al-Baqara 2:31-33 — The names

"He taught Adam all the names, then presented them to the angels and said, 'Tell me the names of these, if you are truthful.' They said, 'Glory be to You; we have no knowledge except what You have taught us.'"

Note carefully: Adam's position before the angels is not established by worship. Nor could it have been — the angels already worship without interruption, and they say so themselves.

The position is established by knowledge. And specifically by one kind of knowledge: naming.

What is meant has been debated: the names of things, the faculty of language itself, the realities of beings, or the names of God. The preference of the majority is the first two — the names of things and the capacity to name them.

This preference is worth dwelling on, because naming is no ordinary skill.

To give a thing a name requires the following: to distinguish that thing from its surroundings; to gather its likes into a category; to attach the category to a sound; and to be able to use that sound when the object is not present. The last item is decisive — to be able to speak about what is not there. The past, the future, abstract concepts, things that do not exist, things that might: all rest on this capacity.

This is also the point to which modern research on language points when it separates the human being from other living creatures: many animals communicate, but producing an unlimited number of new sentences and referring to what is not present appears to be peculiar to the human being. That the verse should choose exactly this faculty as the human being's distinguishing attribute is worth noticing.

I do not write this as a claim of miracle — the verse is not doing linguistics. I say only this: with dozens of properties available for defining the human being (power, reason, feeling, worship), what is chosen is naming, and that is a well-aimed choice.

"We have no knowledge except what You have taught us."

This sentence sets out the real difference between the two kinds of being. The angels' knowledge is given and closed: as much as has been given, that much. The human being's knowledge is open-ended: he can learn, err, correct, accumulate.

This openness is a risk as much as a superiority. A creature that can learn can also learn wrongly; a creature that can accumulate accumulates error too. The angels' concern and the human being's superiority are two outcomes of the same capacity.