ADALIA (Ad'a-lea), (Heb. gt AI, ad-al-yaw', of Persian origin), one of the ten sons of Haman, the enemy of the Jews. He was slain by the Jews under the royal edict at Shushan (Esth. ix:8), B. C. 447.
ADAM (ad'am), (Heb. aw-dawm', red), the word by which the Bible designates the first human being.
It is evident that, in the earliest use of lan guage, the vocal sound employed to designate the first perceived object of any kind would be an ap pellative, and would be formed from something known or apprehended to be a characteristic prop erty of that object. The word would. therefore, be at once the appellative and the proper name. But when other objects of the same kind were dis covered, or subsequently came into existence, diffi culty would be felt it would become necessary to guard against confusion, and the inventive faculty would be called upon to obtain a discriminative term for each and singular individual, while some equally appropriate term would be fixed upon for the whole kind. Different methods of effecting these two purposes might be resorted to, but the most natural would be to retain the original term in its simple state, for the first individual. and to make some modification of it by prefixing an other sound. or by subjoining one, or by altering the vowel or vowels in the body of the word, in order to have a term for the kind, and for the separate individuals of the kind.
This reasoning is exemplified in the first appli cations of the word before us : (Gen. i :26). 'Let us make man [Adam] in our image ;' (i :27), 'And God created the man [the Adam] in his own image.' The next instance (ii :7) expresses the source of derivation, a character or property, namely, the material of which the human body was formed : 'And the Lord God [Jehovah Elo him] formed the man [the Adam] dust from the ground [the adamali].' The meaning of the pri mary word is, most prohably, any kind of reddish tint, as a beautiful human complexion (Lam iv :7) : but its various derivatives arc applied to different objects of a red or brown hue, or ap proaching to such. The word Adam, therefore, is an appellative noun made into a proper one, It is further remarkable that, in all the other in stances in the second and third chapters of Gen esis, which are nineteen, it is pui with the article, the man, or the Adam. It is also to be observed
that, though it occurs very frequently in the Old Testament, and though there is no grammatical difficulty in the way of its being declined by the dual and plural terminations and the pronominal suffixes (as its derivatives dam, blood, is), yet it never undergoes those changes; it is used abundantly to denote man in the general and collective sense—mankind, the human race, but it is never found in the plural number. When the sacred writers design to express men distributively they use either the compound term. sans of men `4, benci adam), or the plural of t1:14 cnosh, or t'8 ish.
1. Unity of the Race. The question of the unity of the human race, or the descent of the race from a single pair, has given rise to much discussion.
It is among the clearest deductions of reason, that men and all dependent beings have been cre ated, that is, produced or brought into their first existence by an intelligent and adequately power ful being. A question, however, arises, of great interest and importance, Did the Almighty Creator produce only one man and one woman, from whom all other human beings have descended ?— or did he create several parental pairs, from whom distinct stocks of men have been derived? The affirmative of the latter position has been main tained by some, and, it must be confessed, not without apparent reason. The manifest and great differences in complexion and figure, which dis tinguish several races of mankind, are supposed to be such as entirely to forbid the conclusion that they have all descended from one father and one mother. The question is usually regarded as equivalent to this : whether there is only one species of men, or there are several. But we can not, in strict fairness, admit that the questions are identical. It is hypothetically conceivable that the Adorable God might give existence to any number of creatures, which should all possess the properties which characterize identity of spe cies, even without such differences as constitute varieties, or with any degree of those differences.