Angels Bowed to Adam and God Had to Intervene

When God finished creating Adam, the ministering angels looked at him and nearly made the catastrophic error of calling out "Holy" before him. They were that impressed. According to Bereshit Rabbah 8, compiled in fifth-century Palestine, Rabbi Hoshaya describes the angels as so awestruck by this new creature that they almost gave Adam the divine treatment, the proclamation of holiness reserved for God alone.

God had to stop them. The method He used, according to Rabbi Hoshaya's parable, was to cause Adam to fall into sleep. A king and a governor ride together in a chariot, and the people of the province cannot tell which one to honor. The king steps into his carriage and the problem resolves itself. God caused Adam to sleep, and in sleeping, Adam's mortality became visible, and the angels understood the distinction they had almost missed.

But Adam before the sleep was something the angels could not stop staring at. Legends of the Jews, drawing from sources including the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin and the later Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer, records that the first Adam was not the diminished creature who eventually left the garden. He filled the world from one end to the other. His radiance lit the earth. The very fabric of his being was different from what we are now. Only when he sinned did God compress him into the mortal dimensions we occupy.

Eve was not an afterthought. The Ginzberg tradition records that she was not made from Adam so much as taken from him, because only when like is joined to like is the union indissoluble. The Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, the eighth-century Palestinian text, preserves the claim that God Himself was the wedding cantor at Adam and Eve's marriage. He sang the seven wedding blessings, the same blessings sung under the chuppah (wedding canopy) at every Jewish wedding since. Michael and Gabriel served as witnesses. This is where the tradition of celebrating a bride and groom with special blessings came from: it was modeled on the first wedding, attended by God and the angels, before a single human being other than the couple existed on earth.

Adam had a book. Pesikta DeRav Kahana 7, a Palestinian midrash from around the fifth century CE, records a tradition that God's most intimate name, the four-letter name, was revealed to Adam specifically, because Adam was the first creature capable of receiving it and keeping it. The angels knew divine names, but they were assigned their names as functions. Adam was taught the divine names as a gift, as an act of divine intimacy. Rabbi Acha, in the Pesikta, reads Isaiah 42:8 as God saying: "I gave My name to Adam. I did not give it to any graven image."

The book that contained this and other wisdom disappeared when Adam died. Legends of the Jews records that upon Adam's death, the holy book he had possessed was taken and hidden in a cave. The location of the cave was later revealed to Enoch in a dream, and from that book Enoch drew his knowledge of the earth, the heavens, and the movements of time. The book traveled: from Adam to Enoch, from Enoch through a chain of transmission that ended, eventually, with Solomon, who used its wisdom to speak with animals, command winds, and build the Temple in seven years.

What these traditions hold together is a picture of Adam as the first point in a great chain of knowledge, not just a creature who fell. He received divine names. Angels almost worshipped him. God sang at his wedding. He possessed a book that encoded the structure of creation. Then mortality arrived, and the book went underground, and the chain had to be passed more carefully, generation by generation, hidden in dreams and caves, until the right person could receive it again.

The Ginzberg tradition traces the book through history: Adam to Enoch, Enoch to Noah, Noah through the patriarchal line, eventually to Solomon, who used its wisdom to speak with animals and build the Temple. But what the same Ginzberg passage notes about Adam's original stature is that the chain represents a diminishment as much as a transmission. The Adam who filled the world from end to end, whose radiance illuminated the earth, was compressed into mortal form at the moment of sin. What was passed down through the generations was not Adam's full stature. It was whatever could survive the compression. The angels who had almost bowed to Adam in awe were watching a being who would shrink. The book that vanished at his death was the record of what he had been at his largest. Every generation since has been trying to recover some portion of it. The tradition of the wedding blessings preserved this aspiration: at every marriage ceremony, for a moment, the world was arranged the way it had been at Adam and Eve's wedding, with God singing and angels bearing witness, and the compressed human being briefly remembered what it had been like to stand at full height before a creation that had not yet heard the word of judgment.