Human Origins
The first assumption one may make about this account of the family of Adam is that it was composed hundreds of years after the first events, and that it is extremely likely that is was an oral recitation long before it was fixed as a written document.
So it is the recollection, passed from generation to generation, of a family that saw itself as the first of their kind. They were special. There was no other family like them. They were the family of 'man'. Adam is the Hebrew for man, and Eve is the Hebrew for living.
So what did this family believe about their first ancestor? This is what I am going to try to express in modern terms.
Here again is the first section:
No plant of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up; for Yahweh God had not caused it to rain on the earth. There was not a man to till the ground, but a mist went up from the earth, and watered the whole surface of the ground. Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
The key sentence is the last one here: Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
It is worth noting that the Hebrew for man (adam) sounds like and may be related to the Hebrew for ground (adamah). The word for breath in the Bible may also be translated 'spirit' (Greek pneuma from which we get pneumatic). So the Adam legend is telling us that the message being passed down from generation to generation is that they are descended from someone special into whom the Lord had breathed His spirit.
In the 21st century we can best understand the source from which the first man was made, adamah, as indicating simply that which was already there. Was this an advanced hominid primate? Was the fashioning of the first homo sapiens simply the infusion of God's spirit, so that he became something uniquely possessed of a soul, with the capacity to relate to the spiritual cosmos?
An interesting comment on this verse comes in Job 32:8, But there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding. The Bible understands that what happened with the in-breathing of God's spirit into the first man was the gift of understanding. This is a vital concept.
When one examines all that is written about human evolution for many the focus seems to be on physical similarities: man shares with the primates opposable thumbs, upright walking, the capacity to use tools, and many other similarities. But what amazes me are the huge intellectual differences: language and writing, and all the modern technology by which the physical book or reading device which you are using to read this, not to mention the house you live in, the car you drive, and all the other components of modern human existence. All this because of the intellectual difference. The Adam legend tells us that this was a divine gift. I find this somewhat less intellectually challenging than a sequence of evolutionary accidents.
Here is a possible retelling in modern terms, deliberately moving from the third person to the first to emphasize that this is a family recollection:
We humans were made special by the eternal
'I AM' through the gift of His spirit, which is what marks us out as different from other animals, as we have a soul.