Adam Kadmon and the Primordial Human | Foundations

This essay exists to stop the series from calling every Adam the same man. The Metaphysical Interpretations of the Garden of Eden essay read ha-adam as…

This essay exists to stop the series from calling every Adam the same man. The Metaphysical Interpretations of the Garden of Eden essay read ha-adam as "the earthling," formed from adamah, the ground, and it gave one short section to Adam Kadmon with a caution against projecting a Lurianic doctrine back into Genesis. Geometry Made Flesh read the image of God, once, as reflexive consciousness: creation developing the capacity to recognize and participate in its own order. This essay tells the history between those two claims. It does so slowly, because the history is easy to compress into a single "primordial man" who appears everywhere, and that compression is precisely what the sources do not permit.

Four figures, introduced as four

Before any argument, the reader needs four names held apart.

The adam of Genesis. In Genesis 1, God makes "humankind" (Hebrew adam, a collective noun here, followed by "them") in the divine image and likeness. In Genesis 2, God forms "the man" (ha-adam) from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. These are two biblical accounts of one creature: an earthling, made of soil and breath, and a bearer of the image. Neither is yet a cosmic structure.

Philo's heavenly and earthly human. Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher writing in Greek in the first half of the first century CE, read the two Genesis accounts as describing two different humans: one "after the image," incorporeal and intelligible; the other molded from clay, embodied and mortal. This is the first systematic doubling of Adam on record, and it is a Platonizing reading.

Paul's last Adam. Paul, writing to the church at Corinth in the mid-50s CE, contrasts "the first man, Adam," who "became a living being," with "the last Adam," Christ, who "became a life-giving spirit" (1 Corinthians 15:45). This figure belongs to an argument about resurrection and the end of history. It is not a doctrine of emanation.

The Lurianic Adam Kadmon. In the kabbalistic system taught by Isaac Luria in Safed (in the Galilee) between about 1570 and 1572 and written down above all by his student Hayyim Vital, Adam Kadmon, "primordial man," is the first configuration of divine light after God's self-contraction, from whose features the lights of the sefirot (the ten aspects of divine life in Kabbalah) issue. This is a technical term inside a specific medieval and early modern Jewish mystical system.

The earthling, the doubled human, the eschatological human, and the configuration of light: four figures, from four settings, solving four problems. Anyone who cannot keep them apart is not ready to read the middle of this essay, and the middle is where the real history happens.

The image and the earthling

Genesis 1:26–27 reads in the NRSV: "Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.' So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." The key Hebrew nouns are tselem, image, and demut, likeness.

Genesis 2:7 reads: "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." The pun between ha-adam and ha-adamah is the text's own; the Eden essay already used it. "Living being" translates nefesh ḥayyah, the same phrase Genesis uses of animals (1:20, 1:24); the human does not become a different kind of substance by receiving breath. It becomes alive.

What does "image of God" most defensibly mean in Genesis? This essay relies on J. Richard Middleton, whose The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (2005) and whose later summary article, "Image of God," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology (2015), set out the options clearly. Middleton distinguishes three families of interpretation. The "substantialistic" reading, dominant in Christian theology from the patristic period into the twentieth century, identifies the image with the rational mind, a reading he describes as "dependent on Platonism." A "relational" reading, associated especially with Karl Barth, locates the image in the human capacity for relationship with God and with one another. The "royal-functional" reading, which Middleton argues is the dominant paradigm among Old Testament scholars, reads the image against ancient Near Eastern royal ideology, in which kings were called "the image" of particular gods and cult statues were sites of divine presence. On this reading, "embodied humanity is portrayed as responsible for administering the earthly realm as the creator's authorized representatives, with delegated power."

