or a misinterpretation for man and woman.

The majority view among scholars is that the Book of Genesis dates from the Persian Empire (the 5th and 4th centuries BCE), but the absence from the rest of the Hebrew Bible of all the other characters and incidents mentioned in chapters 1-11 of Genesis, (Adam appears only in chapters 1-5, with the exception of a mention at the beginning of the Books of Chronicles where, as in Genesis, he heads the list of Israel's ancestors[3]) has lead a sizeable minority to the conclusion that Genesis 1-11 was composed much later, possibly in the 3rd century BCE.[4]

The bible uses the word אָדָם ( 'adam ) in all of its senses: collectively ("mankind", 1:27), individually (a "man", 2:7), gender nonspecific ("man and woman", 5:1,2), and male (2:23-34).[1] 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.[5] Genesis 2:7 is the first verse where "Adam" takes on the sense of an individual man (the first man), and the context of sex and gender is absent; the gender distinction of "adam" is then reiterated in Genesis 5:1–2 by defining "male and female".[1]

A recurring literary motif is the bond between Adam and the earth ("adamah"): God curses of Adam and the earth, causing Adam to work for his food (3:17), and Adam dies and returns to the earth from which he was taken (3:19).[6] This "earthly" aspect is a component of Adam's identity, and Adam's curse of estrangement from the earth seems to describe humankind's divided nature of being earthly yet separated from nature.[6]