Genesis 5:1-2 – The myth of Adam as the first man

Genesis 5:1-2 states that “God created men and women to be like himself. He gave them his blessing and called them human beings. This is a list of the descendants of Adam, the first man.” (CEV)

This comes after Genesis chapters 2 and 3, where God creates man (2:7), then the Fall happens with the expulsion from the Garden of Eden (2:8 to 3:24).

The first man

Then comes Genesis 5, cementing Adam’s status as the first man. (I originally wrote ‘re-iterating’, but I noticed Adam isn’t clearly identified as such until this verse.)

What actually follows is an account of Adam’s third son Seth and his descendants down to Noah. This ushers in the account of the flood, relegating Genesis 5:1-2 to a minor linking role between more important matters.

Genesis 5:1-2 matters because it conflates the first man and the first fallen man. This obscures the critical fact that God’s original design for humanity exists only for the rest of chapter 2, when Adam and Eve can feed from the Tree of Life:

“You may eat fruit from any tree in the garden, except the one that has the power to let you know the difference between right and wrong.” (Genesis 2:16-17)

Contexts

In The Oxford History of the Biblical World, editor Michael D. Coogan writes that “to understand the Bible requires a knowledge of the contexts in which it was produced.”

If we overlay the Biblical account on the historical record, we see that a long period elapsed between the advent of humanity and the Fall, which is known academically as the Neolithic decline.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the Fall resulted from climate change in a wide equatorial belt from north-west Africa to central Asia. This caused long-term drought, desertification, and famine that shattered the original human physiology, including our ability to feed from the Tree of Life—the original and only source of genuine and healthy nurturing.

In The Fall, psychology lecturer Steve Taylor writes: “The main event in human history is a sudden, massive regression – a dramatic shift from harmony to chaos, from peace to war, from life-affirmation to gloom, or from sanity to madness.”

This was the physiological impact of the Fall.

Reversing the Fall

Genesis 5:1-2 hides our lost physiology and replaces it with the myth of Adam as the first man, made from a handful of soil, who with Eve is soon expelled from Eden.

This conflated myth was recorded in the Old Testament, migrated into Christianity and became the founding document of Western civilisation. The message of Christ has been interpreted as finding eternal salvation in a fallen world.

I disagree.

The entire message of Jesus the Christ is about reversing the Fall and restoring humanity to its God-given birthright of access to the Tree of Life. Jesus promises and delivers on salvation in the temporal world, not in some vague angels-on-fluffy-pink-clouds-with-harps hereafter that no-ones cares to question too deeply.

That this is the true endpoint of the Bible is made clear by the last chapter of the last book, Revelation 22:14: “God will bless all who have washed their robes. They will each have the right to eat fruit from the tree that gives life, and they can enter the gates of the city.”

To wash our robes clean, we must fully understand how they got dirty. It happened in that brief elided period between the first man and the first fallen man, whoever they were.

The entire New Testament is a response to Genesis 2:8 to 3:24—and the smokescreen of Adam as the first man laid by Genesis 5:1-2.

Image generated using Fotor AI.