It matters what Middleton refuses. He refuses to let the image mean an immaterial substance hidden inside the body, because that reading imports a later metaphysics into a text that has none. He also records dissent honestly: Claus Westermann held a modified relational view, and James Barr judged the image to be "intentionally unspecified in Genesis." This essay does not need to choose among the specialists to make its point. On none of their readings does Genesis 1 describe a cosmic anthropos. The image is a status and a vocation given to an embodied creature, male and female, who remains the image after the disobedience of Genesis 3 (Genesis 5:1–3) and whose image grounds the prohibition of murder: "Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person's blood be shed; for in his own image God made humankind" (Genesis 9:6, NRSV).

The plural "let us" can be taken only as far as a commentary will carry it. It has been read as a plural of majesty, as God addressing a heavenly court (compare the scenes of the divine council in 1 Kings 22:19–22 and Isaiah 6:8), and, by Christian theologians including Barth, as a distant anticipation of the Trinity. Philo had his own answer, which is instructive: God made the human with "assistants," he suggests, so that human vice could be attributed to them and not to the Father (On the Creation 72–75). The text supports none of these strongly enough to build a doctrine on it, and this essay builds nothing on it.

So the canonical biblical claims are two: the human is an image, and the human is an earthling. Geometry Made Flesh read the image, within the Mystic Sage system, as reflexive consciousness. That is a synthesis, offered as such; it sits closest to the substantialistic family Middleton criticizes, and the essay should be honest about that tension. What Genesis itself offers is quieter: a creature of soil and breath given a royal and representative dignity. It is not yet a cosmos in human shape.

Philo's two humans

Philo is the true hinge between the Bible and later metaphysics, and he deserves more than a sentence. He lived in Alexandria, the great Greek-speaking city of Roman Egypt, from roughly 20 BCE to roughly 50 CE, and he wrote a long series of treatises interpreting the Greek Torah through the philosophy of his day, chiefly a Platonism with Stoic and Pythagorean elements. Two of those treatises matter here: On the Creation of the World (De opificio mundi) and the Allegorical Interpretation (Legum allegoriae). This essay quotes C. D. Yonge's nineteenth-century translation, which is public domain; the Loeb Classical Library translation by F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker is the scholarly standard and should be consulted for any further work.

Philo noticed what modern readers notice: Genesis tells the creation of the human twice. Where modern source criticism attributes the doubling to two sources, Philo attributes it to two objects. In On the Creation 134 he writes that the formation from clay in Genesis 2:7 shows "that there is a vast difference between man as generated now, and the first man who was made according to the image of God. For man as formed now is perceptible to the external senses, partaking of qualities, consisting of body and soul, man or woman, by nature mortal. But man, made according to the image of God, was an idea, or a genus, or a seal, perceptible only by the intellect, incorporeal, neither male nor female, imperishable by nature."

In the Allegorical Interpretation (1.31) he states the distinction more sharply: "The races of men are twofold; for one is the heavenly man, and the other the earthly man. Now the heavenly man, as being born in the image of God, has no participation in any corruptible or earthlike essence. But the earthly man is made of loose material, which he calls a lump of clay." He then reads the earthly man allegorically as "the mind which is to be infused into the body, but which has not yet been so infused," a mind that "would be really earthly and corruptible, if it were not that God had breathed into it the spirit of genuine life" (1.32).

Three features of Philo's reading need to be seen precisely, because each will be inherited and transformed.

First, the heavenly human is an idea. Philo's whole cosmology in On the Creation is built on the Platonic distinction between an intelligible world and a sensible world: God first conceives "that world which is perceptible only by the intellect" as an architect conceives a city, and then builds the visible world on that model (16–19). The image of God, for Philo, is first of all the divine Reason, the Logos, and the human mind is an image of that image (25, 31, 69). "Let no one think that he is able to judge of this likeness from the characters of the body," he writes; "for neither is God a being with the form of a man, nor is the human body like the form of God; but the resemblance is spoken of with reference to the most important part of the soul, namely, the mind" (69). Philo's heavenly human is not a giant body. It is a pattern.

Second, the heavenly human is "neither male nor female." Genesis 1:27 says "male and female he created them." Philo reads the sentence as describing a genus not yet divided into individuals. The doubled outline in this essay's image is drawn to show that Philo did not double the body; he doubled the human into a sexless idea and an embodied, sexed creature.

