[4] Adam is the first human-being aware of God, and features as such in various belief systems (including Judaism, Christianity, Gnosticism and Islam).

[8] Due to the underlying demonization of matter, Gnostic cosmologies depict the body as a form of prison of Adam's soul.

[4] Beyond its use as the name of the first man, the Hebrew word adam is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as "mankind".

[4] Genesis 1 tells of God's creation of the world and its creatures, including the Hebrew word adam, meaning humankind.

[9] The majority view among scholars is that the final text of Genesis dates from the Persian period (the 5th century BCE),[10] but the absence of all the other characters and incidents mentioned in chapters 1–11 of Genesis from the rest of the Hebrew Bible has led a sizeable minority to the conclusion that these chapters were composed much later than those that follow, possibly in the 3rd century BCE.

[4] In Genesis 1:27 "adam" is used in the collective sense, and the interplay between the individual "Adam" and the collective "humankind" is a main literary component to the events that occur in the Garden of Eden, the ambiguous meanings embedded throughout the moral, sexual, and spiritual terms of the narrative reflecting the complexity of the human condition.

Genesis 3, the account of the Fall: A serpent persuades the woman to disobey God's command and eat of the tree of knowledge, which gives wisdom.

Louis Ginzberg retells a midrash that God himself took dust from all four corners of the earth, and with each color (red for the blood, black for the bowels, white for the bones and veins, and green for the pale skin), created Adam.

[20] Her story was greatly developed, during the Middle Ages, in the tradition of Aggadic midrashim, the Zohar and Jewish mysticism.

[20] A 2nd-century BCE Jewish religious work, the Book of Jubilees, tells how Adam had a daughter, Awân, born after Cain and Abel,[24] and another daughter, Azura, born after Seth,[25] and they had nine other sons;[26] Cain married Awân and Seth married Azûrâ, thus accounting for their descendants.

[28] According to the Apocalypse of Moses, which probably originates in first-century CE Jewish literature, the altar of the Temple of Solomon was the centre of the world and the gateway to God's Garden of Eden, and it was here that Adam was both created and buried.

The book cannot be shown to predate the 13th century, but may in parts date back to Late Antiquity, and like other obscure ancient texts such as the Bahir and Sefer Yetzirah, it has been extant in a number of versions.

After these follow two shorter parts entitled "Creation" and "Shi'ur Ḳomah", and after 41a come formulas for amulets and incantations.

[35][19] He did not conceive of this original sin of Adam as being biologically transmitted or that later generations were to be punished for the deeds of a remote ancestor.

[29] The early Christian community adapted this to their own legend of Golgotha, replacing the altar with the place of Jesus's crucifixion.

[39] According to this Christian legend, current in the time of Origen (early 3rd century CE), the holy blood of Christ trickled down and restored to life the father of the human race, who then led the saints who appeared to many in Jerusalem on that day as described in Scripture.

[46] The Shia school of Islam does not even consider that their action was a sin, for obedience and disobedience are possible only on Earth, and not in heaven where the paradise is located.

According to a revelation received by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the community, the Adam mentioned in the Qur'an was born 4,598 years before Muhammad.

[49] The Muslim thinker Nasir Khusraw offers another interpretation of Adam's significance to the Islamic religious tradition.

[51][52] The Druze regard Adam as the first spokesman (natiq), who helped to transmit the foundational teachings of monotheism (tawhid) intended for a larger audience.

[1][2] Some Taoists in the Tang dynasty, inspired by Emperor Taizong's syncretic beliefs and policies encouraging it, viewed the Christian version of Jesus as a redemptive manifestation of "the Way",[54] and respected his ancestors, including Adam, as well.

[56][57] Analysis like the documentary hypothesis also suggests that the text is a result of the compilation of multiple previous traditions, explaining apparent contradictions.

[60] In biology, the most recent common ancestors of humans, when traced back using the Y-chromosome for the male lineage and mitochondrial DNA for the female lineage, are commonly called the Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve respectively as a reference to Adam and Eve.