Adam and Us

Rev. Linda Hamill (St Stephen's Uniting Church)

“Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”( Gen 2:7 NRSV)

We call the first man Adam, though throughout the rest of the Bible the word adam means humankind. So at the beginning Adam is an individual. Later the word morphed to represent all humankind. The word Adam and the dust of the ground which Adam was made have a linguistic relationship; both words are from the same root word. The Hebrew people believed that the connection between humans and the earth is so close that they used similar words. They did not want to forget the stuff that they were created from.

Dust is the essence of your being. You would want to nurture it to see what else it has to offer. After all not only were you created from it; it sustains all the trees and plants that God created so you could eat from. It would be crazy to want to destroy or lay waste the land. You would be losing something of yourself if you did that.