Third, the earthly human is not despised. This is often missed. Philo calls the first molded human "most excellent in both particulars, in both soul and body," made from the purest clay, "an abode or sacred temple for a reasonable soul," and endowed with fitting proportions and beauty (136–139). He does place the intelligible above the sensible, and the soul above the body; that ranking is the Platonic inheritance. But he does not call the body a mistake.

What Philo shows, then, is that by the first century a Jewish interpreter could read Genesis as describing a human archetype prior to the human body, and could call it heavenly. What Philo does not show is a cosmic body, a structure of divine powers in human form, or any of the later kabbalistic apparatus. Scholarship has long debated how directly Philo's ideas reached later Jewish mysticism; his works were preserved by Christians rather than by the rabbis, and a direct line from Alexandria to medieval Castile cannot simply be assumed. Philo is the hinge because he is the first to turn Genesis's double account into a doctrine of two humans. He is not the ancestor of everything that turned afterward.

Paul's last Adam

Paul's contrast between Adam and Christ appears in two letters, Romans 5:12–21 and 1 Corinthians 15. The fuller anthropological passage is in 1 Corinthians, written around the mid-50s CE, probably from Ephesus, to a congregation in which "some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead" (15:12). That is the problem Paul is solving. He is not explaining how the world emanated from God. He is arguing that the dead will be raised bodily, and that the body raised will differ from the body buried.

He builds the argument through contrasts. "What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable … It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body" (15:42–44). Then he turns to Genesis 2:7: "Thus it is written, 'The first man, Adam, became a living being'; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven" (15:45–49, NRSV). The Greek words behind "physical" and "spiritual" are psychikos and pneumatikos, "soulish" and "spiritual"; the NRSV's "physical" can mislead, since Paul is contrasting a body animated by ordinary life-breath with a body animated by God's Spirit, not matter with immateriality.

The resemblance to Philo is obvious: a heavenly human and an earthly one, both read from Genesis. The difference is decisive. Philo's heavenly human comes first, as idea; the earthly one comes second, as copy. Paul insists on the reverse order: "it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual." Many Pauline scholars read that sentence as a deliberate correction of an exegetical tradition like Philo's, possibly current among some Corinthians. Whether Paul knew Philo's writings is not established, and this essay does not claim it. What the text establishes is that Paul's heavenly human is Christ, risen and expected, and that his "man of heaven" is last, not first. The movement is from earth to resurrection, not from archetype to fall.

Paul would have recognized some things in the phrase "Adam Kadmon." He used Adam as a corporate figure: "for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ" (15:22); in Romans, Adam is "a type of the one who was to come" (5:14). The idea that one human figure can contain or represent many would not have been foreign to him. He would not have recognized a primordial configuration of divine light that precedes creation, emanates the structure of divinity, and whose human counterpart is the biblical Adam. His Adam is made of dust; his last Adam is a particular crucified and risen person. A writer who calls Christ "the Adam Kadmon of Christianity" has merged an eschatological argument with a sixteenth-century emanation system, and the merger is the writer's, not Paul's.

A measured body, described modestly

Between Paul and the Zohar lies a body of Jewish mystical literature that bears on this history and is easy to sensationalize. It can be described accurately and briefly, and only that.

The Shi'ur Qomah, literally "the measure of the stature" or, as Gershom Scholem rendered it, "Measure of the Body (namely of the body of God)," is a group of related texts that describe the dimensions of a divine body seen on the heavenly throne, giving enormous measurements for its limbs together with secret names. Scholem, in the second lecture of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), called it the most paradoxical of the early mystical tracts and noted that "from the very beginning, the frank and almost provocative anthropomorphism of the Shiur Komah aroused the bitterest antagonism" among Jewish rational theologians, while later kabbalists read it as a symbol of profound vision.

