Adam’s name denoted his relation to the ground (Hebrew, Adamah), from the dust of which he was taken; and as Eve’s body was derived from that of Adam, the name of the two was Adam (Gen. 5:2), which was the name given by God “in the day when they were created,” and this name was exclusively the description of the first man and the first woman.
In Gen. 2:23 we have the generic name given to the race in the Hebrew terms “Ish” and “Ishah” for “man” and “woman,” given by Adam to himself and to the woman: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called woman (Ishah), because she was taken out of man (Ish).”
2. The root, or primitive meaning, of Ish is uncertain,but from its subsequent use we may infer that it denoted a characteristic of humanity higher than that expressed by the word Adam,and may have occurred to the father of men while naming the animals as an appellative distinguishing his own from the inferior order of the animate creation.[11]
It is remarkable that the ancient Assyrian name for the first man is Admu or Adamu, the Assyrian form of the Hebrew Adam.[12]
3. In the Hebrew history, therefore, names are not to be regarded as mere sounds or combinations of sounds, attached at random to certain objects or persons, so as to become the audible signs by which we distinguish them from each other,but very frequently proper names had a deeper meaning and were more closely connected in men’s thoughts with character and condition than among any other ancient nation with the history and literature of which we are acquainted.[13]Thus it is that, as Archbishop Trench says, words are often the repositories of historical information.[14]
CHAPTER III.
THE DESCENDANTS OF ADAM.
1. As the history proceeds it becomes very plain that the descendants of Adam are selected with a purpose, which a general acquaintance with Scripture reveals. That purpose was to record the ancestry of Abraham and so of the children of Israel. Other descendants are occasionally mentioned when any interesting or important event suggests itself to the historian, but the main purpose is never lost sight of.
Thus the descendants of Cain are briefly enumerated through his first-born, Enoch, “the teacher,” as his name signifies. He was the first builder of a city, and may, as Geikie suggests, have been the first to teach men “the culture of city life,” or “the elements of physical life.”
2. His descendants were Irad, “the swift one,” perhaps because of his hunter’s life; Mehujael, “the stricken of God,” for some unrecorded transgression; Methusael, probably bearing the name God in the syllable “el,” and meaning “champion of God,” suggesting some religious act;as if, even among the race of Cain, God “had not left himself without a witness.”[15]