Adam

This site's tradition holds that he was a real man, and the reason is the New Testament rather than sentiment about Genesis. Luke 3:38 puts him at the end of a list of named fathers and sons. Jude 14 counts generations from him. Paul argues from the order of his creation at 1 Timothy 2:13 and from the manner of his sin at 2:14. Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 set him opposite Christ as one of the two men the whole race stands in, and that argument needs two men.

Other readings are held by serious people and are given here as they give them. C. John Collins, in Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?, and Hugh Ross hold a real, individual Adam and a real fall on an old earth. William Lane Craig, in In Quest of the Historical Adam (Eerdmans, 2021), reads Genesis 1 through 11 as a genre that is literarily mythic but refers to real people, and places Adam far earlier than young-earth chronology allows. John H. Walton, in The Lost World of Adam and Eve (IVP, 2015), reads Adam and Eve as historical individuals who also work as literary archetypes for all humanity. Dennis Lamoureux, Francis Collins and the BioLogos Foundation hold that God created through evolutionary processes and that Genesis 1 through 3 teaches theological truth in the idiom of its own culture. This site's tradition does not hold the last of these, because it removes the second of the two men Paul's argument runs through.

No. Six literal days is a widely held belief on this site rather than a claim the site presses, and the wording the creation pages already carry stands here too. The days of Genesis 1 are marked by "evening and morning" and a counted number, and the Fourth Commandment grounds Israel's literal week in the creation week (Exod 20:11). Read together with the genealogies (ch. 5, 11), many readers take this to a young earth, a widely held reading, not a conclusion this site presses on the reader. Others hold the day-age reading (each day a long era) or the framework reading (the days a literary structure of forming and filling).

On why the account was given, Marcus Brown, in his own words:

"the book was written by moses to the jews in the exodus and its purpose was to teach them about YHWH, not explain every little detail and be a perfect account, or else there would have been much more included"

The day-length readings are worked out in full on the creation week page. This page carries the framing and stays with the man.

Yes, according to the text. Genesis 3:6 says she "also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it." He was there for the serpent's question at 3:1, for her answer, for the flat contradiction at 3:4 and for the offer at 3:5.

He had also received the command directly at 2:16-17, before she existed, and Genesis 3:17 grounds his sentence on his having listened to her voice and eaten. The picture of Adam arriving afterwards to find it already done comes from the retellings and the paintings, not from the verse.

Genesis 2:17 says "in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die," and Genesis 5:5 says he lived nine hundred and thirty years. Three readings are old and each has its holders.

The mortality reading: he became mortal that day. Jerome, in Hebrew Questions on Genesis in the late fourth century, reports Symmachus rendering the Hebrew "you shall be mortal" and calls it the better rendering. Cosmas Indicopleustes reasons the same way in the sixth century, from the fact that Adam did not fall down dead.

The death-in-stages reading: the first death is the soul's separation from God, which happened that day, and the body's death followed. Augustine sets it out in City of God 13.12, and Ambrose reads the doubled Hebrew verb, "die the death," along the same line.

The plain-wording reading: Bede, in his commentary on Genesis, refuses the softer rendering outright. He did not say, if you eat, you shall be mortal, but on whichever day, he said, you eat from it, you shall surely die. This page names the three and chooses none.

1 Timothy 2:14 sets the two cases apart: the woman was deceived, Adam was not. Genesis backs the distinction. Eve says at 3:13 that the serpent deceived her. Adam never says he was deceived, only that she gave and he ate, and 3:17 holds him to a command he had heard from God Himself.

The tradition has read this as the heavier charge against him rather than the lighter one. Augustine states it in City of God 14.11: Adam refused to be separated from his partner even in a union of sin, and "this does not imply that he was on that account any less guilty, since he sinned knowingly and deliberately."

The charge at 2:14 is a charge against Adam and stays there. On the making of the woman four chapters earlier, Adam Clarke read the Hebrew of Genesis 2:18 in 1832 as ruling out a ranking in either direction: she was to be "a perfect resemblance of the man, possessing neither inferiority nor superiority, but being in all things like and equal to himself."

The text does not say. Genesis 2:9 names the tree by what it does rather than by what it is, and Genesis 3:6 calls the fruit good for food, pleasing to the eyes and desirable for obtaining wisdom. No species is named anywhere in the chapter.

The apple came into Western art through Latin, where one word covers both an apple and an evil, and the painters fixed it in place. Many famous paintings of the scene put an apple in the frame, and that is where the picture in most readers' heads comes from. 1 Enoch, a Second Temple work this site carries as a labeled study resource rather than Scripture, calls it "the tree of wisdom" at 32:6 and names no fruit either.

Not in Genesis 3. The chapter calls him "more crafty than any beast of the field that the LORD God had made" and says nothing else about who he is. The identification with the devil is the New Testament's own, at Revelation 12:9 and Revelation 20:2, and it is read back into the garden from there.

It was made in Jewish writing before that. The Wisdom of Solomon, a Greek work from Alexandria commonly dated to the first century BC or the early first century AD and carried here as a labeled study resource, is one of the earliest surviving texts to say it: "Nevertheless through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it."

Genesis 3:21 states two acts and stops. God made garments of skin, and God clothed them. The verse does not narrate a killing, does not use the word sacrifice and does not mention an altar. Their own covering had been fig leaves at 3:7, and it did not survive one conversation.

The first-sacrifice reading: John Wesley (1765) says the beasts were slain before their eyes to show them what death is, hedges his next step with "probably 'tis supposed they were slain for sacrifice," and lands on "the first thing that died was a sacrifice, or Christ in a figure." Adam Clarke (1832) argues it from Genesis 4, where Cain and Abel already know how to bring an offering, and Jamieson, Fausset and Brown (1871) read the verse the same way.

The mortality reading: Origen, in the third century, takes the skins as "a symbol of the mortality that he received," and Gregory of Nyssa reads them as the animal nature humanity put on. Both readings are given with their holders, and the verse says what it says.

The Hebrew phrase can be read "like Adam" or "like men," and the same phrase stands at Job 31:33. The Berean Standard Bible renders both "like Adam."

For the personal reading: Albert Barnes draws the parallel out at length, Adam breaking the covenant in the garden God gave him and Israel breaking it in the land God gave her. Adam Clarke agrees, and dismisses the alternative in four words, "the other is scarcely so," which is a judgment rather than an argument.

Against it: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown answer that Scripture does not elsewhere use the word covenant of Adam's relation to God, and read the phrase as "like men," meaning as lightly as men break everyday agreements with each other. The page gives both and settles nothing.

Genesis does not describe Adam's stature. The Babylonian Talmud, at Sanhedrin 38b, preserves a rabbinic teaching that the first man spanned the whole world, from one end to the other, reading it out of Deuteronomy 4:32's phrase "from the one end of heaven unto the other." The same passage reads Psalm 139:5, "you have laid your hand upon me," as God's hand cutting him down to ordinary size once he sinned. This is a rabbinic reading of two other verses, dated to the Babylonian Talmud's completion between about AD 500 and 600, not a claim Genesis itself makes.