Many of us have heard too many times in the Adam & Eve story that \u201cAdam means dirt.\u201d Humans are made of humus, blah de blah. How cool and ancient and mythical and overimaginative of those ancient Hebrews \u2013 right?<\/p>\n
No, there\u2019s a little more to it than that.<\/p>\n
First of all \u2013 \u201cdirt.\u201d Mistranslated \u201cdust of the ground\u201d by King James and the RSV family of Bibles, the word means \u201cfertile soil.\u201d Adamah<\/em> in the Hebrew (you see how closely it\u2019s related to Adam<\/em>). This is a particular word, not just any old dirt. It is soil \u2013 arable land. Think not about the dust of a desert, but about potting soil\u2026 an obviously fertile soil, the stuff from which all land plants and animals ultimately take their nourishment. But our potting soil is usually pretty blackish brown, and this is not the adamah\u2019<\/em>s color. The words adam <\/em>and adamah <\/em>are not only related to one another, but are related to the word adom<\/em>, \u201cruddy,\u201d reddish. This is particular soil \u2013 for the Israelites this is the color of the hills of home.<\/p>\n It tells them not only THAT God made them, but WHERE God made them. Egyptian soil and Babylonian soil have nothing on that particular soil from which a chosen group of people were made.<\/p>\n We can all say that God made us here \u2013 on this earth. Some of us have (over the millennia) wandered to northern regions where our skin didn\u2019t need the melanin so much, and so we got a little paler, and so it\u2019s funny, nearly ridiculous, to say white people were made from soil. Contrary to the pictures in many a Children\u2019s Bible, however, people in biblical times didn\u2019t have that problem. They understood that they belonged to that land, as surely as their skintone matched the fertile soil.<\/p>\n In a world of cheap travel, adventure, frequent voluntary relocation, and of the nonvoluntary diaspora and exile of many people-groups\u2026 we lose our sense of belonging to a land.<\/p>\n Where do you belong? Where were you made? What color is your dirt? What is the land you cannot abandon?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Many of us have heard too many times in the Adam & Eve story that \u201cAdam means dirt.\u201d Humans are made of humus, blah de blah. How cool and ancient and mythical and overimaginative of those ancient Hebrews \u2013 right?\r\n\r\nNo, there\u2019s a little more to it than that.\r\n\r\nFirst of all \u2013 \u201cdirt.\u201d Mistranslated \u201cdust of the ground\u201d by King James and the RSV family of Bibles, the word means \u201cfertile soil.\u201d Adamah in the Hebrew (you see how closely it\u2019s related to Adam). This is a particular word, not just any old dirt. It is soil \u2013 arable land. Think not about the dust of a desert, but about potting soil\u2026 an obviously fertile soil, the stuff from which all land plants and animals ultimately take their nourishment. But our potting soil is usually pretty blackish brown, and this is not the adamah\u2019s color. The words adam and adamah are not only related to one another, but are related to the word adom, \u201cruddy,\u201d reddish. This is particular soil \u2013 for the Israelites this is the color of the hills of home.\r\n\r\nIt tells them not only THAT God made them, but WHERE God made them. Egyptian soil and Babylonian soil have nothing on that particular soil from which a chosen group of people were made.\r\n\r\nWe can all say that God made us here \u2013 on this earth. Some of us have (over the millennia) wandered to northern regions where our skin didn\u2019t need the melanin so much, and so we got a little paler, and so it\u2019s funny, nearly ridiculous, to say white people were made from soil. Contrary to the pictures in many a Children\u2019s Bible, however, people in biblical times didn\u2019t have that problem. They understood that they belonged to that land, as surely as their skintone matched the fertile soil.\r\n\r\nIn a world of cheap travel, adventure, frequent voluntary relocation, and of the nonvoluntary diaspora and exile of many people-groups\u2026 we lose our sense of belonging to a land. \r\n\r\nWhere do you belong? Where were you made? What color is your dirt? What is the land you cannot abandon?<\/p>","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[441,442,34,127,285],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faith","tag-adam","tag-dirt","tag-food","tag-god","tag-land"],"yoast_head":"\n