Who were Adam and Eve? Part 2

(Part 1 is here)

Question: Which Bible character was created when God pinched off a piece of clay?

Answer: Elihu (Job's friend)

‘Behold, I am toward God as you are; I too was pinched off from a piece of clay.’
Job 33 v 6

So, the second way of looking at Adam and Eve from an evolutionary perspective is much less straightforward but it still maintains that they were two real individuals.

As we have seen, in the Bible Adam is not the only one to have been made from the dust. Abraham admits as much:

‘Abraham answered and said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.’
Genesis 18 v 27

In fact we are all in the same position. When we die ‘the dust returns to the earth as it was.’ Ecc 12 v 7.

Now Abraham, Elihu and all the rest of us all began our lives as a single cell in our mother’s womb that multiplied and multiplied until our birth… then kept on multiplying! That process is what Elihu is referring to as being ‘pinched off from a piece of clay’. So the idea of Elihu being taken from the clay is a metaphor for the scientific explanation - not an alternative theory.

So it could be that when Genesis 2 describes Adam as being‘formed the man of dust from the ground’ it is a metaphor for natural methods. Our bodies are physically part of the rest of the animal world as Ecclesiastes reinforces:

‘I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.’
Ecclesiastes 3 v 18 – 20

If we go down this symbolic route then it seems likely that Eve’s formation from Adam’s rib is also symbolic and represents the birth of Christ’s bride from his wounds on the cross.

So in this scenario Adam and Eve had a long ancestry behind them but were separated off from the rest of humanity into the isolation of Eden’s paradise. There they were the first to know God, the first to walk with him, and the first to leave him.