Rav Acha taught that before Adam was created, God turned to the ministering angels and consulted with them. "Shall we make man?" He asked. The angels answered honestly: "What good will this man be?" God replied, "His wisdom will be greater than yours."
To prove it, on the sixth day God gathered the cattle, the wild beasts, and the birds, and paraded them before the angels. "Name them," He said. The angels could not. Then He called the same animals before Adam. "This is an ox," Adam said, "this is a donkey, this is an eagle" — and the names fit so well that all creation accepted them.
Then God asked Adam, "And you — why is your name Adam?"
"I should be called Adam," he replied, "for I was taken from adamah, the ground." He had understood his own name from his own body.
Then the surprising question. "And what," God asked, "is My name?"
"It is fitting," Adam said, "that You be called Adonai, Lord, for You are Lord over all Your creatures."
Rav Acha drew his proof from Isaiah 42:8: "I am the Lord, that is My name." That is — the very name Adam called Me.
The sages are teaching that naming is the first act of wisdom, and that the human being is the creature who can name even its Creator — not because we invent God, but because God granted us the privilege of answering when He asks.
(From the 1901 Hebraic Literature anthology, drawing on Bereshit Rabbah 17.)