Table of Contents
A psalm addresses two kinds of people by name.
Both the sons of "Adam," and the sons of "Ish," together rich and poor.
Tehillim (Psalms) 49:3, Judaica Press translation on Chabad.org (short excerpt for review and study)
The Hebrew line reads gam bnei adam gam bnei ish, “both sons of adam, both sons of ish.” Both nouns can simply mean a human being. The BDB lexicon lists “man”, “human being” and “great man” among the senses of ish. The King James Version reads the pair as a contrast in rank, and numbers the verse one lower than the Hebrew text does:
Hear this, all ye people; give ear, all ye inhabitants of the world: Both low and high, rich and poor, together.
Psalms 49:1-2, KJV (Hebrew 49:2-3)
Rashi read the two names as two family lines.
Both the sons of "adam" The sons of Abraham, who was called (Josh. 14:15): "the greatest man (האדם) among the giants"; the sons of Ishmael and the sons of Keturah. and the sons of "ish" The sons of Noah, who was called (Gen. 6:9): "a righteous man (איש צדיק)."
Rashi on Psalms 49:3, trans. Rosenberg, Sefaria, CC-BY (The Judaica Press Complete Tanach with Rashi)
In Rashi’s account, then, both groups still descend from one human family, through Noah and Abraham.
Randolph’s reading in 1863
Paschal Beverly Randolph went much further. His book Pre-Adamite Man (New York: S. Tousey, 1863) argued that humans lived on earth long before Adam. In Randolph’s account, the pairing of adam and ish is evidence of two separate races that the Bible’s editors failed to remove:
Randolph claims the two races appear together over seventy times.
It is somewhat remarkable that those who so delighted in perverting Scripture, and assigning but a single origin to man, should not have taken pains to exclude all those passages which relate to independent and different origins, as, for instance, those already quoted, and such passages as this, from the 33d chapter of Deuteronomy: "Give ear all inhabitants of the world: both sons of Adam, and sons of Ish;" and Isaiah 31st, "Then shall the Assyrian fall... And the sword, not of an Adamite, shall devour him." These two races, of Adam and Ish, are mentioned more than seventy times in the same sentences.
Paschal Beverly Randolph, Pre-Adamite Man (1863), p. 95
Two details in the passage do not match the Bible text. The “give ear” verse is not in Deuteronomy 33. It is the opening of Psalm 49, quoted above. The Isaiah line is real, and its Hebrew does pair lo-ish and lo-adam, “not ish” and “not adam.” The King James Version renders the same verse as a contrast between strong and weak:
Then shall the Assyrian fall with the sword, not of a mighty man; and the sword, not of a mean man, shall devour him: but he shall flee from the sword, and his young men shall be discomfited.
Isaiah 31:8, KJV
In this verse the Assyrians fall by a sword the Hebrew calls neither ish nor adam. The same pair turns up again in Psalm 62, where the King James Version again translates it as “men of low degree” and “men of high degree” (Psalms 62:9, KJV; Hebrew 62:10).
Randolph himself hedged on the page that follows. He credits “a friend at my elbow” for some of these points and admits he “cannot see the indications as plain as he does, not having a copy of the unpointed text of the Bible at hand for verification” (p. 96). The “more than seventy times” figure is his own, and the book gives no list.
His argument belongs to an older debate about the pre-Adamites, going back to Isaac La Peyrère’s Men Before Adam (1656).
