Adam

The second chapter tells the same making from close up. In chapter 1 God speaks and man exists; in chapter 2 the LORD God kneels in the dirt. The Hebrew plays on the words: adam is formed from the adamah, the man from the ground, as a potter forms a vessel. What makes the clay a person is breath. God breathes into his nostrils, and the man becomes a living soul, the same phrase used of the animals in chapter 1 but here received mouth to mouth.

The garden is planted after the man is made and then he is put into it, which means Eden is a gift and not his origin. The two trees are named in the middle, and the four rivers give the place a geography, two of them still on the map, so that the writer clearly means somewhere and not nowhere. Verse 15 gives the man his work, to dress it and to keep it, the two verbs later used of the priests' service in the tabernacle. Adam is a gardener and a guardian before he is anything else.

The command in verses 16 and 17 is generous before it is strict. Of every tree thou mayest freely eat: the Hebrew doubles the verb, eating thou mayest eat. One tree is withheld, and the reason is not given; only the consequence. In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. This is the first thou shalt not in the Bible, and it is addressed to the man alone, before the woman exists. He will be the one responsible for passing it on.

The serpent's first word is a question, and the question misquotes God. Hath God said ye shall not eat of every tree? God had said the opposite, eat freely of every tree but one. The woman corrects him, but she adds a clause of her own, neither shall ye touch it, and drops the word freely, so that the command already sounds narrower in her mouth than in God's. The serpent then contradicts God outright, ye shall not surely die, and offers a motive for the prohibition: God is keeping something from you. That is the lie under every temptation in Scripture, that the giver is a withholder.

Verse 6 is built in three steps, saw, took, ate, and the tree is described with the same words that described every tree in the garden, good for food, pleasant to the eyes, with one addition, to be desired to make one wise. She gave also unto her husband with her. The words with her have made readers ask where Adam was all along, and the plain sense is that he was there, silent, and ate. Paul says Adam was not deceived; the woman was deceived, and the man went along knowing.

The promised knowledge comes at once and is only this: they knew that they were naked. Fig leaves, then hiding among the trees, then a voice in the cool of the day. The first question God asks a human being is Where art thou, and it is not for information. Adam's answer names fear and nakedness but not the fruit. When pressed he blames the woman and, in the same breath, the one who gave her: the woman whom thou gavest to be with me. The woman blames the serpent. No one confesses. That, more than the eating, is what the sentences in the next verses answer.

The first thing Adam does after the sentence of death is give his wife a name that means life. Eve, because she was the mother of all living. It is an act of faith in the promise of verse 15; there will be children, and among them the seed. The second thing that happens is that God makes them clothes. Coats of skins means an animal died so that they could be covered, and the verb is the same one used later for the priests being clothed. The fig leaves they made are replaced by a covering God provides, which readers since the church fathers have taken as the first sacrifice and the first picture of atonement.

Verse 22 gives the reason for the exile, and it is mercy dressed as severity. A man who has become as one of us, to know good and evil, must not now take of the tree of life and live for ever in that condition. Endless life in a fallen state would be the real curse. So the LORD God sent him forth, and then, more strongly, drove out the man, back to the ground he was taken from, to do the work he was always meant to do but now with sweat.

The cherubim and the flaming sword close the way. They are guards, not decorations, and they face east, the direction Cain will go and the direction Israel's tabernacle will open toward. The tree of life is not destroyed; it is kept. It appears again in the last chapter of the Bible, in a city where there is no more curse and the gates are never shut.

Chapter 5 begins with a title, the book of the generations of Adam, and a summary that repeats chapter 1: in the likeness of God, male and female, blessed, and called their name Adam. The name belongs to both of them here, which is the text's last reminder that the image was given to the pair. Then comes a sentence that carries the whole doctrine of inheritance in it: Adam begat a son in his own likeness, after his image. The image of God passes on, and so does whatever Adam has become. Seth is born to a man already under sentence.

The numbers that follow set the pattern for the chapter: years before the named son, years after, total, and he died. Adam lived nine hundred and thirty years, long enough to see Enoch walk with God and to be alive within a few decades of Noah's birth. The refrain and he died sounds eight times in the chapter, once for every man but Enoch, and it is the sentence of chapter 3 carried out line by line. Paul draws the conclusion in Romans 5: by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin. The book of the generations of Adam is the first genealogy in Scripture, and Luke ends his with the same name.