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Adam — Description

I wanna attack this subject from a slightly different angle than I did with my discussion of Eve. There I was more concerned with different ancient portrayals of the woman herself than I was with the Genesis narrative in its broader cultural context. I'd like to take this opportunity to start from the earliest surviving motifs of Mesopotamian creation myths and see if it's at all possible to reverse engineer our way back up to the 10th century BCE, when Genesis was originally authored. You might think that's an easy feat, but our cuneiform corpus is drawers upon drawers of literal broken rubble, and Genesis is upwards of a millennium derived from whatever the original nugget of myth was. We're about to stumble our way through a game of archaeological Telephone, so stay academically cautious and keep your finger on the asterisk key.
The Bible opens with, “In the beginning, the gods created the heavens and the earth”. To the Sumerians, the first people in the region to invent intelligible writing, the pantheon of gods they'd have assigned this role to were referred to as the “Anunnaki”. Most people today only recognize this word from the ancient aliens bullshit spewing from the drunken mouth of that uncle you don't invite to Christmas anymore, but that's an obvious bastardization of the original concept. The Anunnaki were simply the first generation of gods in Sumerian cosmology, think of them as roughly the equivalent of the Titans of Greek myth or the Jötnar of my Heathen worldview. The Anunnaki are seven primal, planetary powers: An (the sky), Enlil (the wind), Ninhursag (the womb), Nanna (the Moon), Utu (the Sun), and Inanna (the planet Venus). They're also self-destructively lazy, because making a planet is hard, so why not make someone else do it?
According to the Atra-Hasis version of the myth, written in Akkadian during the reign of King Ammi-Saduqa (17th century BCE), the solution these seven free-loaders came up with was to create a cast of 600 lesser gods called the “Igigi” to do all the heavy lifting of creation for them. This state of affairs lasts a shockingly stable 3600 years before the Igigi get tired of digging out the trenches for the Tigris and Euphrates. They drop their tools where they stand and go on strike, as they rightfully should. When the peasants storm his palace, Enlil is both too stupid to understand what he did to piss everyone off and too cowardly to address the rabble himself, so he sends his vizier Nuska to check outside the barred doors like “eyyyyyy what's uh… how's it goin Igigi? Everything good in the hood, fellow kids?”
The protesters give Nuska whatever the ancient Sumerian equivalent of throwing tomatoes is, and Enlil supposes he does in fact have to get out of bed today, rats. Enlil calls the Anunnaki into the corporate council room to discuss what needs to be done in order to get out of paying the consequences of their actions. An suggests they find someone to blame for this insurrection and punish him, but then the Igigi all give them the whole “I'm Spartacus” routine. Enki meanwhile has more than one brain cell because he's like “well guys they're tired, this labor sucks and you're not giving them anything in return but Purple Flurp and a thumbs up”. Enki, squarely of the promote-not-hire mentality, argues for the creation of an even lower class of being called “humans” to take on the work formerly assigned to the Igigi, and the Igigi find the offer of permanent paid vacation to be fuckin’ kickass! See, causing enough of a stink does eventually force other people to solve your problems!
Luckily, in the room with them already is Belet-ili the Womb Goddess, helluva title goddamn. She's also called Mami or Nintu but context clues would suggest she's synonymous with Ninhursag, who is already attested as the mother of the gods. She agrees to the plan only on the condition that Enki supply the purified clay himself. Enki says bet, give me fifteen days, we'll also need one god among us to slaughter for his blood. The poor bastard who draws the same short straw as that guy at the opening of Prometheus ends up being an otherwise unattested character named Ilawela, a name derived from the Akkadian words “ilu” meaning “deity” (cognate with Hebrew “el”) and “awilu” meaning “human being. His name is just “God-Man”, and idk why but that tickles me to no end. It's like something you'd name a parody of Superman. God-Man however is more known for his intelligence (which in Akkadian is “ṭēmu”), and in order to preserve that intelligence, the gods set it aside as a disembodied ghost (which in Akkadian is “eṭemmu”, it's a pun). His flesh and blood is then mixed in with the clay of the Earth, and a heartbeat emerges from the mixture, which is a… weirdly specific kind of ick that'd work great as the visual in a horror movie. The ghost enters the meat-clay mixture, the Igigi spit on it for some reason, and then everyone pats themselves on the back.
