Adam - A Man Among Men

Question: So Adam was a man chosen to start the line to Christ. Okay, but how was Adam chosen from among all men alive at that time?

Answer: The nature of the narrative in Genesis runs along anthropomorphic lines, that's the way Moses presents it to us. This way we can draw many lessons from the text; but the questions that arise in our minds after frequent reading of Genesis may be answered in other parts of the Bible. For instance "How did the serpent get to be so crafty?" We have to wait until we get to Ezekiel and Isaiah to find that out: (Ezek 28:14-17), (Isa 14:12-15).

We find that there are other scriptures in the Bible that may throw some light on how Adam was chosen.

Firstly, it will help us to know that in ancient Mesopotamia adoption was an official practice that took place; there were a number of ways a child could be adopted. We have clay tablets that document adoptions. one route to adopt a child involved a newborn that had been abandoned from birth, what was known as “to the dog” while still “in (its) water and blood.”1 in one tablet that’s been found a woman has abandoned her newborn son, and this is expressed as “throwing him into the dog’s mouth” whereby she legally forgoes all her rights to that child. another tablet has been trans lated as, “if a man an infant out of his amniotic fluid for sonship has taken and has brought him up, that adopted child shall not be (re)claimed.” This suggests that the parents abandoned the infant, and he was quickly adopted while amniotic fluid was still on him. if the adopter has raised the infant, the adopted child could not be reclaimed by anyone, including the child’s natural parents. 

This is an interesting view of life in Mesopotamia, it doesn’t make the people of Mesopotamia less civilized than we are, because babies are sometimes abandoned in the modern world too, it’s not a good thing, but it sometimes happens. Mesopotamians showed themselves to be civilized by having documentation for someone who had found an abandoned baby and adopted the child. in Ezekiel 16 we read: your ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. on the day you were born your cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to make you clean, nor were you rubbed with salt or wrapped in cloths. no one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to do any of these things for you. rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised. Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, “live!” 

In this chapter Ezekiel is told to confront Jerusalem. as we read though the chapter we realize that God is speaking in an allegorical way about their ancestry and history and telling the people to look how far away they have moved from their beginnings. it seems at that time Jerusalem is the focal point for the Israeli nation, some of which is already in captivity, including Ezekiel himself. The allegory continues and mentions that God adorned Jerusalem with jewelry: putting bracelets on her arms and a ring in her nose. We are reminded of how the Israelites first started to become a nation. Rebekah was given two gold bracelets weighing ten shekels and a gold nose ring weighing a beka. 

Ezekiel laments at how far the nation has fallen. But it is the first part of Ezekiel's message that may be of interest to us. He starts off talking about their ancestry saying, “your father was an Amorite and your mother was a Hittite.” That sounds a little odd because weren’t Abraham and Sarah father and mother to the nation of Israel? And they were from Ur.

The Hittites crop up in Canaan when the Israelites first start to take the land of Canaan for themselves. They had descended from Ham, Noah's son. But there is a second people group also named the Hittites who were a major empire with a capital city called Hattusha who descended from the early settlers in Anatolia now part of Turkey. The Amorites were nomadic people and were well known to the Mesopotamians and early Canaanites. 

Also, when Moses wrote his song in Deuteronomy 32 there’s a stanza which says, “remember the days of old; consider the generations long past . . . in a desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye . . . The Lord alone led him; no foreign god was with him. He made him ride on the heights of the land and fed him with the fruit of the fields.” 

Isaiah begins his prophecy with, “Hear me, you heavens! listen, earth! For the Lord has spoken: ‘I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me.’” When these scriptures ask us to look back, we may wonder just how far back are we talking about? Did Yahweh really find an abandoned baby kicking about in its blood and amniotic fluid with its cord uncut? If that happened then Yahweh spent a lot of time with Adam raising him as his own son. He breathed into him, investing something of himself within Adam.

Yahweh would have spent time on earth raising a child just like we do. He would have taught the child, fed him, and made a home for them to dwell in. He arranged for irrigation ditches to be dug from the Euphrates and planted a garden and taught Adam about looking after the fruit trees. Adam got to know the animals in the area and made up names for all of them. Yahweh would bring an animal along and say, “What do you think of this one?” They may have laughed as Adam came up with a name for each animal that his father Yahweh brought to him, just like any parent would have fun while teaching their children. 

Adam was very young while all this was happening. every now and again Adam might see a human being, but he knew he was different; they didn’t have Yahweh rearing them. 

Yahweh taught Adam about love, sincerity, humility, and having an open heart, and how to live without guile, there would be no better father in the world to be raised by. Adam received some of the “life” that Yahweh had. When Ezekiel tells us the story about the baby being found, the word spoken to the baby was “live!” He gave Adam “life,” he received the “living” tag, and Adam could have gone on to receive the fullness of that life, the completion was within his grasp.

He was an ordinary man, ish in the Hebrew language, but his adoption as a son of Yahweh meant he was chosen for a special task, it changed his being.

Jesus also tells us to look back to the beginning of the human race in Matthew 19:4–5. The first scripture he draws our attention to is from Genesis chapter 1 saying, “at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female.’” Jesus reminds us that the creator set the established order of male and female, which equates to father and mother; each pair has offspring who in turn become fathers and mothers themselves. Then Jesus moves several verses further forward into Genesis chapter 2 and reminds us what the text declares just after Eve has been created. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” Why does the text of Genesis use Adam as an example relating to people leaving their father and mother if Adam didn’t have a father and mother? 

We can’t say that God begot Adam, because he didn’t—God only has one begotten Son. We can say God created Adam, in the same way that God is the creator of us all, but we can’t say that God physically fathered Adam. We may say God was Adam's father by adoption. if, as some people say, Adam was the first man created, then drawing a parallel about leaving your father and mother doesn’t fit well if Adam never had a father and mother to leave. But if Adam was adopted by Yahweh, that means he had a natural biological father and mother that he left, and then the parallel would fit.