Adam and Eve

• 1. Introduction

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  Adam and Eve are the first man and first woman in the creation myth of the Abrahamic religions. From them flows a startling claim. All of humanity is in essence a single family, with everyone descended from one original pair. Their story sits at the opening of the Book of Genesis, in chapters one through five of the Hebrew Bible. There, two distinct creation narratives sit side by side, telling the beginning of things in two different ways. Yet for a couple so foundational, they are oddly absent from the rest of the Hebrew scriptures. Adam surfaces only once more, in a single genealogical listing in 1 Chronicles 1:1. Eve does not appear again at all. So who were they meant to be, and why does so much rest on a piece of forbidden fruit? Why do Judaism, Christianity, and Islam read the same garden and arrive at such different conclusions? And how did a serpent, a rib, and a tree come to shape doctrines, art, and poetry for thousands of years?

• 2. Two Tellings Of A Beginning

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  In the first creation narrative, Adam and Eve are not named at all. God creates humankind in God's image and tells them to multiply and to act as stewards over everything God has made. The phrasing is collective, "male and female He created them", which reads as a simultaneous creation. The second narrative works very differently. God fashions "the man", ha adam, from the earth, adamah, breathes life into his nostrils, and sets him as caretaker over creation. The wordplay runs deep. Adam means man, Eve means life, and the name for the woman, ishsha, comes from ish, the word for man. There is even a buried pun across languages, since the Sumerian word ti means both 'rib' and 'life'. God then creates an ezer kenegdo, a "helper corresponding to him", from the man's side or rib. The man receives her with joy. From that moment, the text says, a man will leave his parents to cling to a woman, the two becoming one flesh.

• 3. The Forbidden Tree

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  Inside the Garden of Eden, all creation is vegetarian and there is no violence. The man and woman may eat the fruit of every tree except one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A talking serpent, identified in Genesis 3:1 as more crafty than any other animal God had made, draws the woman into conversation. The serpent disputes God's command directly, assuring her she will not die, and that her eyes would be opened so she would "be like God, knowing good and evil". Contrary to the popular version, the woman does not beguile the man into eating. He appears to have been present at the encounter with the serpent the whole time. She sees the fruit is good for food and a delight to the eye, eats, and gives some to the man, who eats also. With that, the two recognize their nakedness and stitch loincloths from fig leaves. They have become god-like in knowing good and evil, gaining the ability to conjure destructive concepts like shame. Notably, Genesis itself never identifies the serpent with Satan.

• 4. Judgment And Exile

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  God's questioning after the eating reads like a courtroom. He calls out to the man with a rhetorical question, and the man hides out of fear, then names the woman as the real offender, even implying God is at fault because the woman was God's gift to him. The woman in turn shifts the blame to the serpent. Three judgments follow in Genesis 3:14 through 19, laid first on the serpent, then the woman, then the man. The serpent is cursed to crawl on its belly. The woman receives pain in childbearing and subordination to a husband who will rule over her. The man receives cursed ground and a death oracle, sealed in a chiasmus that ties his creation from dust to his return: "for dust you are, and to dust, you will return." Only then, abruptly in Genesis 3:20, does the man name the woman "Eve", hawwah, "because she was the mother of all living". The expulsion is precise in its motive. God exiles the couple to keep them from the tree of life, then sets cherubs and a flaming sword, "apparently in constant motion", to guard the way back.

• 5. After The Garden

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  Genesis 4 opens life outside Eden with a birth and a murder. Adam and Eve's first children are Cain and Abel, and the first murder follows. A third son, Seth, is born, and Adam is said to have had other sons and daughters. Genesis 5 traces Adam's line from Seth down to Noah, recording ages at the birth of first sons and at death. Adam's own age at death is given as 930 years. Later traditions filled in the gaps. The Book of Jubilees says Cain married his sister Awan, a daughter of Adam and Eve. The Pseudo-Philo even supplies names for the rest of the children, listing sons such as Eliseel, Suris, and Anath, and daughters such as Phua, Iectas, and Asin. This material belongs to the Primeval History, the opening chapters of the Torah, which reached something like its current form in the 5th century BCE. Its names and places, Adam meaning man, the Land of Nod meaning "Wandering", read as symbolic rather than real, which is why scholars suspect it was attached to Genesis as a late introduction.

• 6. Eve On Trial

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  "You are the devil's gateway", Tertullian told his female readers, holding women responsible across generations for the death of Christ. Some early fathers of the Christian church laid the Fall squarely on Eve as the first sinner, and the consequences ran for centuries. In 1486, the Dominicans Kramer and Sprenger drew on similar tracts in the Malleus Maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches", to justify the persecution of accused witches. Medieval Christian art often gave the Edenic serpent a woman's face, sometimes identified as Lilith, sharpening both its seductiveness and its link to Eve. Some Church Fathers, including Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, read the Hebrew "Heva" in an aspirated form as "female serpent". Out of the Fall came the doctrine of original sin, shaped by St Augustine of Hippo, who lived from 354 to 430. Reading the Apostle Paul, Augustine took Adam's sin to be hereditary, a condition every person is born into while awaiting redemption. That idea became a cornerstone of Western Christian theology, though it is shared by neither Judaism nor the Orthodox churches.

• 7. Many Gardens, Many Meanings

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  In Islam, Adam is revered as the father of humanity and Eve, Hawwa, as the mother of humanity, and the version of events differs sharply from the Christian reading. Here Adam and Eve are equally responsible for their sin of hubris, rather than Eve being the first to be unfaithful. In al-Qummi's tafsir, the Garden was a Heavenly Eden, and after eating the forbidden fruit both were sent down to Earth as God's representatives, Adam to the peak of al-Safa and Eve to al-Marwah. Adam wept for 40 days until he repented, after which God sent down the Black Stone and taught him the Hajj, and the pair reunited on the plain of Arafat near Mecca. Crucially, original sin does not exist in Islam, because God forgave them. Other traditions reframe the tale entirely. Jewish belief holds that Adam and Eve are buried in the Cave of Machpelah in Hebron, while one rabbinic reading, in Midrash Rabbah, says Adam was first created as a hermaphrodite, both male and female, before being split. The Gnostics produced their own texts, the "Apocalypse of Adam" and the Testament of Adam, and among the Ophites the serpent is recast as a hero rather than a villain. In the Baha'i Faith, 'Abdu'l-Baha rejects a literal reading, calling the serpent a symbol of "attachment to the material world".

• 8. Adam And Eve In Later Imagination

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  John Milton's Paradise Lost, the 17th-century epic in blank verse, expands the story in vast detail and grants Adam something the biblical version never does. Before leaving Paradise, Milton's Adam is shown a glimpse of mankind's future by the archangel Michael. Other writers reached for the same source with wildly different aims. Mark Twain played it for satire in "Eve's Diary" of 1906 and in The Private Life of Adam and Eve, published in 1931 after his death. C. L. Moore's 1940 story Fruit of Knowledge turned the Fall into a love triangle between Lilith, Adam, and Eve. C.S. Lewis re-enacted the whole scenario on Venus in his 1943 novel Perelandra, where a green-skinned pair faces a tempter from Earth and, this time, does not fall. Science offers a final, separate echo of the names. Tracing human lineage through the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, biologists speak of a Y-chromosomal Adam and a Mitochondrial Eve. The matrilineal ancestor lived around 155,000 years ago and the patrilineal one between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, which means, unlike the couple in the garden, they never lived as a single pair in a single moment.