls like a bell over the whole race: and he died, and he died, and he died.

His significance in salvation history

Adam matters because in the Bible he is never merely one man among many. He is the head of humanity, the one in whom, Paul writes, all die. The story of Eden explains why the world is at once so beautiful and so broken, why human beings are made for God and yet turn from him, why work is good yet wearying, and why death shadows every life. Every genealogy in Scripture, and the human family itself, is traced back to this one father, so that his fall is not his alone but ours.

Yet Eden does not end without hope. In the very sentence upon the serpent, God spoke the first promise of the gospel, that the seed of the woman would bruise the serpent's head, though his own heel would be bruised. From the ruins of the first disobedience, God set in motion the long rescue that runs through the whole Bible toward one who would crush the evil that Adam let loose.

Where Adam points to Christ

The New Testament sets Adam and Jesus side by side as the two men on whom everything turns. As by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, so by the obedience of one, Jesus Christ, many are made righteous. Paul calls Jesus the last Adam, a life-giving spirit, the new head of a new humanity that begins not in Eden but in the empty tomb.

Where the first Adam reached out and took the forbidden fruit and fell, the second Adam stretched out his hands on a tree and gave himself away in obedience. Where the first Adam brought a curse and hid in shame, the last Adam bore the curse in the open and clothes us in righteousness, as God once clothed Adam in skins. In Christ the paradise that was lost is not merely recovered but surpassed, for the tree of life stands again at the center of the city of God, its leaves for the healing of the nations.

A note on the sources: everything above is drawn from the biblical text itself. Where a detail comes from later tradition rather than Scripture, it is named as tradition. Dates for the earliest figures are traditional and approximate, and Scripture does not always give them. The aim is to tell each life honestly, and to let it do what the whole Bible does, point to Jesus Christ the Lord.

Related: Noah · Abraham · All the people of the Bible