Enki and Mami then lock themselves in the “room of fate” (whatever that means), divide the clay into fourteen pieces which are then implanted into her seven womb goddesses, and let the little buns cook for ehhhhh… ‘bout nine months should do it. I assume this is where the recipe calls for either sugar and spice and everything nice or snips and snails and puppy dog tails, depending of course if you're cooking a gardevoir or a gallade. Mami went for an even split here, seven human females and seven of their weird mutant gorilla counterparts. Mami gave the humans a list of instructions on how to human and then set the humans loose into Mesopotamia to do said humaning. Unfortunately, giving humans the indefinite ability to create more humans meant eventually the place was crawling with humans, and humans, I can attest, are loud. The gods put up with their racket for 1200 years before they went okay no you know what fuck this, we can't sleep. Enlil chucks disease, famine, and drought into the simulation to control the population, but Enki, the based legend he is, goes behind Enlil's back and just tells the affected humans “lol no guys wait you got this, just stop worshipping them and the second they realize they're not being fed anymore they'll apologize real quick”. And real quickly they did apologize, but in that passive aggressive corporate whining kind of way, juuuust long enough to stall while Enlil drafts the plan for the Flood, I'm sure you know this Bible story already.
Unfortunately, while the parallels are inescapable, tracing a direct line of descent from this Sumerian creation myth to the Garden of Eden story in Genesis is a fickle endeavor. Hebrew is a Semitic language, so is the Akkadian which Atra-Hasis was written in, but the story comes from unrelated Sumerian, while Genesis was first drafted a whole collapse of society later than Atra-Hasis, some seven hundred years into a completely different cultural context. The closest cousins to the authors of the Bible from whom we have extensive archaeological material preserved are the Canaanite peoples inhabiting the city of Ugarit. Ugarit supplies us with a corpus of some 1500 cuneiform tablets written just before the Bronze Age Collapse, and ordinarily provides key insight into the polytheistic framework from which the Biblical tradition evolved. Unfortunately for our discussion today, there's yet to be found any cognate to the story of the Garden of Eden amongst these tablets. Instead, the Canaanites seem to have put more emphasis on the slaying of Lotan, the chaos serpent, by the storm god Baal Hadad as their essential creation myth. This story is interesting to note as both a descendant of the earlier Babylonian Tiamat and a cognate with the Biblical Leviathan, but it leaves the creation of humankind omitted entirely. To the people of Ugarit, we're just sorta… here.
The Garden of Eden itself seems to be a uniquely Hebrew invention. The closest thing I can offer you is a location name dropped in Sumerian texts as “Dilmun”, most notable in the myth of Enki and Ninhursag. Here, Dilmun has just sorta… always existed, like some kind of geological feature, but it's devoid of river waters. There's only one solution, Enki concludes: stick his dick in it. No really, that's how it's described, rivers in this mythology are… troughs which Enki… digs out. Man no wonder the Igigi went on strike. Enki then goes on to find his daughters disturbingly attractive, and he discovers the first eight plants which Ninhursag sprouts from this fertile earth. Enki's never seen these plants before and he's incredibly nosey, so he eats the plants just to absorb their souls, and this understandably pisses off Ninhursag. For this, she refuses to direct her “life-giving eye” towards Enki for the rest of his days, causing him to fall sick until a fox convinces Enlil that he can get Ninhursag to come back around and cure the illness (the fox is a vague trickster spirit in Sumerian cosmology, always wanting something from the gods in exchange for service. Weirdly the reward Enlil grants the fox for his efforts here is to plant “two birch trees”, whatever that means). Enki is then cured of the pain in his eight organs by means of Ninhursag birthing eight gods of healing and vegetation from his flesh. Damn imagine getting billed for both a medical procedure and child support at the same time, what a rub.
