The fall is one of the key events in redemptive history, a tragedy that explains the brokenness of the world in which we find ourselves living. Every religion—and every person—has to wrestle with the big question of why bad things happen, not just to the wicked but to the innocent as well. Some religions, such as those of Israel’s ancient neighbors, solve the problem by imagining multiple deities locked in a perpetual conflict, with humanity as an unfortunate bystander. Others imagine a God who tries his best but is not powerful enough to avert all evil, especially given human free will.
The Bible gives us a different answer. Evil and suffering in this world are a result of the failure of our first parents to resist temptation. Because of their sin, all people now are born with a bent toward sin that they cannot fully resist, even if they wished to do so. Creation itself is under God’s curse because of human sin, which results in innumerable natural disasters and sicknesses (Rom. 8:20–23). Yet none of this is outside God’s control, any more than individual human decisions are. Without being the author of sin, God ultimately controls it and directs it for his glory and the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose (Rom. 8:28). Thus the fall, tragic as it is, becomes the context in which we hear the first promise of the gospel, in Genesis 3:15. The rest of Scripture is in many ways the sovereign working out of God’s fulfillment of that promise in Christ. The obedience of the second Adam transcends the disobedience of the first Adam. The death that enters the world through Adam and Eve’s sin is overcome by life and hope in the second Adam, Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 15:22).
Indeed, we can sketch the main flow of the history of the world in four movements: creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. Each of these represents a different experience for mankind: as created before the fall, it was possible for humans to sin, but also possible for them to resist it (man was posse peccare—able to sin). After the fall our natural state is one in which it is not possible for us not to sin (non posse non peccare)—we may choose to sin in differing ways, but we are all living for our own glory, not our Creator’s. Redemption makes it possible for us not to sin (posse non peccare), although we are still deeply stained with sin’s legacy (Romans 7; 2 Cor. 5:17). At the consummation God will finish the sanctifying work he has begun in us, and we will no longer be able to sin (non posse peccare), which will be true freedom (Phil. 1:6).
In addition to this primary focus of the chapter on the fall, we find a number of secondary themes as well, as might be expected in an origin story. The foundational differences and nonreversible relationship between men and women lie at the heart of the narrative. The fall occurs through a reversal of the male-female relationship, an order that God restores when he intervenes by addressing the man first. This pre-fall order underlies the rest of Scripture’s teaching about the proper roles of men and women, including in the church. Many scholars have gone astray by attempting to interpret Paul’s teaching about women’s roles in the church in 1 Corinthians and 1 Timothy in a vacuum, or against the background of Second Temple Judaism, rather than seeing it as rooted and grounded in creation, a plain connection that Paul makes explicit in 1 Timothy 2:12–15.Genesis 3
In Hebrew you is plural in verses 1–5
Or to give insight
Hebrew wind
In Hebrew you is singular in verses 9 and 11
Hebrew seed; so throughout Genesis
Or to, or toward, or against (see 4:7)
Eve sounds like the Hebrew for life-giver and resembles the word for living
3:1–5 Genesis 3 begins with a disjunctive construction (vav + nonverb), separating what follows from what precedes grammatically, just as the chapter will separate “life before” from “life after” in a comprehensive way. We are introduced to a new character, “the serpent.” This character is not a god; he is merely one of the creatures that the Lord God has made, albeit potentially dangerous in being “more crafty” (“shrewder”) than all other creatures (Gen. 3:1). We are not told the serpent’s backstory here. Indeed, the entire Bible says very little about Satan’s origins, except to affirm that he has been created by God and is subject to his control—he is “God’s devil,” as it were, and, wicked though he is, Satan cannot do anything beyond God’s permission (cf. Job 1–2). The form chosen by the serpent is not arbitrary; Leviticus classifies animals in terms of clean and unclean—for a variety of reasons, some connected with eating habits, some with means of locomotion—and snakes are in the unclean category (Lev. 11:42). The serpent’s writhing motion on the ground, which is connected to this episode (cf. Gen. 3:14), makes it an appropriate anti-God image.
