Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man, c. 1615. Public domain.
Genesis 3 · Doctrine · Featured Study
The Fall & the Protoevangelium
Genesis 3 tells how the first sin came into the world, and Paul's reading of it in Romans 5 is the ground of the doctrine of original sin.
One command, one transgression, and the whole creation fractures into enmity, pain, thorns, exile, and death. Yet before the sentence is even spoken over the man and the woman, God turns to the serpent and promises a Deliverer: the seed of the woman who will crush the serpent's head. This is the protoevangelium: the first gospel.
And the LORD God commanded him, “You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”
- First taught
- Genesis 2:17 “but you must not eat from the tree…”
- Fullest statement
- Romans 5:12 to 21 “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through…”
- Confessed by
- Augustinian Reformed, Eastern Orthodox, Wesleyan
One command, one transgression, and the whole creation fractures into enmity, pain, thorns, exile, and death. Yet before the sentence is even spoken over the man and the woman, God turns to the serpent and promises a Deliverer: the seed of the woman who will crush the serpent's head. This is the protoevangelium: the first gospel.
Summary
In Genesis 3 the first man and woman break God's one command, and God answers with a curse, a covering and a promise.
- Five steps lead from the serpent's question to the hiding among the trees.
- Augustine, Chrysostom, Wesley and Pelagius gave four different answers to what Adam's sin passes on to his descendants.
- God clothes Adam and Eve in skins, a covering that costs a life.
- Paul reads the Fall in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15: death came through Adam, and life comes through Christ.
The Command and the Breach
The doctrine's first text is the command of Genesis 2:17, and its fullest is Paul's reading of the Fall in Romans 5.
The LORD God gave the man one prohibition inside a wide permission: every tree of the garden was his to eat from, except one. The warning attached to that tree is the first time Scripture speaks of death.
And the LORD God commanded him, “You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.”God gives the command and its penalty to the man before the woman is formed.
Paul reads the same event as the door through which sin and death came to the whole race.
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed on to all men, because all sinned.Paul traces every human death back to Eden.
The LORD God gave the man one prohibition inside a wide permission: every tree of the garden was his to eat from, except one. The warning attached to that tree is the first time Scripture speaks of death.
Paul reads the same event as the door through which sin and death came to the whole race.
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, so also death was passed on to all men, because all sinned.Paul traces every human death back to Eden.
The Fall Across the Canon
Eight texts run from the command in Eden to John's naming of the ancient serpent in Revelation 12.
Each later text reads Genesis 3 as an event with lasting effects, and the promise spoken to the serpent is the thread that ends with the serpent named in Revelation.
- What it adds
- God names death as the penalty for eating from the one forbidden tree.
- What it adds
- God sets enmity between two lines of offspring and names the blow that ends it.
- What it adds
- Hosea says Israel broke the covenant as Adam did.
- What it adds
- David confesses that he was sinful from the time his mother conceived him.
- What it adds
- Paul says sin entered through one man and death passed to all men.
- What it adds
- One man's disobedience made many sinners, and one man's obedience makes many righteous.
- What it adds
- As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.
- What it adds
- John names the ancient serpent as the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world.
In Adam all die, That ancient serpent
The Anatomy of the Fall
The temptation moves in five steps, each with its verse.
THE QUESTION
The serpent questions what God said and turns God's generous word into a stingy prohibition.
THE LIE
The serpent denies the warning of death and promises that they will be like God: the first denial of God's word and character.
THE LOOK
She saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes and desirable for obtaining wisdom, the pattern of 1 John 2:16.
THE ACT
She took, ate, and gave, and the eyes that were promised opening saw only shame.
THE HIDING
They sew fig-leaves and hide from the God who walks in the garden, sin's first instinct.
The look, The act, The hiding
The serpent's words in the Berean textGenesis 3:1 and Genesis 3:4 to 5
Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field that the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’”“You will not surely die,” the serpent told her. “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”The trial in the gardenGenesis 3:9 to 13
Then the LORD God asks four questions, and each answer moves the blame one step further away. The man blames the woman and, in the same breath, the God who gave her; the woman blames the serpent. The serpent is asked nothing.
But the LORD God called out to the man, “Where are you?”The LORD God calls the man out before He pronounces any sentence.
The Curses & the Promise
God sentences the serpent, the woman and the man, then shuts the garden.
TO THE SERPENT, GENESIS 3:15
God sets the seed of the woman against the serpent, and the New Testament reads the first gospel as fulfilled in Christ (Romans 16:20; Galatians 3:16).
TO THE WOMAN, GENESIS 3:16
God increases her pain in childbirth, and He says that her desire will be for her husband and that he will rule over her.