Now there's a few words of caution with trying to equate Dilmun with Eden. Dilmun, for one, is a real place, an ancient kingdom hugging the southwestern coast of the Persian Gulf, with a rich history as a trading partner with the Sumerian city states. Yes, the Sumerians ascribed mythical qualities to it, but this is less born from a mythological framework and more from their perspective of Dilmun as a rich, far away land, the same sort of fairy tale qualities we in modern English might use to describe a moonlit Arabian night. It's less folklore and more tourism embellishment. Secondly, while the myth I just summarized does seem to be under the impression that Dilmun has existed since the beginning of time, this is actually not uncommon for most cities in the Mesopotamian sphere. The city of Nippur, for example, was believed to be inhabited by gods before humans showed up and started running the joint. To the Sumerians, questioning the origins of your city is like asking where that mountain over yonder came from. So far as anyone could remember, they'd just always been there. There's nothing uniquely mythical about Dilmun or its fertility. At most I could agree that the flowery language used to describe said fertility found its way into the Bible, but at its most generous, that just leaves us with an origin of the Garden as a garden, with little in the way of the theological implications that Genesis is so rife with.
Before we give up entirely, I feel obligated to bring up the attempted reconstruction of an Ugaritic Genesis by theologians Marjo Korpel and Johannes de Moor, because while it's a really sexy bit of worldbuilding, it's also, by the authors’ own admission… flimsy. They suppose a mythological framework wherein the god Horon rebelled against the supreme god El by corrupting his heavenly Tree of Life into a Tree of Death. This in turn is the reason why gods send “Adammu” into the Garden, because apparently Adammu can do something about this predicament. Except no, he can't, because then Horon bites him in the form of a snake, thus depriving him of his immortality and condemning him to this hellish mortal existence. It's a fun idea, but it's unfortunately an idea that's… entirely made up by Korpel and Moor. See, their argument is entirely predicated off of Ugaritic tablets KTU 1.100 and KTU 1.107, which if you actually read yourself, you'll be left wondering where the hell these authors are getting all this narrative from. These seem to just be generic prayer tablets about a random dude and a random woman (named “šrġzz” and “pḥlt”, I honestly have no clue where Korpel and Moor pulled “Adammu” from), who have bitten by regular, earthly snakes and are now seeking divine relief from the venom. There's no Tree of Death and Horon is not some kind of Satan-analogue rebel in any known Ugaritic myth. He's not even a snake, in fact he's being invoked here alongside El to alleviate the pain of the snake bite. Korpel and Moor lean heavily on the argument that we simply have missing tablets that would provide context to what survives, but I honestly don't think there is any. I think these tablets are exactly what they say on the tin, and trying to use them to extrapolate an entire myth is wishful thinking at best, and runaway imagination at worst.
So, okay, that's the closest we're probably ever going to get to a genesis of Genesis. I can now close my research tabs and crack open my Bible, let's take it from the top. Genesis 1 recounts the timeline of creation: first day the gods divide the world into day and night, second day they enclose the planet in an atmosphere, third day they add water to the simulation and seed whatever areas of dry land remain with plant life, fourth day they sprinkle the sky with the Sun, Moon, and stars (I… would've thought that'd come included with making the sky, night, and day, but I guess that's why I write essays on DeviantArt instead of Bibles), fifth day they start getting creative with fauna for each biome, sixth day they make a dude in their likeness (their first mistake), give him dominion over all the creeping things of planet Earth (their second mistake), and tell him and the first woman to be fruitful and multiply (their worst mistake). On the seventh day the gods rested, they're very tired, and surely the humans can't get into that much trouble while they get a few winks in…
Genesis 2 elaborates that this man, Adam (whose name is just the Hebrew word for “human”) was Steve's OC specifically (reminder that I refer to YHWH as “Steve” because we're cool like that). Steve formed Adam from the dust of the ground (the Hebrew word for soil or clay is “adamah”, it's a pun, the Bible has puns) and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Steve then plants a garden in Eden (meaning “delight” or “luxury”) and plops his little Sim in, right next to the tree that makes things sentient and the tree that makes things immortal. That one's on Steve, what did you think was gonna happen? That's like installing red LED eyes on a robot just in case it turns evil. The Bible then stims into Eden's geography, which is phenomenal for fantasy map makers but kind of annoying to reconcile with a real globe. Let me explain:
Genesis 2:10 reads, “A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches”. There's the Tigris and Euphrates, good start, and then there's the “Pishon” and the “Gihon” which… no one has a good identification for. Josephus was under the impression that the Pishon is the Ganges and the Gihon is the Nile, working poetically to include the four cradles of civilization in this region of the world, but that's so geographically impossible even by the maps available to Josephus at the time that it's bugging the shit out of me. So I said fuck it, got my voluptuous ass stuck in a dingy rabbit hole for a while, and I've come away with this overthought revelation: there are four rivers at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Karun River flows northwards into Iran from the Persian Gulf, for one, though I… don't know how this could jibe with Genesis clearly stating that the Gihon flows around the whole land of Cush, i.e. in Ethiopia. It can't be the Pishon either, because the Pishon envelops the land of Havilah, which other books of the Bible seem to identify as “ehhhh between Egypt and Assyria-ish, like the uppermost roof of Arabia, thereabouts”. Fascinatingly, I'm not unconvinced this is an oral tradition preserving the memory of a real rivershed that has since dried up. Fun fact (well not “fun”, a lot of people don't have access to clean water because of this) the whole country of Kuwait has no natural sources of freshwater, no lakes, no rivers. Not anymore that is. See there's a wadi (a dry bed where a river that should exist has a clearly defined valley in the landscape) running through Kuwait and into Arabia called Wadi al-Batin, which last dried up around 2000 BCE, and if I was a gambling gal I'd wager this is what the authors of Genesis thought they were referring to when they used this word “Pishon”. What an interesting intersection between mythology and hydrology.