The serpent speaks to the woman—a surprising turn of events, given our experience of the world. Yet the woman’s experience of life is much more limited at this point, perhaps especially with the “beasts of the field,” who live outside the garden. The serpent clearly targets the woman since she did not hear the prohibition in Genesis 2:16–17 directly from the mouth of God. Yet the man evidently is also present with her throughout the entire encounter (3:6). There is a reversal of the proper ordering of creation from man-woman-beast to beast-woman-man in this chapter. This theme is highlighted by the chiastic structure of the passage in terms of the characters interacting in each scene, which begins with disordered relationships in scenes A and B and ends with those relationships’ being properly reordered after the divine intervention.
(A) The serpent and the woman (vv. 1–5); the man is silently present (v. 6)
(B) The woman and “her man” (vv. 6–7)
(C) God and the man (vv. 8–12); the woman is silently present
(D) God and the woman (v. 13)
(E) God and the serpent (vv. 14–15)
(D') God and the woman (v. 16)
(C') God and the man (vv. 17–19)
(B') The man and “his woman” (v. 20)
(A') God and the man (vv. 21–24)
As is typical of Satan, the serpent uses the things God has created good for his own wicked purposes. He begins with a question that misrepresents God’s words: “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” (v. 1). Far from saying “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden,” what God actually said was, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden” (2:16), with a single exception. Eve’s response is initially accurate—though omitting the intensification of God’s command (“You may surely eat”)—but she adds a clause to God’s words that make the prohibition regarding the tree of life sound petty and legalistic. According to her, God told them not merely to avoid eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but not even to touch it, lest they die (3:3). Again Eve omits the intensification of the original command (“You shall surely die”).
The serpent not only misquotes God; he goes on to contradict him. God had said, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (2:17). Satan says to Eve, however, “You will not surely die” (3:4). His inclusion of the intensification that Eve omitted evinces firsthand knowledge of the truth, even as he twists it to serve his own purposes. The shrewdness of the serpent is evident further in the fact that he never directly tells Eve to eat from the tree; he simply proposes a different exegesis of the key biblical text and then allows her to draw her own desired conclusion. Eve also follows the serpent in referring to the deity generically as “God” rather than by his more relational covenant name, “the Lord.” The greater the distance that exists between humans and the deity, the easier it is for them to believe that God does not have their best interests at heart.
After the serpent denies the doctrine of judgment (“You will not surely die”; v. 4), the doctrine of divine providence is the next target of the serpent’s attack. Far from acknowledging God’s working all things together for Eve’s good (Rom. 8:28), the serpent claims that God is seeking to protect the uniqueness of his divine status, which would be imperiled if the humans ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and became like him (Gen. 3:5). The irony of the man and woman’s believing this claim is deeply tragic, for God had created them in his very image for rulership over an entire creation designed for their good. Nevertheless, this is the same heresy that we routinely believe any time we choose to sin rather than to obey the Lord’s fatherly commands to us.
The serpent claims not only that Adam and Eve (the verb is plural) will not die but that they will have their eyes opened, acquiring godlike knowledge and status (vv. 4–5). But the serpent is trading in characteristic half-truths. Adam and Eve do not die immediately, though their fullness of life in God’s presence is immediately lost. Moreover, while their eyes are opened with a new kind of knowledge, this knowledge brings shame and conflict rather than status and power (vv. 7–13).
