Two Adams: Adam ha-Rishon and Adam Kadmon

Does Genesis really speak of two Adams?

Genesis 1:26–27 speaks of adam as humanity or the human created in the image of God and immediately adds, “male and female he created them.” Genesis 2:7, by contrast, has God form ha-adam from the dust of the adamah—the ground—and breathe life into it. The difference between the two narrative scenes is real, but the text itself never uses the expression Adam Kadmon and does not name two separate first beings.

Carol Meyers, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture, notes that adam in the early part of the narrative is often best understood as “the human,” with the definite article ha-adam. The proper name Adam becomes unambiguous only later in the story. Genesis 5:1–2 likewise uses adam for humankind, created male and female.

The popular formula “the Adam of Genesis 1 is Adam Kadmon, while the Adam of Genesis 2 is Adam ha-Rishon” is therefore historically too quick. It can function as a later esoteric reading, but it is not a distinction that Genesis itself marks with those names.

Adam ha-Rishon: “the first human,” not a second secret Adam

Rabbinic literature often uses the expression Adam ha-Rishon—literally “Adam the first,” or “the first human.” Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5, for example, explains why “Adam, the first human” was created alone: among its reasons is that no one should be able to claim that his ancestor was greater than another’s. Adam functions here as humanity’s common beginning and as an ethical argument for human equality.

The expression therefore does not designate a being set over against the Adam of Genesis. It is a rabbinic designation for the same primordial human, about whom rabbis then tell and debate new things. Midrashic and Talmudic interpretations can assign Adam traits absent from Genesis, but that produces an expanded reception of the biblical figure, not a second biblical person.

The distinction matters because the phrase “first Adam” can make it sound as though a “second Adam” must follow. In rabbinic usage, ha-Rishon primarily marks priority: the first human in the sequence of humankind.

When Adam becomes as large as the world

Talmudic imagination dramatically expands the biblical Adam. Sanhedrin 38b preserves traditions in which the material for his body comes from across the earth and in which Adam ha-Rishon spans “from one end of the world to the other,” or from earth to the firmament. After sin, God is said to diminish him.

Such images are an important stage in the history of the cosmic human. Adam is no longer merely an individual at the beginning of a genealogy but a body in which the whole world is symbolically mirrored. Peter Schäfer and Karmen MacKendrick both draw attention to rabbinic and later Jewish traditions in which the primal human becomes a macro-anthropos or microcosmic figure whose boundaries touch those of creation.

Yet another brake is necessary. The cosmic Adam of particular rabbinic traditions is not automatically Adam Kadmon in the later technical kabbalistic sense. It creates a related symbolic field from which later mystics could draw, but it is not yet the developed system of sefirot and emanations.

Two faces: male and female before division

Berakhot 61a preserves another famous interpretation. Rabbi Yirmeya ben Elazar says that God created Adam ha-Rishon with two faces or two sides (du partzufin), male and female in a single body, and then divided them. The reading connects Genesis 1:27—“male and female he created them”—with Genesis 2, where the woman is formed from Adam’s ṣelaʿ.

This interpretation shows how rabbinic exegesis can reconcile two formulations in Genesis by imagining a primordial unity that is later divided. But again, it does not posit two Adams. It speaks of one primordial human with a double structure, from which man and woman emerge.

Later mysticism will incorporate related motifs of polarity, union, and division into a much wider symbolism of divine configurations. Historically, however, it is safer to speak of motif-level continuity than to equate “androgynous Adam” directly with Adam Kadmon.

Philo: heavenly and earthly humanity before Kabbalah

Already in the first century, Philo of Alexandria read the two creation accounts through a Platonic lens. For him, the human “in the image of God” can be an intelligible, incorporeal pattern, whereas the human formed from dust is sense-perceptible and composed of body and soul. This gives us a very early Jewish scheme of heavenly or intelligible humanity and earthly humanity.

The parallel matters because it shows that speculation about a supernal human prototype was not invented by medieval Kabbalah. Philo’s framework, however, is primarily biblical-Platonic. Baudouin Decharneux situates it within Philo’s broader thinking about creation, Logos, and divine powers; the intelligible human should therefore not simply be renamed the later Adam Kadmon.

The history of the idea looks more like a river with several tributaries than a single straight genealogy. The vocabulary of a “heavenly human” is ancient; the technical kabbalistic architecture of Adam Kadmon is much later.

Paul: the first Adam and the last Adam

Another ancient “two Adams” scheme appears in 1 Corinthians 15:45–49. Paul distinguishes the first Adam, a “living being” and “from the earth,” from the last Adam, Christ, associated with life-giving spirit and the heavenly. This is a Christological and eschatological interpretation of Adam, not a kabbalistic doctrine.

The resemblance to Philonic language does not establish a simple identity. Research on the origin of Paul’s two-Adam scheme points to Jewish exegesis of Genesis and the wider Hellenistic environment, while Paul’s narrative direction is distinctive: the earthly comes first, then the spiritual. His “second” or “last Adam” is Christ, not Adam Kadmon.

