Adam and Eve, Explained

After forming Adam and placing him in the garden of Eden, God observes, “It is not good that the man should be alone.” None of the animals Adam names prove to be a fitting companion, so God causes Adam to fall into a deep sleep, takes one of his ribs, and forms it into a woman. Adam's response — “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” — is the Bible's first recorded human speech, and the passage closes by explaining marriage: a man leaving his parents to be joined to his wife, “one flesh.”

A serpent, described as “more subtil than any beast of the field,” approaches the woman and distorts God's actual instruction, asking, “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” When she corrects him — explaining they may eat freely except from one tree, on pain of death — the serpent directly contradicts God: “Ye shall not surely die,” claiming instead that eating it will open their eyes and make them “as gods, knowing good and evil.”

Seeing that the tree was “good for food,” “pleasant to the eyes,” and desirable for wisdom, the woman eats, and gives some to her husband, who is with her. The text is blunt about the outcome: “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” — and, ashamed, they sew fig leaves together to cover themselves.

When God confronts them, each is given specific consequences: pain in childbirth for the woman, a strained relationship with her husband, and for the man, ground that now resists his labor — “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground… for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Even here, God clothes them with animal skins before what comes next.

Adam names his wife Eve, “because she was the mother of all living.” To prevent them from also eating from the tree of life and living forever in their fallen state, God sends them out of Eden, stationing cherubim and “a flaming sword which turned every way” to guard the way back in.