Adapa is one of the great Mesopotamian wisdom figures, often compared to Adam.
In the myth, Adapa is a sage of Eridu, servant of the god Ea or Enki. He is granted wisdom but not immortality. After breaking the wing of the south wind, he is summoned before Anu in heaven. Ea instructs him not to eat or drink what is offered there, warning that it will be the food and water of death. But the food and water are actually the gift of life. Adapa obeys the instruction and loses immortality.
The story stands close to the Adamic pattern: a primordial man, divine wisdom, a heavenly test, food, mortality, and the lost possibility of eternal life. Where Adam eats and falls, Adapa refuses and remains mortal. Both stories turn on the mystery of knowledge, obedience, and life.
Adapa shows that the Adamic story belongs to a wider Near Eastern symbolic world. Mesopotamia remembered the first wise man, the loss of immortality, and the dangerous nearness of divine knowledge.
Adapa is a mirror of Adam: wisdom without full restoration, knowledge without immortality, the sage who stands at the threshold but does not yet return to the Tree of Life.
Library of Light Edition 1.0 — Last revised: May 2026