Quotes About Adam

Did the mean old werewolf stick the poor kitty in the box and leave her?" I asked. She smelled like my neighbor, which told me that Adam had spent some time with her on his lap before he'd brought her over here.

You have walked no more than a few miles from the city walls when you come to the end of cultivated fields and the great steppe begins, stretching from the foothills of the Zagros Mountains all the way across to Arabia, the tract called in Sumerian edin, which some think gave us the name of Adam and Eve's garden in the Bible.

The Adam story, then, is not simply about the past. It's about Israel's present brought into the past—even as far past as the beginning of the human drama itself.

Adam in primordial times plays out Israel's national life. He is proto-Israel—a preview of coming attractions. This does not mean, however, that a historical Adam was a template for Israel's national life. Rather, Israel's drama—its struggles over the land and failure to follow God's law—is placed into primordial time. In doing so, Israel claims that it has been God's special people all along, from the very beginning.

Seeing the similarities between these two stories should discourage us from expecting the Adam story to contribute to contemporary scientific debates about human origins (let alone guide those debates). Likewise, the similarities between Genesis and Atrahasis suggest that the biblical account cannot be labeled "historical," at least not in any conventional sense of the word.

This is the point of the story: the choice put before Adam and Eve is the same choice put before Israel every day: learn to listen to God and follow in his ways and then—only then—you will live. The story of Adam and Eve makes this point in the form of a myth. Proverbs makes it in the form of wisdom literature. Israel's long story in the Old Testament makes it in the form of historical narrative.

The story of Adam and Eve is a preview of Israel's long journey in the Old Testament as a whole.

Here's a simpler explanation: there were other people living outside of the Garden of Eden all along, even if the story doesn't explain it. Which leads to this: maybe the story of Adam and Eve isn't about the first human beings. Maybe it's about something else. And that something else is this: The Adam story is a story of Israel in miniature, a preview of coming attractions.

Another angle, one often taken by Christians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, is to read the Adam story as being not about a fall down from perfection, but a failure to grow up to godly wisdom and maturity.

The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.

This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, He made him in His own likeness.

And after he had become the father of Seth, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters.

So Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died.

But they, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant; there they were unfaithful to Me.

Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who did not sin in the way that Adam transgressed. He is a pattern of the One to come.

So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being;” the last Adam a life-giving spirit.

For Adam was formed first, and then Eve.

And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman who was deceived and fell into transgression.

Enoch, the seventh from Adam, also prophesied about them: “Behold, the Lord is coming with myriads of His holy ones