Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
Adam: archetype, individual, or both?
Formed from dust, Eve built from his side. Is that how the first man was made, or what every human is?
Genesis 2:7, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: is the forming of Adam from dust about how one man's body was made, or about what every human is? She was made for this job. That can be about how she was born and raised, or about what she is now. Genesis 2:7 has been read both ways, and as both at once.
If the forming of Adam is a description of a physical event, Genesis makes a claim about human origins that science can test. If it is a statement about identity, it makes a different kind of claim. Both poles affirm a real, historical Adam. They disagree about what the forming means.
The verb "formed," yatsar, occurs forty-two times; it is used for forming the human spirit in Zechariah 12:1, for summer and winter, for events planned long ago, and for Israel as a people. "Dust" returns in 3:19, where the man is told he is dust and will return to dust, which ties it to mortality. The word translated "rib," tsela, appears about forty times and is otherwise never anatomical; it usually means a side of something, often in tabernacle and temple building. Adam's own response is "bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh."
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Lennox reads Genesis as going out of its way to describe a direct, special creation of man from dust, not development from earlier hominids. He calls the making of the woman from the man the decisive point: if the first females came from pre-existing hominids, the account does not fit at all, and if it is a metaphor, a metaphor for what? He engages Denis Alexander's model of Adam and Eve as two chosen Neolithic farmers and finds it hard to square with Genesis 2:5 and Romans 5:12.
Walton argues forming from dust and building from the side are archetypal claims, about every human being's identity, not material origins. Dust signals mortality; the tree of life was provided because people were mortal. Egyptian reliefs show the god Khnum forming the pharaoh on a potter's wheel at his coronation, a statement about role, not birth. He still holds Adam and Eve to be real people in a real past, because they stand in ancient genealogies, which list real people, and because Paul's argument requires a historical entry of sin.
The young-earth position takes the forming and the rib as a literal, physical account of the first two humans, created on day six.
Walton has to explain why a text that names materials (dust) and a procedure (sleep, opening, closing) is not describing a procedure. Lennox has to explain why, on his own reading, the animals formed from the ground in 2:19 are not read with the same weight, a point Walton raises.
Not a denial of a historical Adam. Walton and Lennox both affirm Adam and Eve as real people. The question is whether Genesis 2 tells us how their bodies came to be.
- Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (2015), propositions 8 and 11
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 4, engaging Denis Alexander, Creation or Evolution: Do We Have to Choose? (Monarch, 2014)
