What is the significance of God making man from clay?

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Why does God (and gods in many other myths) create Man from clay? What is the significance of this?
 
NAB footnote:

God is portrayed as a potter molding man’s body out of clay. There is a play on words in Hebrew between adam (“man”) and adama (“ground”). Being: literally, “soul.”

Peace,

Ryan 🙂
 
FuzzyBunny116 said:
Why does God (and gods in many other myths) create Man from clay? What is the significance of this?
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Several things come to mind:
  1. Because man was created from the earth and has his soul breathed into him by God, man is made up of two parts: the physical (natural) and the spiritual (supernatural).
  2. We are not simply a lump of flesh nor are we a “trapped spirit”, we are flesh and spirit together: a soul without a body awaits its body’s resurrection.
  3. God created us from matter, and “God saw that it was good”: matter is not intrinsically evil (as many Gnostics believe).
 
Laudatur Iesus Christus.

When talking to a proponent of “evolution” it maybe more useful to cite the Douay-Rheims translation of the Sacra Vulgata:

And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7 (Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition.)

Spiritus Sapientiae nobiscum.

John Hiner
 
Play-Doh had not been invented yet.
God used what he had available.
 
FuzzyBunny116 said:
Why does God (and gods in many other myths) create Man from clay? What is the significance of this?
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Interesting question. Don’t know that anyone has a full answer – though the general unity of the image in scripture is clear from the preceeding posts.

I would also call attention to the image as talked about in the dead sea scrolls where the seed of man is called clay.

My understanding of many other myths, which competed with Genesis apologetically in the early times – are that most all of them view man a created from the carcass of a slain God or primordial deity. The clay, if any, was a second thought – which is along the lines of golems and other warlike mythical slaves.

We don’t have evidence of cause, or effect, to choosing the image that I know of – that is a fun question to explore if you have the time to read various myths and study what was important and not important to the original author. But here are a couple of ideas that float in my mind with respect to what I have read so far.

to the ancients, in the mesopotamian areas – the esuary and river were intimately associated with life. The exact cause of this reasoning, I am unsure, but none the less the slaugtering of primoridal Gods and the mixing or forming of the pre-existing carcasses is a common theme in many mythologies I have seen.
There also seems to be a preoccupation with visual thinking – appearances of natural things are tied to their origins in some ways.

So, let me cast out a few loose correlations to aid your questioning:

Reddish clay looks quite a bit like skin, (Adamah, “Adam”) esp. to people not quite as “white” as caucasians – eg: miriam’s leprosy was white as snow, so she was not quite that white normally. Also, clay is associated with rivers – the very word meo-potamia means in the middle of the rivers. That word – potamus, is where the word for POTTERY comes from – the same word for “river”. Because examination of rivers will reveal rich deposits of river clay.

Rivers also snake and meander, looking like one of the most common cultic pagan gods known – the serpent. Which also was quite visually fallic to many of the ancients – and so became associated with certain fertility rites – eg: the one done by the Israelites around the Golden Calf in the desert had much sexual overtones to it, and the serpent in the desert also suggests the problem was rampant in the camp.

Also, if you rub clay slip, or “slime” if you will, between your fingers it has a characteristic sticky gelatinous texture very much like a certain bodily fluid of note.

Reading into the OT the image, we find desriptions of God forming man in the womb – the particular word in Greek often being koile (coils / guts) and seldom matri (matrix?) womb in the formal sense. Again, they appear to be fascinated with the similarily in coiling intestines, and the dirt which comes from it – in association with the images of snakes, rivers, and other coiling sources of great virulence and fertility / fertalizer. The flooding of the Nile, and other such rivers, is what depostied the fertile silt for farming and would have been a commonly understood image of fertility.

The image of river clay, is a bit different than porcelain and pure kaolin clays, in that river clay often contains small imperfections, rocks, other items which are part of the clay body – and which reduce the plasticity (moldability) of the clay, and the final color of it when fired (depending on the contents, clay will lighten or darken) — so more so than the image of clay itself, which man often molds images of things in – the river clay also suggests the difficulty of making a good product.

Anyway, I hope these loose thoughts help.

God bless you.
 
Huiou_Theou said:
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Also, if you rub clay slip, or “slime” if you will, between your fingers it has a characteristic sticky gelatinous texture very much like a certain bodily fluid of note.
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Oh. My. Goodness. I’m never going to look at my work the same way again!!! 😊
 
Dust to glorious mankind parallels God’s acts throughout history. He commonly has been known to take what is unworthy, base, tiny, pathetic, and use it to achieve the astounding.

It might also tie to humanity’s rise from the dead, for just as the old man rose from dust, so the new man shall.

Also, I think of it as symbolizing Christ’s saving us from death. Dust is like death, or the grave, or sin, and the new man being created from it is a wondrous thing.
 
aurora77,

Considering I didn’t explicitly mention which bodily fluid …
and, yes, it may have taken some years for the ancients to come to the same conclusion…

Just curious, have you ever had an art collector ask you to make a casting of one of those clay fertility goddesses (replicas) that people sometimes have – or are you more of a brick, or plate maker, or what? I don’t think potters normally blow air into things with their mouths … do they? I mean, it’s odd that these busty fertility gods/goddeses thingies are fire hardened clay – so unlike what we are, a breathing soft being.

Not that I am encouraging the making of Idols for neo-pagans or anything, just thinking of the apologetic value of such images…
 
God is portrayed as a potter molding man’s body out of clay. There is a play on words in Hebrew between adam (“man”) and adama (“ground”). Being: literally, “soul.”
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That the same idea that I have gotten from Jewish sources.

And one think for creationists.
The word creation is used in Hebrew only regarding the creation of heavens and earth. God modeled the humans from preexisting matter.
Ben Mamonides said that the different verbs used meaned that God created the world in a way that the matter was the posibilities to change and even to become alive. As Fransic Collins said, Mamoinides would have accepted the idea of the Big Bang and evolution long before Lamark,Darwin and Father Lemaitre formulated them.
 
inthecloud said:
That the same idea that I have gotten from Jewish sources.

And one think for creationists.
The word creation is used in Hebrew only regarding the creation of heavens and earth. God modeled the humans from preexisting matter.
Ben Mamonides said that the different verbs used meaned that God created the world in a way that the matter was the posibilities to change and even to become alive. As Fransic Collins said, Mamoinides would have accepted the idea of the Big Bang and evolution long before Lamark,Darwin and Father Lemaitre formulated them.
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Do you have a citation for this? I believe you, its just a fascinating insight, and I’d like to read it for myself.
 
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