You know how it goes from here: God says don't eat tree, snake says eat tree, Eve becomes sentient, Adam becomes sentient, lousy kids get kicked out of Eden and Adam dies at 930. I went over all that in my Eve blurb, I won't bore you with the rehash, let's just fast forward to the Qur'an. In Islam, Adam is considered both the first Muslim and the first of the 25 mainline prophets. The most interesting twist I think the Qur'an spins on the original story is that it frames the Fall of Adam as revenge for Adam causing the fall of Iblis (a djinn who fills the role of Satan in Islamic tradition). While it receives random mentions throughout, the main crux of the Adam story is detailed in Surah 2, verses 30-39. It cold opens with God gathering his angels to tell them they're getting a new baby brother. This baffles the angels (who in Islamic cosmology are kinda mindless automata programmed only with the Word of God) because this new “human” thing that God is trying out seems tricksy and violent. And gross. All the little tinker toys, however, because they have to, readily accept God's answer of “lol guys, I'm God, I think I know what I'm doing”. Iblis is a djinn though, which means he has freewill, and he wants to use that freewill to worship God, not some temptable clay thing. Not only does Iblis refuse God's command to bow before Adam, he then sneaks into the Garden of Eden and convinces Adam to sample a bite of forbidden fruit for himself and his wife. God thus casts humanity out of heaven, and Adam begs forgiveness. “Oh Lord!” he says in Surah 7:23, “We have wronged our own souls: if Thou forgive us not and bestow not upon us Thy Mercy, we shall certainly be lost”. God forgives him, Adam's still his kid and he loves him, but actions do have consequences and Adam's gotta sit through his punishment like a big boy. “Therein shall ye live and therein shall ye die,” God assures him, “but from it shall ye be taken out at last”. Lo and behold, by the time the Prophet Muhammed passed through the first layer of Heaven on his Night Journey, there dwelt Adam and Eve happily reunited and long since forgiven by their God. Add this to the growing pile of data supporting my belief that Original Sin is a stupid and incredibly toxic concept which is nowhere near as universal as some people may think it is. I for one am happy that Adam and Eve are happy, can't you be?
Design notes, HTF DO BOYS WORK?? This was TORMENT on my little lesbian soulllll ;n; You're gonna make me look at boys for reference?? What could I have possibly done to have deserved this Tenth Circle of Hell?? I'm already on my monthly dammit, Mama's pissy and angsty and sad and lonely. I spent 7 hours whittling sandstone by hand, and when all that yielded was the splintered fragments of whatever fossil is in the connected piece, I went okay fine, let's get the air scribe out. I get anxious because I keep seeing little splinter bits come off with the sandstone and worry I'm damaging what I can't yet see. My lab partner and I agree the air scribe might be too strong a tool, so I chuck my little potato into the air abrator and hunchback for the last couple hours of my shift. Now I got something poking out, probably a neural spine because they're flat, angular, prone to shattering, and delicate. I'm trying to be careful, because potentially rendering material irrecoverable is still a massive anxiety for me. It genuinely keeps me up at night sometimes. I might have undiagnosed OCD and should probably see a psychiatrist. I've been on a waiting list for a therapist for several months now :/