TO THE MAN, GENESIS 3:17 TO 19
The ground is cursed because of him, and he will eat by the sweat of his brow among thorns until he returns to dust, so death enters the world.
Then God clothes them in garments of skin, and a covering that costs a life replaces the fig leaves they made. It is the first shadow of the Lamb of God whom John the Baptist names in John 1:29.
So the LORD God said to the serpent: “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and every beast of the field! On your belly will you go, and dust you will eat, all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”The garden shutGenesis 3:24 and Revelation 22:2
So He drove out the man and stationed cherubim on the east side of the Garden of Eden, along with a whirling sword of flame to guard the way to the tree of life.Revelation 22:2 sets the tree of life again beside the river of the new Jerusalem.
Calvin, Henry and Missler on the curses and the promisecommentaries of 1554 and 1706, and a modern verse-by-verse commentary
John Calvin, in his commentary on Genesis, reads Genesis 3:15 as the first announcement of Christ's victory, the whole gospel already folded into one sentence spoken to the serpent. Matthew Henry, in his Commentary on the Whole Bible, traces the chapter's own mixture of judgment and mercy, each of the three curses carrying a promise folded inside the sentence.
Chuck Missler, in his verse-by-verse commentary The Book of Genesis, taught the seed of the woman as the opening move of a lineage the rest of the Old Testament keeps under attack. He traced that thread forward toward the virgin birth.
Genesis 3 Among the Ancient Stories
Two older Mesopotamian texts tie food, wisdom and a lost chance at life together.
Adapa, Gilgamesh and Genesis 3the bread of life refused and the plant of life stolen
In the Akkadian myth of Adapa, known from a copy in the Amarna archive of the fourteenth century BC, the god Anu offers Adapa the bread and water of life. Warned by his own god Ea, Adapa refuses them and loses the immortality he might have had. In the Epic of Gilgamesh a serpent steals and eats the plant of renewed life that Gilgamesh has brought up from the sea floor.
The parallels are real and the differences are larger. In Genesis the loss comes by a broken command and a moral choice. The serpent speaks, is judged and is cursed by the one God who made him.
Then the LORD God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil. And now, lest he reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever...”The tree of life in Genesis answers to the bread of life in Adapa and the plant in Gilgamesh.
How the Traditions Formulate It
Four answers to one question: what passes from Adam to his children?
Four formulations of original sin, each with what passes from Adam, its representative source and its holders.
| Formulation | What passes from Adam | Representative source | Held by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Augustinian and Reformed | Adam's guilt, reckoned to all as their head, and a corrupted nature | Augustine, Against Julian; Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 6 | The Western church since Augustine; the Reformed confessions |
| Eastern Orthodox (ancestral sin) | Mortality and a nature wounded and prone to sin; each person is guilty of his own sins | John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans, 10 | The Eastern Orthodox churches |
| Wesleyan | A corrupted nature, met in every person by prevenient grace, so that no one is left without the power to answer God | John Wesley, The Doctrine of Original Sin (1757), and his notes on Romans 5 | Methodist, Holiness and Pentecostal churches, the Wesleyan-Pentecostal tradition among them |
| Pelagian | Nothing: Adam's sin harmed Adam alone, and each person sins by imitating him | Pelagius, On Nature, as Augustine answers it in On Nature and Grace (415); condemned at Carthage (418) and Ephesus (431) | No church today |
Augustine and Chrysostom on the same versethe Latin and the Greek readings, in their own words
Augustine read Romans 5:12 in a Latin text that said all sinned in Adam. Chrysostom, preaching the same verse in Greek a generation earlier, read it as death passing to all through Adam's fall. Wesley, writing in English in 1755, kept the Western teaching of a sinful nature and set it beside grace given to every person.
“These words clearly teach that original sin is common to all men, regardless of the personal sins of each one.”
Augustine of Hippo · Against Julian 6.20.63 · on Romans 5:12Patristic
“As the best physicians always take great pains to discover the source of diseases, and go to the very fountain of the mischief, so doth the blessed Paul also. Hence after having said that we were justified, and having shown it from the Patriarch, and from the Spirit, and from the dying of Christ (for He would not have died unless He intended to justify), he next confirms from other sources also what he had at such length demonstrated. And he confirms his proposition from things opposite, that is, from death and sin. How, and in what way? He enquires whence death came in, and how it prevailed. How then did death come in and prevail? ‘Through the sin of one.’ But what means, ‘for that all have sinned?’ This; he having once fallen, even they that had not eaten of the tree did from him, all of them, become mortal.”
