The Pre-Adamic Race

.... In creating the entire universe, God's crowning achievement was mankind, whom He made in His own image. But according to a new doctrine, the same Biblical passage explains the origin of demons. For when God created Adam and Eve, the Scriptures say:

.... "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

(Gen 1:28 KJV)

.... According to the popular new teaching, this passage hints at another race of men who inhabited the earth before Adam and Eve. God was displeased with them and destroyed them (it is said,) so that Genesis 1:28 actually speaks of His starting over. And the disembodied spirits of those original beings became the demons of today.

  .... At first glance, one might wonder how this passage could support such a conclusion. It is entirely based on the word ‘replenish’, which appears only in the King James translation. To ‘replenish’ the earth, it is argued, means that the earth had once been full, was then depleted, and was now being ‘re-filled’. Thus, a prior existence is suggested and the rest in conjectured. But is that what the passage really implies? 

.... The Hebrew word in question is the word ‘male’ (pronounced ‘maw-lay’) which simply means ‘to fill’. It does not imply a second or subsequent filling at all, and all other modern Bibles have corrected this error in translation. 

.... So it is simply that the King James translators made an unfortunate choice of words. Since this was the only place in the Bible where such a thought could remotely be sustained, correcting it leaves the doctrine of a pre-Adamic race unsupported, and the part about those pre-humans becoming demonic spirits was conjectured from the beginning. Actually, the Bible teaches that demons are fallen angels and were never men at all – Matt 25:41; Rev 12:4. .

.... But let's prove this further. Even if there had been a pre-adamic race, God would not have destroyed them utterly. That would be an admission that He'd made a mistake in creating them in the first place; an admission that He was imperfect and short-sighted in His creation. Instead, if such a race had existed and they went too far astray, God would have destroyed the majority yet worked with them to save a remnant – as He did in destroying the vast majority of mankind through the flood, though He saved the race itself through Noah (see Rom 11:2-5). 

.... In that episode, even the animals were saved. Why not save a whole race of mankind? This is consistent with God’s character and would therefore be the truth of the matter :

.... "For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob."

(Mal 3:6; c.f. Num 14:12, 2 Pet 2:5-9, Mark 13:20)

.... The final argument on this point is the simplest and most profound. When God created mankind, He called the first man ‘Adam’, which simply means ‘Man’. This implies that ‘Adam’ was a unique description, something that would distinguish him from any other being that existed, or had existed before him. In fact, 1 Corinthians 15:45 calls Adam ‘the first man’. 

.... Thus when Jesus came, He was called ‘the second Adam’, or ‘the second man’ (1 Cor 15:45-48). Adam was first, and Jesus was second. But if a pre-adamic race had really existed, wouldn’t Adam have been the second man, and Jesus the third?

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