Does the Bible speak of people before Adam and Eve?

Answer 1

A:Bishop Ussher, centuries ago, estimated from The Bible that Adam and Eve were created some six thousand years ago. Of course, we know from science that modern humans lived over two hundred thousand years before the Bible says that Adam and Eve were created, but our purpose is to establish whether anyone existed in biblical terms before Adam and Eve.

We do find that the creation of Adam and Eve is in what is known as the second creation story (Genesis 2:4b-25), and there is another creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:4a). Jewish scholars, early in the Common Era (CE), in trying to harmonise the two accounts decided that the first story might have described people created before Adam. They believed that one of these earlier creations might have been Lilith, who is mentioned in the Book of Isaiah and features elsewhere in Jewish tradition, where she was Adam's first wife.

Christians tend to read the second creation story as the fuller, more detailed account of the creation of man (and woman) that the first story simply reported, ignoring the major disjunctions between the two creation stories, thereby making Adam the first person in both stories.

However, Leon R. Kass (The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis) says that to understand Genesis we must scrupulously avoid reading into the second story any facts or notions taken from the first, and vice versa. He says the second creation story departs from the first not only in content but also in tone, mood and orientation, and the two stories, which had two different authors, are entirely unrelated. As they are two independent stories, neither can be said to have occurred before the other. In biblical terms, there was no one before Adam.

Answer 2

No. Genesis ch.1 is the beginning of the Creation and mentions God having made the first humans. Any later chapters mentioning the first humans, such as Genesis ch.2, are not separate events; they are recaps of the identical happenings in Genesis ch.1, to add further detail. This is the traditional interpretation.