John Chrysostom · Homily on Romans X · on Romans 5:12Patristic
The answer to PelagiusPsalm 51:5, Ephesians 2:3 and Romans 5:19
The church answered Pelagius from texts like these. David confesses sin from conception, Paul calls believers by nature children of wrath, and Romans 5:19 says the many were made sinners through one man's disobedience.
Surely I was brought forth in iniquity; I was sinful when my mother conceived me.The psalm places sinfulness before any act, which the Pelagian view denies.
All of us also lived among them at one time, fulfilling the cravings of our flesh and indulging its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature children of wrath.Paul includes himself and his readers, so the condition is shared by every person.
What Genesis 3 Leaves Unsaid
Genesis 3 leaves the speaker behind the serpent, the kind of fruit and the time in the garden unnamed.
Who spoke through the serpent?answered later in the canon
Genesis 3 calls the tempter a serpent, the most crafty of the beasts of the field. Revelation 12:9 gives the name, and the church has read Genesis 3 by that light since the second century.
And the great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.John makes the same identification again in Revelation 20:2, where the dragon is bound for a thousand years.
What was the fruit?the text names only the tree
The chapter speaks only of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and gives the fruit no name of its own.
How long did they live in the garden?the text gives no span
Genesis moves from the forming of the woman in chapter 2 to the serpent's question in chapter 3 with no measure of the time between. Genesis 5:3 gives Adam's age at Seth's birth as 130 years, and that is the first number the text attaches to his life.
One Man's Trespass and the Last Adam
Paul's reading of Adam and Christ, and the New Testament's reading of the seed as Christ.
Paul builds Romans 5 on a comparison between two men. Adam's one sin brought death to the many, and Christ's one obedience brings life. Paul calls Adam a pattern of the One to come, and the comparison holds only because each man acts for those who belong to him.
So then, just as one trespass brought condemnation for all men, so also one act of righteousness brought justification and life for all men. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.Each clause about Adam is answered by a clause about Christ.
In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul sets Adam beside Christ again, at death and resurrection. Death came through a man, and the resurrection comes through a man. He names Christ the last Adam, the head of a new humanity raised from the dead.
Death before the law of MosesRomans 5:14
Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who did not sin in the way that Adam transgressed. He is a pattern of the One to come.Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who broke no spoken command as Adam did.
The promised seed in the New TestamentGalatians 3:16, Hebrews 2:14 and Romans 16:20
The Hebrew word for seed, zera, can name one child or a whole line of descendants, and Genesis 3:15 uses it for both sides of the enmity. The verb that follows is singular: he will crush your head. The New Testament reads the promise toward one person, and Paul argues from the singular seed in Galatians 3:16.
The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. The Scripture does not say, “and to seeds,” meaning many, but “and to your seed,” meaning One, who is Christ.Paul argues from the promises God spoke to Abraham in Genesis 12 to 22.
Now since the children have flesh and blood, He too shared in their humanity, so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil,Hebrews reads the death of Christ as the blow that destroys the devil, the crushing of the head that Genesis 3:15 promised.
The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.Paul gives the church a share in the promise of Genesis 3:15.
Adam hid from God among the trees, and Christ laid down his life of his own accord, as he says in John 10:18.
Where the Tradition Has Stood
Four teachers read the first gospel and the garments of skin.
died 202 · Irenaeus
“He has therefore, in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both waging war against our enemy, and crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam, and trampled upon his head, as thou canst perceive in Genesis that God said to the serpent, ‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; He shall be on the watch for thy head, and thou on the watch for His heel.’”
Irenaeus · Against Heresies 5.21.1 · on Genesis 3:15Patristic
died 253 · Origen of Alexandria
“It is said that God made those miserable garments with which the first man was clothed after he had sinned. ‘For God made skin tunics and clothed Adam and his wife.’ Therefore, those were tunics of skin taken from animals. For with such as these, it was necessary for the sinner to be dressed. It says, ‘with skin tunics,’ which are a symbol of the mortality that he received because of his skin and of his frailty that came from the corruption of the flesh.”
Origen of Alexandria · Homilies on Leviticus 6.2.7 · on Genesis 3:21Patristic
1703 to 1791 · John Wesley
“The beasts whose skins they were, must be slain; slain before their eyes to shew them what death is. And probably 'tis supposed they were slain for sacrifice, to typify the great sacrifice which in the latter end of the world should be offered once for all. Thus the first thing that died was a sacrifice, or Christ in a figure.”
