If, as a species, we are to survive the next century or two, we must take a much longer view of our history than is our habit. But for today, let’s go back only as far as Adam and Eve, our civilisation’s origin story.
First committed to parchment sometime around the 7th century BCE, the story of Adam and Eve is part of the Yahwist tradition, an explicitly patriarchal strain of ancient Hebrew culture. Like all good origin myths, it has layers of meaning so it resonates with people of differing outlooks.
The Expulsion (or Fall as interpreted by early Christians) has all the drama of a soap opera, the struggle of a hero’s journey, the riddles of a parable and the grandeur of an epic. It’s not just an origin story – it’s a Freudian birth metaphor (Eden as the womb), a coming-of-age tale (Eden as childhood), and a coded account of a society’s transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture (Eden as the world before human impact) – but even more importantly, it’s a coded account of the beginnings of patriarchy.
In the first or Elohist account of the Creation, God (Elohim) makes humans last – male and female in God’s own image – after the light, the land, the waters, the vegetation, the creatures of the water and the creatures of the land. But in the Yahwist version it’s all about Adam.
Before any other creatures, before any vegetation, even before rain, there is “a flood rising from the Earth” making mud (adamah) from which God models a mud-creature or human (often translated “man”). God then assembles a garden to put the “man” in. You know the rest …
Knowledge of the world is a terrible thing, because once you have it, peace is no longer the peace of innocence – but temporary relief from disquiet. We call this condition adulthood, and, through the Eden myth, we connect growing up with alienation, and masculinity with primacy.
The Creation story is the beginning of a Christian narrative arc that culminates in the Apocalypse, in the Book of Revelation. Many people apparently believe that the climate chaos – which scientists are certain is largely our own doing – is the will of a disappointed omnipotent God bringing His Creation to an end because His finest creatures insist on following their own logic, consuming all the fruit.
It might make more sense to suppose it’s the result of a non-interventionist God allowing Her Creation to burn itself out.
Either way, our only real salvation is in understanding our place here in this world – remembering that the Adam-centred Genesis 2 story is the origin story of civilisation, not humankind. Our true emergence – our dependence on the rest of Creation – is clear in Genesis 1.
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If you check Genesis 2:7 you will discover that God did indeed make Adam out of “dust” or “dirt” (depending on the translation), and remember, we are mostly water.
Adam was not made from mud. That sounds like a golem to me.