Dr. Dylan Johnson

And in the midst of the garden, he plants two trees.

One is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and one is the tree of life, as will be revealed to be tree of eternal life.

And you can't eat from either of them.

You can eat from everything else, but neither of those two.

And this gets to my reading and what this story is all about.

It's about what those two trees represent in terms of ancient scribes, ancient Hebrew speaking scribes, trying to make sense of humanity's place in the world.

It's a creation story.

That's what all these creation stories are about.

I'll leave it there.

We can kind of get into the details, but that's otherwise the synopsis is right.

So he's never given a name, right?

Unlike Eve, who is given this name, which derives from an etymology for to live.

So her name literally just means life.

But Adam doesn't get a name, which...

Seems a bit unfair.

He's the first man.

We've got to call him something.

Right, right.

So I think just tradition, I don't know when exactly, perhaps in the rabbinic period, perhaps even earlier, they start to read this common noun, which is Adam, man or humanity, depending on its usage, as a proper name because he doesn't have one in the narrative.

Yeah, exactly.