This provides a useful methodological test. If every heavenly or second Adam is placed under the label Adam Kadmon, we lose the very thing we are trying to study: different historical systems that used the same biblical figure to answer different questions.

Before Kabbalah: heavenly bodies, measurements, and early Jewish mysticism

Between the rabbinic period and medieval Kabbalah lies another important layer of early Jewish mysticism. Hekhalot and Merkavah texts developed over a long period; Daphna Arbel stresses that the corpus is composite and that its developed forms are commonly placed roughly between the fourth and ninth centuries, although they preserve older traditions.

Especially relevant here is Shiʿur Qomah literature, which describes the divine body using staggering cosmic measurements. Marla Segol treats it as an early strand of Jewish bodily and cosmic symbolism. The later kabbalistic use of the human form as a structure of divine powers therefore did not arise in an intellectual vacuum.

But once more, relationship is not identity. Shiʿur Qomah, the rabbinic cosmic Adam, and medieval Adam Kadmon belong to different corpora and different periods. They can be compared as part of a history of anthropomorphic thinking without turning them into one unchanged secret doctrine transmitted intact for a millennium.

When does Adam Kadmon appear?

This is the crucial chronological divide. Joseph Dan, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture, summarizes Adam Kadmon—“primordial man”—as a kabbalistic term characteristic of the thirteenth century and later. It denotes the highest or hidden totality of divine powers when conceived in anthropomorphic form.

That fits the broader history of Kabbalah. Gershom Scholem located the emergence of Kabbalah as a recognizable medieval movement in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Provence and Spain. Oded Yisraeli, meanwhile, shows that medieval kabbalists themselves told several different stories about their origins: some linked the wisdom to Moses, others to Elijah, and some even to Adam.

This is a crucial distinction between an internal traditional genealogy and the historical dating of texts and concepts. The claim that kabbalistic wisdom went back to Adam is itself valuable historical evidence for how medieval kabbalists understood the authority of their tradition; it is not independent proof that the technical concept Adam Kadmon is documented in the period when Genesis was composed.

The Zohar and the Lurianic turn: the human as cosmic architecture

Zoharic literature greatly expanded the anthropomorphic language of the sefirot. Modern historical scholarship associates the core formation of the Zohar chiefly with late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Castile, although traditional attribution connects it to the second-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai. Pinchas Giller and Boaz Huss emphasize both the complex composition of the Zohar and its later canonization and enormous influence.

In sixteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah, Adam Kadmon becomes a more precisely defined cosmic stage. In Etz Chaim, the tradition of Isaac Luria’s teachings recorded by Hayyim Vital, Adam Kadmon is the collective form of the first ten sefirot or the first emanated configuration after the divine infinity, Ein Sof. Further worlds and configurations unfold from its symbolic human structure.

Adam Kadmon is therefore not simply “a giant human who lived before Adam.” In this system it is a metaphysical map of emanation, a symbolic human form in which the cosmos is organized. Nor is it precise to identify Adam Kadmon simply with Ein Sof: the Lurianic system distinguishes them—the former is a primordial emanated configuration, not the infinite divine source itself.

Adam ha-Rishon and Adam Kadmon: the same person or different levels?

Once the sources are arranged chronologically, the phrase “two Adams” becomes more useful as a comparison between two levels of symbolism than as a claim about two prehistoric people. The earthly Adam remains the first human and a figure of human history; Adam Kadmon in Kabbalah represents a supernal structure of divine emanation. Later kabbalists can establish analogies between them, but analogy is not identity.

The table shows how two true statements can create a false conclusion: rabbinic literature really does know a cosmically enlarged Adam, and Kabbalah really does know Adam Kadmon. But between them stand centuries of development, several different textual corpora, and a major change in the function of the idea.

From Jewish Kabbalah to later esotericism—and what remains of the “two Adams”?

From the Renaissance onward, Christian kabbalists translated Jewish mystical concepts into their own theological systems. Peter Forshaw shows how Pico della Mirandola, Reuchlin, and later authors interpreted kabbalistic materials within Christian frameworks. In such receptions Adam Kadmon could be drawn toward Christ, Logos, or a universal human archetype. Still later Western esoteric traditions blended these identifications further.

Whenever a modern diagram combines Genesis, Philo, Paul, the Zohar, Luria, and occultism in a single chart, we should therefore ask: from which century does each connecting line come? The diagram may be philosophically or spiritually meaningful without being a historical map of how the concept developed.

The narrow conclusion is comparatively clear. Adam ha-Rishon and Adam Kadmon are not two biological Adams in Genesis. The former is a rabbinic designation for the biblical first human; the latter is a later kabbalistic cosmic concept with older motif-level antecedents, but its characteristic technical form belongs to medieval and especially Lurianic Kabbalah. The more interesting question remains open: when traditions repeatedly describe the universe in human form, are they explaining the cosmos through the human—or the human through the cosmos?