Adam in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2
Question: So is there a difference between Adam in Genesis 1 and Adam in Genesis 2?
Answer: Let's take a look:
God shaped the biology of humanity very carefully and added his divine “life and light” to that biology, teaching us that a human being has a dimension that biological entities do not have. We have many predecessors in the evolutionary chain, and quite a number of them share over 50 percent of our DNA sequences.
The scriptures teach that the spark setting humanity apart from other species came not from nature but from super-nature. Biology is the framework in which human spirit resides. When our biological frame dies we have another framework in which to reside. The Apostle Paul says, “we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven” (2 Cor 5:1).
The Neanderthal race died out, so too did Homo erectus and Homo antecessor and others from the Homo genus, but they were not what we call “modern humans” or “Homo sapiens,” rather we may term them as human subspecies. Some of the subspecies were a part of the building blocks that God used on the way to making man in his image. Geneticists say that a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA seems to be present in some humans. When God told the humans to replenish the earth (Gen 1:28 kjv), the word “replenish” could refer to replacing the early species or subspecies from the genus Homo.
So modern humans, with their integrated spirit, replaced previous Homo models.
“It is the spirit in a person, the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding” (Job 32:8).
God bestowed his image on humankind and called them Adam. Then Genesis sums up the whole long process of life’s development: “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).
We remember that the Hebrew word for mankind is Adam, and in Genesis 1:27 ha-adam, meaning “the human,” or as we would say these days, “the human race.”
The human species is made up of two distinct sexes: male and female. Genesis 1 teaches us that both sexes are contained in the word “Adam”—“male and female he created them.”
Genesis 5:2 also makes it plain, “Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam.” Both male and female were called Adam, and they were both human. We would suppose this to be the case because science, archaeology, and paleontology confirm what Genesis chapter 1 teaches us.
Genesis chapter 2 moves on to explain the “generations of heaven and earth” (Gen 2:4) where one particular Adam is spoken of, because one particular Adam began the process of heaven meeting with earth, fulfilled when Christ came among us and told us that “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man” (John 3:13). Notice that Jesus calls himself the “Son of Man,” meaning “Son of Adam,” thereby completing the process that started with Adam in Genesis 2.
Humanity as we know it—modern humans—had been created back in Genesis 1 and “Adam” was their collective name. However, Adam the man, whom God took to the garden of Eden, was an individual. He represented the “collective Adam”; in other words, he represents us all.
The New Testament refers to Adam as one “who is a pattern of the one to come” (Rom 5:14). Adam the man was a pattern, figure, or type who represents human beings and because Christ also became a human being, Adam is a type of Christ too.
The chain of generations that led to Christ’s birth started with Adam; as highlighted in the genealogical record of Luke 3.
God chose a man from among men to start this process. Adam, the man, was born as we all were.
We cannot be human unless we are born from a previous generation of human beings—excepting the very first generation into whom God placed his image; and even they had the genetic print of all the preceding hominids.
Angels may appear as men, but not human men. We should also note that the Lord “appeared” to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We know he appeared to Abraham as a man, not a human man, but a man of some sort. But we see that Christ was "born" of a woman, he became human. His Father was God, so we see Christ's divinity but we also see his humanity. God didn't simply create a fully grown body for Jesus to step into, no, Jesus took his place in the line of humanity, because it was humanity that needed to be saved. "Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity" (Heb 2:14).
Adam the man was born from the mating of two human beings, male and female, but God is going to breathe into him in a special way, and with the making of Eve from Adam's rib cells, a new era will have begun.
We see a distinction between Adam the collective group in Genesis chapter 1 and Adam the individual in Genesis chapter 2. This is highlighted well in Genesis chapter 5 where we see the Hebrew word “adam” used both as a collective noun and a proper noun—the proper noun being “Adam” the man’s personal name, and the collective noun being the generic name for mankind.
The NIV translates the Genesis passage this way:
“This is the written account of Adam’s family line. When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them ‘Mankind’ when they were created. When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth” (Gen 5:1–3).
The Hebrew text in these verses uses the word “adam” four times, yet in English the NIV translators have written “Mankind” twice in place of adam. That is because the first mention is the proper noun and the second and third are the collective noun and the fourth is the proper noun again.
Strong’s concordance has two different numbers for the two words; there is “adam 120” the collective noun, and “Adam 121” the proper noun.
In the Westminster Leningrad Codex the Hebrew marking surrounding the words for adam the proper noun and adam the collective noun, are slightly different:
ם֑ ָד ָא and ם ֔ ָד ָא.
The consonants and vowel pointings are the same but the phonetic pronunciation is different.
The text of Genesis itself supplies us with answers about the individual man, Adam, and the collective group Adam. This is how the King James Version translates the Genesis 5 passage:
“This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created. And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image; and called his name Seth” (Gen 5:1–3).
The King James Version only changes one of the “adam” words into “man,” the other three are left as “Adam” even though the “collective group “Adam” is meant for the third one, which is why the word “them” is used. So we are not talking about an individual because God made them male and female, and called their name Adam.
The translators of the King James Bible are trying to help us understand the allegorical nature of the story so that when we come to chapter 2 of Genesis and the individual man named Adam is introduced to us, we will see that he is representing all the other “adam/ humankind.”