Adam is the first human being of the Genesis narratives, and the opening chapters give not one account of his making but two, set side by side. In the first (Genesis 1), God creates humankind, male and female together, in the divine image on the sixth day. In the second (Genesis 2-3), God forms a single man from the dust of the ground, breathes life into him, sets him in the garden of Eden, and later fashions the woman from his side. Scholars of the Hebrew Bible generally assign the two accounts to different sources woven together, which is why they differ in order and emphasis.
The name itself is a play on words. Hebrew adam means humankind or man in the collective sense, and it echoes adamah, the ground or soil from which he is taken; the creature of earth is named for the earth. Through much of the second narrative ha-adam, the man, reads less as a personal name than as the human, the representative figure.
The story of the garden, the two trees, the command, the serpent, the eating, and the expulsion into a life of labour and mortality, is among the most influential narratives in the world, and each of the traditions that inherited it read it in a markedly different way.