The texts' date and meaning are contested, and the dispute is the essential fact. Heinrich Graetz in the nineteenth century had treated the Shi'ur Qomah as a late composition influenced by Islamic anthropomorphism. Scholem rejected this as "entirely fallacious," placed Shi'ur Qomah speculation among "the older possessions" of the early hekhalot ("palaces") literature, and argued that the measurements referred not to the divine essence but to its visible "glory," the "figure similar to that of a man" that Ezekiel saw above the throne (Ezekiel 1:26: "something that seemed like a human form," NRSV). Martin Samuel Cohen's The Shi'ur Qomah: Liturgy and Theurgy in Pre-Kabbalistic Jewish Mysticism (1983) argued that the extant texts are a post-Talmudic reworking of an earlier core. Scholem also raised the possibility of a link with Iranian "primordial man" speculation; that suggestion is his, and it remains a hypothesis.

What can be said responsibly is this. Late antique or early medieval Jewish visionary literature contains texts that describe a divine figure in human form and assign it measurements; these texts are historically contested; they are not the Lurianic doctrine of Adam Kadmon, which they precede by many centuries; and they are not a prompt for practice. This essay does not reproduce their measurements or names, because the measurements carry meaning only within the visionary and liturgical setting the texts presuppose, and because isolated numbers invite exactly the kind of decontextualized use the brief for this series refuses. The point for this history is narrower: a Jewish tradition of imagining divine glory in human form existed well before the Zohar, and it was controversial from the start.

The Zohar's supernal Adam

The Zohar ("Radiance") is the central work of medieval Kabbalah: a vast Aramaic commentary on the Torah, framed as the teachings of the second-century sage Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai and his companions. Traditional Jewish communities have long received it under that attribution, and many still do. Modern scholarship, since Scholem's fifth lecture in Major Trends, places its composition in Castile in the late thirteenth century, with the Castilian kabbalist Moses de León as the principal figure. Scholem argued for de León as essentially the sole author.

This essay takes Yehuda Liebes as its Zohar scholar, for one specific purpose. In "How the Zohar Was Written" (in Studies in the Zohar, SUNY, 1993), Liebes argued that the Zohar is the product of a circle of Castilian kabbalists rather than of one man, with de León as a central but not solitary contributor. Later scholars have extended the argument in other directions; Daniel Abrams has argued that "the Zohar" as a single book is partly a creation of its sixteenth-century printers. The limit of Liebes's approach, for this essay, is that it is a historical and philological reconstruction of authorship drawn from clues inside the text; it tells us who wrote and in what setting, and this essay does not attribute to Liebes any further claim about the meaning of the Zohar's anthropos. The consensus that matters here, and that Liebes shares with Scholem, is the date and place: late-thirteenth-century Castile, not second-century Galilee.

What does "primordial" human language actually do in the Zohar? Here the essay relies on Scholem, and labels it as Scholem. In his Encyclopaedia Judaica entry "Adam Kadmon," he notes that early Kabbalah speaks of adam elyon, "supreme man," and that the Zohar's Aramaic equivalents are adam di-l'ela or adam ila'ah, "the man above," and in places adam kadma'ah ila'ah, "the primordial supreme man." The term sometimes names "the totality of the Divine emanation in the ten Sefirot," and sometimes a single sefirah. The term "Adam Kadmon" itself, Scholem reports, first appears in an early-thirteenth-century treatise, Sod Yedi'at ha-Metsi'ut, and in the later Zoharic stratum called Tikkunei Zohar; it is not the Zohar's main vocabulary.

The function of this language, in Scholem's account in Major Trends, is symbolic: the world of the sefirot "is capable of being visualized under the image of man," so that "the limbs of the human body … are nothing but images of a certain spiritual mode of existence which manifests itself in the symbolic figure of Adam Kadmon." Scholem immediately adds the kabbalistic limit: "the Divine Being Himself cannot be expressed. All that can be expressed are His symbols." The human form is not a picture of God's essence. It is a symbolic grammar for speaking of the manifested structure of divine life, and the human body, in turn, is read as an image of that grammar.

