Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/26

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The Garden of Eden.

we term letters; without the luxuries which we have learned to love; and innocent of the very knowledge of evil; good in all the Lord calls good, and wise in the wisdom of holy life, beyond all that this world, as it now is, can imagine.

But was not Adam a single individual? Careful consideration does not so read the Scripture. Adam is the Hebrew term for man; not man a male individual, for there is another Hebrew word for that; but man collectively as a class or race. Adam means mankind. It could not mean an individual, for in the original it is a collective noun. True, the translators of the Bible, having imbibed the old tradition of Adam as the sole progenitor of the human race, have sometimes translated it as though it were the name of an individual. But they have been compelled in other places to give the real meaning, or spoil the sense of the text. Thus, when it is said in the first chapter of Genesis, "And God said. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen. i. 26), the original Hebrew word is Adam. But it would not do to translate it Adam there, as the name of an individual, because the text proceeds thus: "And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea," etc. And the next verse continues in the same strain: "So God created man," literally, "God created Adam, in his own image, in the image of God created He