Adam

Genesis 2:7 tells that God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the text plays on the words: adam, 'human', echoes adamah, 'tilled earth'. The reading that this dust was red is late and comes from confusing adamah with adom, 'red', which is a different root. Earlier, in Genesis 1:26-27, humanity appears created 'in the image of God', male and female, and only in 2:21-22 is Eve's formation from his side narrated while he sleeps. The Quran tells the creation with a different material and a different emphasis: God shapes Adam from dry clay that rings like pottery (Al-Hijr 15:26-29), teaches him the names of all things as proof of a knowledge the angels lack, and orders them to bow before him; all obey except Iblis, who refuses on the grounds that he is of fire and not of clay (Al-Baqara 2:30-39). In all three traditions Adam is not born but made, and that difference is what turns him into the starting point of all humanity.

The biblical text does not describe him, so every portrait of Adam comes from later. Rabbinic traditions enlarge him to cosmic size: the Talmud (Sanhedrin 38b) says that at first he stretched from one end of the world to the other and that after the sin he was reduced to a hundred cubits. The figure of sixty cubits usually quoted is not Talmudic but an Islamic hadith recorded by al-Bukhari, and the two should not be crossed. Kabbalah takes the idea elsewhere with Adam Kadmon, the primordial man whose figure contains the entire unfolding of the sefirot and serves as a bridge between the divine and the material. From the same matrix comes a much-quoted correspondence: the two hundred and forty-eight limbs of the human body are paired with the two hundred and forty-eight positive commandments of the Torah, and the three hundred and sixty-five sinews with the three hundred and sixty-five prohibitions, six hundred and thirteen in all. In Christian art Adam is a young naked man in the garden, and what identifies him is not his face but what stands beside him: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent and the fruit, which Western iconography turned into an apple through a Latin pun between malum, 'evil', and malum, 'apple'.

Adam is not worshipped in any of the three religions: his role is explanatory. Judaism reads him above all through Midrash, which presents him as the first to receive teaching and interprets the gap between Genesis 4 and 5:3 as a separation from Eve of a hundred and thirty years after Abel's death. Christianity makes him half of a pair: Paul sets him against Christ as 'the last Adam' and turns his fall into the reason a redemption is needed (Romans 5:12-21; 1 Corinthians 15:45). Islam treats him as the first prophet, names him some twenty-five times in the Quran, and links his creation to Friday, the day of gathering. From the crossing of Sufism and Kabbalah comes a third reading, that of the perfect man: al-Insan al-Kamil in Arabic, the idea that there exists a complete human model of which we are all degraded copies and to which the spiritual path seeks to return. On the ground, the one shared devotion is the tomb: the cave of Machpelah in Hebron, venerated by Jews and Muslims as the burial place of the patriarchs, is also given in several traditions as that of Adam and Eve.