That is a genuine expansion of Genesis. Genesis gives an earthling who is an image; the Zohar reads the image backward into God, so that the divine life itself has a human shape at the level of its manifestation, and the human body becomes a text in which that shape can be read. The expansion is real, important, and medieval. It is not a definition of the Hebrew word tselem.

Adam Kadmon in Luria and Vital

Isaac Luria (1534–1572), called the Ari, taught a small circle in Safed for roughly two years before his death. He wrote little. His teaching survives chiefly through his disciple Hayyim Vital (1542–1620), whose Ets Ḥayyim ("Tree of Life") became the main exposition of the Lurianic system. Lawrence Fine's Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford, 2003) is the best guide in English to that circle as a living community of practice; Scholem's seventh lecture in Major Trends remains the classic account of the doctrine. What follows is an accurate paragraph a non-specialist can reread, not a course.

In the Lurianic account, creation begins with tsimtsum, a self-contraction or withdrawal by which the infinite, Ein Sof, makes room within itself for anything other than itself. Into that primordial space a single beam of divine light enters. Scholem summarizes: "the first being which emanated from the light was Adam Kadmon, the 'primordial man.' Adam Kadmon is nothing but a first configuration of the divine light which flows from the essence of En-Sof into the primeval space of the Tsimtsum … He therefore is the first and highest form in which the divinity begins to manifest itself after the Tsimtsum. From his eyes, mouth, ears and nose, the lights of the Sefiroth burst forth." The lights from some of these features stay unified; the lights from the eyes emerge as separated points that require "vessels" to contain them. The vessels cannot hold the light and break, the shevirat ha-kelim, "breaking of the vessels," scattering sparks of divine light into the lower realms. The repair of that breakage, tikkun, is the task in which divine and human action participate. In the restored structure, the sefirot are reorganized into configurations called partsufim, "faces" or "countenances," whose formation Lurianic texts describe, as Scholem notes, in images of conception, gestation, birth, and growth.

Two features of this system matter for the history of the primordial human.

First, Adam Kadmon in Luria is above everything humans can name. Scholem's encyclopedia entry calls it "the most sublime manifestation of the Deity that is to some extent accessible to human meditation," ranking "higher in this system than all four worlds" of emanation, creation, formation, and making. It is not a person, not a prototype of a human individual, and not the biblical Adam.

Second, the system nonetheless maps the biblical Adam onto it. Scholem reports that in Luria's anthropology "Man, as he was before his fall, is conceived as a Cosmic being which contains the whole world in itself," and that "Adam ha-Rishon, the Adam of the Bible, corresponds on the anthropological plane to Adam Kadmon, the ontological primary man," so that, in Vital's words as Scholem renders them, "the one is the clothing and the veil of the other." The human form is thus a mediation: the first human, before the sin, was a cosmic structure in whom the scattered sparks were to be gathered, and the sin of Adam deepened the breakage that human action must now help repair.

That is what Adam Kadmon is in Vital's scheme: the first configuration of divine light after the contraction, the source from which the sefirotic lights issue, with a corresponding human Adam who was meant to be the cosmic mediator of repair. It is a sixteenth-century doctrine, developed in Safed in the generations after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.

Whether that historical setting explains the doctrine is a real scholarly disagreement and should be left standing. Scholem, in Major Trends and later work, read the Lurianic myth of exile, breakage, and repair as Kabbalah's profound response to the catastrophe of the expulsion, and connected its spread to the messianic movement around Sabbatai Zevi in the seventeenth century. Moshe Idel, in Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) and later studies, challenged that causal chain: Luria himself was of Ashkenazi descent and grew up in Egypt; the Lurianic texts do not refer explicitly to the expulsion; the system's key ideas can be traced to earlier kabbalistic developments; and the spread of Lurianic teaching was slower and narrower than Scholem's narrative required. The disagreement does not change what Adam Kadmon is in the system. It changes what we think the system was for, and that is reason enough not to canonize a single twentieth-century narrative.

