Dr. Dylan Johnson

To toil a garden at first, yes.

So hopefully the toil isn't too laborious.

And this will become important when I talk about parallel creation myths from Mesopotamia.

But at least from the outset, God creates a garden.

There's no bushes in the field.

And what's really interesting is there's no rain.

So there's no precipitation at this point.

And the garden is fed by what translators for millennia have translated as mist.

this word aid in Hebrew, but actually comes from Sumerian.

We don't get many Sumerian loan words into Hebrew, but this one id in Sumerian just means a river, specifically the subterranean river that springs up from the underworld and waters.

Yeah, it's a very erudite language, which makes us suspect that they probably encountered it through some other medium, but nonetheless, there's no doubt that this word is coming from Sumerian.

Interesting.

So underground river.

So underground river feeding the garden that God has planted.

He needs someone to toil the land and he decides to, what's the word is to fashion, really to sculpt.

human being, the first man.

And I think here I can say, when we encounter this name, which we often translate as a proper name, Adam, really the word just means man.

It's not a proper name.

Unlike Eve, which does become a proper name, Adam is quite clearly not a proper name.

So the character should just be called the man, which is what he's called more frequently than not.