>>>In Genesis 5:2 for instance it says "Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
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>>Two questions. First, was Eve's name Adam, too? Second, what does it mean "call a name something" - a name has a name? Which brings the subquestion: what were their names' names before that?
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>FWIW, "adam" is the Hebrew word for "man." So I read that passage as "and called them 'man'"
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>Tamar

That is true, but it would be circular reasoning to say that "man" was not a name and it is only a common word for the human race. It would be more correct to say "man" is the English word for "Adam", because Hebrew is a much older language than English. (Also "Human" is used in English for the same word.) So from the historic account that means that God called their name "Adam" and subsequently the entire human race was called by that name as common originator, but individual people did receive their own names after that. So when you read the passage in Hebrew you read literally translated into English "he is calling the name of them human", so the word "name of them" exists in the Hebrew text and to remove it from the text would not be correct.