A Renaissance microcosm

Microcosm language outside Jewish Kabbalah has its own history, and one witness is enough to date the European esoteric Adam. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486–1535), the German humanist and occult philosopher whom the Eden essay already used for his reading of Adam, Eve, and the serpent as faculties, published the full De occulta philosophia libri tres (Three Books of Occult Philosophy) in 1533. In Book II, chapter 27, titled in the 1651 English translation "Of the proportion, measure, and Harmony of mans body," Agrippa sets out the claim that the human body, as the lesser world, contains the measures and harmonies of the greater one. He relates the body's proportions to the dimensions of Noah's ark and inscribes the outstretched human figure in geometric figures centered on the navel.

Agrippa belongs to a specific environment: Christian humanism of the early sixteenth century, fed by the Florentine revival of Platonism and Hermetic texts, by Christian appropriation of Kabbalah after Pico della Mirandola, and by medieval astrology and natural magic. His microcosmic body is therefore a Christian-Neoplatonic construction, not a Lurianic one; Agrippa wrote before Luria taught, and the two systems did not depend on each other. The famous diagrams of the human figure inscribed in circle and square that circulate with Agrippa's name are his version of a widespread Renaissance motif. Neither they nor any modern occult diagram of the sefirot laid over a human body is biblical, and none is a picture of Philo's heavenly human or Paul's last Adam. If such a diagram appears on this site, it appears as reception history, labeled with its century.

What Mystic Sage can and cannot say

The brief for this essay asked a hard question: which sentence of Mystic Sage doctrine survives without using the term Adam Kadmon at all? The honest answer is the sentence the site most needs.

The living person concentrates relations that exceed the individual. That sentence can be stated without Adam Kadmon, and it rests on materials already established. Geometry Made Flesh argued, as doctrine, that the human being is "a localized expression of a reality that exceeds the individual" and "an organized event," and that each person's identity develops "through relation to other people, environments, memories, languages, and institutions." Genesis supplies the biblical ground in its own terms: an earthling continuous with soil and animals, given breath and a representative dignity on behalf of the whole creation. Middleton's royal-functional reading makes the representative point explicit: the human is the creator's authorized representative in the earthly realm. None of that requires a primordial configuration of light.

What, then, does the term add? It adds three things, and they should be named exactly, so the site does not use the term for atmosphere.

It adds a structural claim about God. In the Zohar and in Luria, the human shape is not only a human property; it is the form in which divine life becomes manifest, at the level of symbol. Genesis does not say this. Mystic Sage may find it illuminating as a correspondence: the human form and the manifested order of reality can be read in each other's terms. It must name that as correspondence, from a medieval and early modern Jewish system, every time.

It adds a theory of mediation. In Luria, the first human was meant to gather and repair what had been scattered, and human action still participates in tikkun. This is closer to Mystic Sage's own participatory doctrine than anything in Philo. The site may cite it as a documented tradition that resembles its synthesis. It may not present Lurianic tikkun as the meaning of Genesis, or present its own participatory doctrine as Lurianic.

It adds a warning. Luria's system places Adam Kadmon above every world and makes it the most sublime manifestation of the divine accessible to meditation. A human reader who is told "you are Adam Kadmon" has been told something the system itself never said of any individual. The biblical Adam corresponds to Adam Kadmon as its "clothing and veil," in Vital's figure; the reader is not the configuration of divine light.

The negative boundary, therefore, is fixed. Mystic Sage will not say that the reader is Adam Kadmon. It will not say that Genesis describes the partsufim, the breaking of the vessels, or the sefirot. It will not lay a diagram of the sefirot on a human body and call it biblical. It will not treat the Shi'ur Qomah as a meditation practice. And it will not use "as above, so below" as an argument; that phrase is a summary of a correspondence, not evidence for one.

The primordial human is a late and profound attempt to say that human form can mean more than one body. Genesis already calls the earthling an image and a living ground. Philo doubles the human into an archetype and a molded creature. Paul makes the heavenly human last rather than first. The Zohar reads the divine life itself in human shape, and Luria builds a cosmos of light and repair through that hint. Mystic Sage may use the hint, and must show its work before it uses the building.

