Questions on Adam in Strong's

[gbrooks9 (George Brooks)]

@JRM

The word ’ādām does not mean “red” or “ruddy.”

@JRM

Yes, agreed.

@JRM

This is at most a possible connotation of ’ādām, what we might call a folk etymology, based on ’ādām sounding like the Hebrew for “red” (’ādom) and “blood” (dām).

Yes, I believe this is what Strong was trying to get at … but he certainly didn’t leave much for us to go on.

[Marshall (Marshall Janzen)]

@gbrooks9

The spelling and pointing of H120 and H121 are indeed identical! So what’s going on? Why did Strong break them out?

I’m finding that Strong did this more than I thought. Here are just the first few, giving the general and proper noun Strong’s numbers:

• אֲדָמָה, ground (H127/H128)
• אֹהֶל, tent (H168/H169)
• אוֹן, wealth (H202/H203)
• אָוֶֶן, emptiness (H205/H206)
• אוּר, light (H217/H218)
• אַחֵר, another (H312/H313)
• אַיָּה, hawk (H344/H345)

So I can’t fault Strong for singling out Adam to split. It does appear that many tools (including several study Bibles) have used this split to obscure Adam’s meaning, though, especially by jumping to “red, ruddy” and bypassing the meaning of “humanity, human”.

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@JRM

The translation “the breezy time of day,” which takes "the rûaḥ of the yôm " to mean “the wind of the day” is mediated through the Greek and Latin; Theodotion has “the wind/breeze of the cool of the day”; the LXX thus has “evening” and old Latin translations have “afternoon.”

But it is just a likely that the text intends to say that God came in a judgment theophany, “in the wind of the storm.” This is what the first couple heard (the trees were whipping around, as in Psalm 29) and this is why they hid themselves

Fascinating stuff. Maybe along the coasts of the Mediterranean, an afternoon breeze coming off the sea feels pleasantly cool, but as you move inland and get closer to the desert, afternoon winds are anything but pleasant and cool. Does the interpretation depend where we think the author may have lived? haha. “In the wind of the storm” seems a far more likely translation. Thanks for the tidbit!

@JRM

Some scholars think this is just a misreading; others think it is intentional, and reflects a universalizing approach in Second Temple Judaism.

I vote for the second option. James is not alone among the apostles in quoting the OT with more flexibility than we often realize.

[Marshall (Marshall Janzen)]

Thanks to the feedback I got here, I tweaked the paragraphs I was writing. Here they are, with a bit of context:

Rather than being a common personal name, ʾadam had two related meanings: “humanity” and “human.” Those aren’t obscure etymologies found in fine print on a baby names website. Those are direct meanings for the word, much like “Bob” means moving up and down. […]

Most general study Bibles and countless free online Bible tools contain the fact that Adam means humanity. Too often, they contain it well, divulging the fact so obliquely it never reaches those who don’t already know. Faced with a word too scandalous to lay bare, these sources lace fig leaves over all Adam’s members save one man. Here are three examples of this curious phenomenon. […skip first two…]

My last example is most evident in the diverse world of online Bible tools, though it originates long before the web was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye. In 1890, James Strong published the first edition of his Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible. This work, now long in the public domain, assigned what came to be known as “Strong’s numbers” to the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek words that comprise the Bible. Although each number is supposed to indicate a unique word, not merely a distinct meaning, Strong often gave separate entries to words that become names. This results in ʾadam receiving two numbers: H120 for the general meaning of humanity or any member of humanity and H121 for the name of the first man or a city. To further separate the name from its collective meaning, Strong lumped the ʾadam named in Genesis 5:2 with the general occurrences rather than the names.

Countless Bible tools, especially those geared to non-experts and freely available online, build on these Strong’s numbers. Digitization has further marginalized the primary meaning so it doesn’t appear when looking up references to Adam in English Bibles. Such tools are more likely to suggest that Adam means “red, ruddy” or “ground” – meanings of other possibly related Hebrew words – than to give the meaning of the actual word ʾadam. Those who know what they’re looking for may discover the full meaning with only an extra click or tap, but those who don’t know are left in the dark.