Either with or without a knowledge of Hebrew (I had one year of it
in seminary, and survived!), I think that placing the weight of a "new"
interpretation of the 'adam vocabulary on the presence or absence of a
definite article is pretty risky stuff. You must ask yourself if the
average ancient Hebrew, listening to the reading of the Pentateuch, would
have caught from such a subtlety the message: "Ah, here God is referring
to some creature much more primitive than I existing milllions of years
ago, and HERE God is referring to my great, great, great (etc.) grand-
father Adam, who had the capability of naming the animals and of under-
standing the difference between obedience and disobedience to a divine
command." Sorry, I ain't buying it. The first step in hermeneutics is
to consider the range of possible meanings a text COULD HAVE CONCEIVABLY
HELD for its original hearers.
Dennis Durst