The ethical test of a cosmic human

There is a test that every one of these traditions, read at its best, would accept, and it is sharp enough to state in one paragraph. A cosmic human image that does not produce care for actual humans has failed the image-of-God tradition it claims to extend. Genesis 9:6 grounds the prohibition of murder in the image: the reason not to shed human blood is that God made humankind in the divine image. The Mishnah, compiled in the Land of Israel around 200 CE, draws a microcosmic conclusion from the creation of a single first human, and the conclusion is ethical, not speculative: one who destroys a single soul is regarded as having destroyed an entire world, and one who sustains a single soul as having sustained an entire world; and whereas a human ruler stamps many coins with one seal and they all look alike, "the supreme King of kings … stamped all people with the seal of Adam the first man … and not one of them is similar to another" (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5, William Davidson translation; the printed text restricts the first saying to "a soul from Israel," while important manuscripts read it universally). That is the earliest rabbinic "Adam as a world," and its whole point is that the person in front of you is irreplaceable. If talk of a primordial human makes the speaker more interested in the diagram than in the neighbor, the talk has turned the image of God into an ornament for the self.

The practical test follows from that paragraph. When you say "humanity," ask which human you mean: the earthling formed from soil, the image entrusted with care, the eschatological humanity Paul hoped for, or a cosmic structure in a mystical system. Spiritual speech that cannot answer that question is not yet serious. And when a teaching offers you a cosmic language for the human, ask one more question before you adopt it: does it make the nearby person more visible to you, or less?

Source transparency and further reading

This note lists the four figures as four lineages, with a starting edition for each.

Lineage one: the adam of Genesis. Genesis 1:26–27; 2:7; 5:1–3; 9:6; with Psalm 8:4–6 and Ezekiel 1:26 (NRSV, wording checked against the NRSV Anglicized edition). Starting scholarship: J. Richard Middleton, The Liberating Image: The Imago Dei in Genesis 1 (Brazos, 2005), and "Image of God," in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Theology, vol. 2 (Oxford, 2015), 516–523, which also reports the dissent of Westermann and Barr.

Lineage two: Philo's two humans. Philo of Alexandria, On the Creation of the World 16–25, 69–75, 134–139, and Allegorical Interpretation 1.31–32, quoted from C. D. Yonge's translation (1854–1855, public domain). The Loeb Classical Library edition (trans. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker) is the recommended scholarly text for further work.

Lineage three: Paul's last Adam. 1 Corinthians 15:12, 20–22, 42–49; Romans 5:12–21 (NRSV). The reading of 15:46 as a reversal of a Philonic-type order is a widely held position in Pauline scholarship; whether Paul knew Philo's works is not established.

Lineage four: Adam Kadmon. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), second lecture (on Shi'ur Komah), sixth lecture (on the Zohar's theosophy), and seventh lecture (on Isaac Luria), and his Encyclopaedia Judaica entry "Adam Kadmon." Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos (Stanford, 2003), for Luria's circle as a community of practice. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale, 1988), for the challenge to Scholem's expulsion thesis. Yehuda Liebes, "How the Zohar Was Written," in Studies in the Zohar (SUNY, 1993), for the Zohar's setting and authorship. Martin Samuel Cohen, The Shi'ur Qomah (1983), for the alternative dating of that literature.

Comparative witnesses. Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 (William Davidson translation). Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia (1533), Book II, chapter 27, in the 1651 English translation by "J. F." (consulted through the EEBO and Wikisource texts).

Status of the synthesis. The four figures, their texts, and the scholarly disputes are reported in their own strata. The claims that the living person concentrates relations that exceed the individual, that Adam Kadmon adds a structural claim, a theory of mediation, and a warning, and that a cosmic human image must be tested by care for actual humans are Mystic Sage synthesis. They are not presented as the intent of Genesis, Philo, Paul, the Zohar, or Luria.