What does the name Adam mean?

A word before it was a name

Adam is not a rare or special word in Hebrew. It means a human being, or human beings all together, the way English once used “man” for everyone. That is how Genesis first uses it, on the sixth day, when God makes adam “male and female” (Genesis 1:27). The family record in Genesis 5 says it outright.

In the day that God created man, he made him in God’s likeness. He created them male and female, and blessed them. On the day they were created, he named them Adam.

So the name first belongs to both of them. In the garden story the Hebrew usually says ha-adam, “the human,” with the article, more a title than a name. Translators disagree about where to switch. The King James Version starts writing Adam at Genesis 2:19; the World English Bible waits until 3:17. By Genesis 4:25, “Adam knew his wife again,” it is plainly his name.

An earthling from the earth

The second account of creation explains the word with a pun you can hear in Hebrew.

Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Ground is adamah. God shapes the adam from the adamah, the way a potter shapes clay. The name tells him where he came from, and the story keeps reminding him. He leaves the garden “to till the ground from which he was taken” (3:23), and he will go back to it: “you are dust, and you shall return to dust” (3:19). Latin, by coincidence, holds the same idea: homo, human, is related to humus, soil.

Compare the woman’s name. The man calls her Eve, Chavah, “because she would be the mother of all the living” (3:20). His name looks back to the ground. Hers looks forward, to everyone who will come from her.

Red earth, and earth from everywhere

The Jewish historian Josephus, in the first century, wrote that Adam means “red,” because he was formed from red earth (Antiquities 1.34). Hebrew adom is red and dam is blood, and Edom got its name from Esau’s red stew (Genesis 25:30). Many scholars treat these as echoes rather than the root, but the sounds are close.

The rabbis drew a lesson from the single first human. The Mishnah says humanity began with one person so that no one could ever boast to another that his father was greater (Sanhedrin 4:5). Rabbi Meir taught that God gathered Adam’s dust from every part of the earth, so that he belongs to every land (Talmud, Sanhedrin 38a–b).

Man, people or a place?

Because adam is an everyday word, a verse can sometimes be read more than one way. Hosea 6:7 says “they, like Adam, have broken the covenant.” The King James Version reads it as men in general; other scholars read “at Adam,” a town by the Jordan where the river stopped for Joshua (Joshua 3:16).

Son of Adam

In modern Hebrew, ben adam, “son of Adam,” simply means a person. God calls the prophet Ezekiel ben adam more than ninety times, the phrase Bibles render “son of man” (Ezekiel 2:1). The Quran addresses humanity as “children of Adam” (7:26). Luke ends the family tree of Jesus with “the son of Adam, the son of God” (Luke 3:38), and Paul builds on the word itself.

“The first man Adam became a living soul.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.

For Paul, Adam is the human made of dust, and Christ a new beginning for humanity. The name still means what it meant on the first page: a human being, made from the ground.