| The first Manifestation
of God to appear on earth in recorded religious history. His dispensation began
the Adamic Cycle. |
| Adam is also considered to be a collective term for the whole of mankind, as in
Genesis 5:1-2: 'In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name
Adam, in the day when they were created.' |
| 'Abdu'l-Bahá has
explained that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve is symbolic: 'Therefore this story
of Adam and Eve who ate from the tree, and their expulsion from Paradise, must be thought
of simply as a symbol. It contains divine mysteries and universal meanings, and it
is capable of marvellous explanations . . . We will explain one of them, and we will
say: Adam signifies the spirit of Adam, and Eve his soul. For in some passages in the
Holy Books where women are mentioned, they represent the soul of man. The tree of good
and evil signifies the human world . . . The meaning of the serpent is attachment to
the human world. This attachment of the spirit to the human world led the soul and
spirit of Adam from the world of freedom to the world of bondage, and caused him to
turn from the Kingdom of Unity to the human world. When the soul and spirit of Adam
entered the human world, he came out from the paradise of freedom and fell into the
world of bondage. From the height of purity and absolute goodness, he entered into
the world of good and evil . . . This is one of the meanings of the Biblical story of
Adam.'10 |
| [BD 8] |
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| Manifestation of God who inaugurated a 6,000 year cycle ending with the Dispensation of the Báb.
"The Faith of Bahá'u'lláh should indeed be regarded, if we wish to be faithful to the tremendous implications
of its message, as the culmination of a cycle, the final stage in a series of successive,
of preliminary and progressive revelations. These, beginning with Adam and ending with
the Báb, have paved the
way and anticipated with an ever-increasing emphasis the advent of that Day of Days
in which He Who is the Promise
of All Ages should be made manifest.' (Shoghi
Effendi, WOB 103). The Guardian further writes of "the rise of the Orb of Bahá'u'lláh's
most sublime Revelation marking the consummation of the six thousand year cycle ushered
in by Adam, glorified by all past prophets and sealed with the blood of the Author
of the Bábí Dispensation.'
(BN, insert dated Oct. 8, 1952). Adam in Persian means man. The Qur'án uses the same phrase for the creation of Adam as for that of Jesus
Christ; cf. 15:29, 66:12, etc.: "breathed of My spirit into him.' |
| [BG 6] |
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| According to the genealogies of Genesis, Adam died at the age of 930, making him the third longest living person next to Noah and Methuselah. With such numbers, calculations such as those of Archbishop Ussher would suggest that Adam would have died only about 127 years before the birth of Noah, nine generations after Adam. In other words, Adam's lifespan would have overlapped with that of Noah's father Lamech by at least fifty years. Ussher and a group of theologians and scholars in 1630 performed calculations and created a study that reported the creation of Adam on October 23, 4004 BC at 9:00 am and lived until 3074 BC. |
| [Wikipedia] |
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