John Wesley · Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament · on Genesis 3:21Evangelical
1802 to 1910 · Jamieson, Fausset & Brown
“Thus, fatal shall be the stroke which Satan shall receive from Christ, though it is probable he did not at first understand the nature and extent of his doom.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible · on Genesis 3:15Reformed
John Wesley, Jamieson, Fausset & Brown
Where the Reading Is Contested
Three questions on which faithful readers of Genesis 3 and Romans 5 differ, each with its holders.
Did any animal die before the Fall?An open question: young-earth and old-earth readings
Young-earth creationists, among them Creation Ministries International in 10 answers from biblical creationists, Part 2, hold that a creation called very good held no death. They cite Genesis 1:29 to 30, which gives plants as food to people and animals alike, and Romans 8:20 to 22, which speaks of the creation subjected to futility and decay. Old-earth evangelicals answer that Romans 5 speaks of death passing to all men and that futility is a wider word than death, as Reasons to Believe argues in Animal Death Before the Fall and C. John Collins in his book of 2011, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?
And God looked upon all that He had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.Both readings start from God's verdict on the finished creation.
For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but because of the One who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time.Paul says the whole creation is still waiting for its release.
What does “because all sinned” mean in Romans 5?An open question: the race in Adam, or each person's own sin
Augustine in Against Julian and the Westminster Confession, chapter 6, read the verb as pointing back to Adam's one act, in which the race sinned through its head. They rest on verses 18 and 19, which trace condemnation to one trespass. The nineteenth-century revivalist Charles Finney, in his Lectures on Systematic Theology (1846), took it of each person's own sinning in Adam's pattern. He read Paul's clause as the reason death spread to all, since every person sins. The Eastern churches, following Chrysostom in his Homilies on Romans, object to the Reformed reading that the Greek says because all sinned and names no guilt passed from Adam to his children.
Is the promised seed one person or a people?An open question: individual and collective readings
The messianic reading takes the seed as one person, Christ, pointing to Galatians 3:16. Irenaeus holds it in Against Heresies 5.21.1, Calvin in his Commentaries on Genesis (1554) and Spurgeon in his sermon Christ the Conqueror of Satan. The collective reading, held by Bede in his Commentary on Genesis, takes the seed as the woman's descendants in their long struggle with evil. Each side answers the other from the grammar of Genesis 3:15, which One Man's Trespass and the Last Adam sets out.
“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. The seed of the woman is the entire human race, the seed of the devil are the betrayers, who are depraved with his example of pride and rebellion.”
Bede · Commentary on Genesis (Hexaemeron) · on Genesis 3:15Patristic
Books to Read Next
Four works that teach the Fall at length.
Homilies on Romans
John Chrysostom · c. 391
Homily 10 is the Eastern reading of Paul's words on Adam.
The City of God, Books 13 and 14
Augustine of Hippo · c. 420
Augustine writes on the first sin, on death and on the two cities.
Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis
John Calvin · 1554
Calvin reads Genesis 3 verse by verse.
The Doctrine of Original Sin
John Wesley · 1757
Wesley wrote it as a long answer to John Taylor, and it remains the fullest statement of the Wesleyan formulation.
In Adam, In Christ
What Genesis 3 and Romans 5 ask of the reader.
Genesis 3 shows every step of the first sin: a question about God's word, a denial of it, a look, an act and a hiding. God answers with a question, a sentence and a promise, and He clothes the two He has judged. Romans 5 asks the reader to find their own story in that chapter, as a child of Adam and a sinner from birth. It then asks the reader to trust the last Adam for what the first one lost.
For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive an abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!Paul sets the gift above the trespass with the words how much more, and the reign in life belongs to those who receive it.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- Associates for Biblical Research, A Theology of the Fall in Genesis 3 and the Ancient Near East.
- Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chapter 6, Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment Thereof.
- Canons of the Council of Carthage (418) and the Council of Ephesus (431) against Pelagius and Caelestius.
- John Wesley, The Doctrine of Original Sin, According to Scripture, Reason, and Experience (1757)
- C. John Collins, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? (Crossway, 2011)
- Animal Death Before the Fall: What Does the Bible Say? (Reasons to Believe)
- Creation Ministries International, 10 answers from biblical creationists, Part 2.
- John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (1554)
- Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible.
- Augustine of Hippo, Against Julian.
- Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (c. 420)
- John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans (c. 391)
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755)
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies (c. 180)
- Bede, Commentary on Genesis.
- Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Systematic Theology (1846)
- James Strong, The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (1890), Hebrew and Chaldee Dictionary.
- Augustine of Hippo, On Nature and Grace (415)
- Chuck Missler, The Book of Genesis, a verse-by-verse commentary.
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