The Fall

The Fall is the disobedience of Adam and his wife to God's command in the garden of Eden, and its consequences, as Genesis 3 tells it.

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The Temptation

The LORD God let the man eat from every tree but the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die" (Genesis 2:16-17). The serpent, "more crafty than any beast of the field," asked the woman whether God had really forbidden every tree in the garden (Genesis 3:1-3). When she repeated the warning, adding "or touch it" (Genesis 3:3), the serpent answered, "You will not surely die," and promised that "your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil" (Genesis 3:4-5). Seeing that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes and desirable for wisdom, she ate and gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate (Genesis 3:6). Their eyes were opened; knowing they were naked, they sewed fig leaves into coverings (Genesis 3:7).

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Questioned and Judged

They hid from the LORD God among the trees, and He called to the man, "Where are you?" (Genesis 3:8-9). The man blamed "the woman whom You gave me"; the woman said, "The serpent deceived me" (Genesis 3:12-13). The LORD God cursed the serpent to go on its belly and eat dust, and put enmity between it and the woman, and between its seed and hers: "He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel" (Genesis 3:14-15). To the woman He said, "I will sharply increase your pain in childbirth," and "Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you" (Genesis 3:16). Because the man had listened to his wife, the ground was cursed, and he would toil among thorns and thistles until he returned to it: "For dust you are, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:17-19). Adam lived 930 years and then died (Genesis 5:5).

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Out of the Garden

Adam named his wife Eve, "because she would be the mother of all the living," and the LORD God clothed them in garments of skin (Genesis 3:20-21). Since the man had become "like one of Us, knowing good and evil," and lest he take from the tree of life and live forever, the LORD God banished him from the garden "to work the ground from which he had been taken" (Genesis 3:22-23). He stationed cherubim east of the garden, with a whirling sword of flame, to guard the way to the tree of life (Genesis 3:24).

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Sin Spreads

Cain killed his brother Abel (Genesis 4:8), and before the Flood the earth was "full of violence" (Genesis 6:11). Ecclesiastes says, "God made mankind upright, but they have sought out many schemes" (Ecclesiastes 7:29).

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Later Readings

M. G. Easton, in an 1897 Bible dictionary, thought the name "the Fall" was "probably borrowed from the Apocryphal Book of Wisdom." Kaufmann Kohler and Emil G. Hirsch, in their article on the fall of man, wrote that it begins to appear as a theological concept "only in the late Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha."

John Day, an emeritus professor of Old Testament studies, writes that a popular Christian understanding, first attested in the second-century writer Irenaeus, read Genesis 3:15 as a prophecy, the protoevangelium, "the first declaration of the Gospel." For the original writer, John Day adds, "the serpent was not equated with Satan," a concept that "developed only later." Paula Fredriksen, professor of Scripture emerita at Boston University, writes that the doctrine of original sin "was the invention of the early fifth-century North African church, and Augustine was its premier architect." In Fredriksen's account, Augustine held that Adam's descendants inherited "not only his penalty, but also his actual guilt." Kohler and Hirsch held that "in modern Jewish thought the fall of man is without dogmatic importance."

John Day also points to the Epic of Gilgamesh, where a serpent eats the plant of life Gilgamesh sought, but judges Genesis 3's dependence on it "an interesting possibility rather than a certainty."