Adam

Adam (Hebrew adam, "man," linked to adamah, "ground" or "red earth") is at once the generic word for humanity and the personal name of the first man, the head of the human race. As the being formed from dust and made in God's image, Adam stands at the foundation of biblical anthropology, and as the one through whom sin and death entered the world, he stands at the foundation of the gospel — for Christ comes as the "last Adam" to undo what the first Adam did.

God "formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature" (Genesis 2:7). Created male and female in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), Adam was given dominion over the creatures, set in the garden of Eden "to work it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15), and granted every tree but one, with the warning that to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would bring death (Genesis 2:17). He named the animals, and from his side God fashioned the woman, his wife, so that the two became "one flesh" — the founding of marriage (Genesis 2:24).

Tempted through the serpent, Eve and then Adam ate the forbidden fruit, and with that act sin, shame, and death entered human experience (Genesis 3:6–7). They were expelled from the garden and barred from the tree of life, the ground itself cursed to bring forth thorns and toil (Genesis 3:17–19). Yet within the judgment came the first gospel promise, that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head (Genesis 3:15). Adam named his wife Eve, "the mother of all living" (Genesis 3:20); their sons included Cain, Abel, and Seth, through whose line the worship of God was preserved (Genesis 4:25). Adam lived 930 years and died (Genesis 5:5), the first to taste the death his disobedience had brought.

The New Testament makes Adam the great representative figure of fallen humanity. Luke traces Jesus' genealogy back to "Adam, the son of God" (Luke 3:38). Paul teaches that "sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned" (Romans 5:12), and sets Adam and Christ in deliberate parallel: "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Corinthians 15:22). The first Adam "became a living being"; the last Adam, Christ, "a life-giving spirit" (1 Corinthians 15:45). Thus Adam is more than the first human: he is the head of the old humanity under sin, whose ruin is reversed by the obedience of the second Man from heaven.