3:6–7 In light of the serpent’s words the woman looks at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in a new way, considering it to be “good for food,” “a delight to the eyes,” and desirable “to make one wise” (v. 6). Even before she takes the fruit she is already beginning to form her own evaluations independently of God’s word. In reality, every tree that God had made was “good for food” and “pleasant to the sight” (cf. 2:9), but now she sets her heart on the forbidden tree. The wisdom offered by eating from that tree is certainly not God’s wisdom, for the beginning of that wisdom is the fear of the Lord (Prov. 9:10). The fear of the Lord would have kept her from eating from the tree. Eve’s “logic” thus deconstructs itself, as our reasoning in favor of sin always does. But it is enough to tempt her to take and eat the fruit from the forbidden tree, hoping for a new kind of knowledge that would give her autonomy from her creator. Christian art since at least the Middle Ages has pictured the fruit as an apple, likely based on the fact that in Latin the word for “apple” and for “evil” is the same (malum). The type of fruit is unspecified in the Genesis account, however, and it was unlikely to have been an apple, since those were not introduced to Israel until significantly later.
It is at this point that we learn that Adam has evidently been with Eve throughout the entire encounter (Gen. 3:6), apparently without contributing a single word to a conversation in which God’s words to him have been misquoted, maligned, and denied by both the serpent and his own wife. Instead of being Adam’s helper, Eve is leading him astray, and he has done nothing to challenge her. Before the fruit is even touched Adam fails in his God-appointed priestly task as guardian of the sanctuary and teacher of torah. Adam’s sinful abdication of his responsibility throughout the encounter is highlighted at this point by his being named “her husband” (v. 6; “her man”). Sin always subverts God’s ordering of the world. However, the chapter is not devoid of hope. In the corresponding chiastic section B' (cf. structure above), when order is restored after God’s intervention, their relationship is once more “the man and his woman” (v. 20; ESV: “his wife”) as Adam resumes a leadership role by naming his wife “Eve” in response to God’s word of promise.
Immediately after Adam and Eve sin the consequences of that sin begin to become apparent: “The eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (v. 7). Their nakedness had not bothered them previously because they had had nothing to hide. Because they had been content to accept their assigned place in the divine order, there had been nothing over which to fight. But now that they have declared themselves to be as gods, everything is in flux. Once they have rejected the created order, they seek to establish their own order, which inevitably means conflict with one another, a striving for the dominant position. In that struggle, knowledge is power. No longer could they be completely open with one another, because the other person might use that openness against the spouse. As a result, they begin to cover up and hide from one another with ineffectual and uncomfortable loincloths made from fig leaves in a desperate attempt to regain the safety they had experienced prior to the fall (v. 7). In a tragicomic scene, after Adam and Eve’s declaration of cosmic war on the creator of the universe, the highest priority on their to-do list is to sew fig leaves together to hide from one another.
Adam and Eve do not die immediately, in the sense that their life is not at once extinguished. Otherwise the Lord’s purposes of redemption could not be completed. However, in the Bible death is the reverse of life, not of existence. Adam and Eve’s experience of life in its fullness is immediately greatly diminished as their sin exposes them to shame and fear. The serpent had claimed that, if they disobeyed God, they would experience freedom and power; in actuality their sin brings bondage and helplessness. They discover the hard way that Satan is the real hard taskmaster, not God.
3:8–13 The futility of Adam and Eve’s attempt to “be like God” is rapidly exposed when the Lord makes known his presence in the garden. It was apparently customary for the Lord to “walk to and fro” in the garden on a daily basis. The difficult phrase “With respect to the wind/Spirit of the day” (Hb. leruakh hayyom; v. 8) is understood by most as a temporal description, following the LXX, which translates it “in the afternoon” (to deilinon). This would thus be a reference to the time of day when the afternoon breeze picks up, making it a pleasant time for a walk: “At the breezy time of day” (NET). When Adam and Eve heard the sound of God’s arrival, they immediately recognized the inadequacy of their flimsy coverings and ran to hide in the trees, as if the created world could conceal them from the one who had made all things.
Like a parent confronting a naughty child, the Lord calls out a question that gently invites the man to reveal himself: “Where are you?” (v. 9). Unlike the serpent, who inverted the proper order by approaching the woman, God begins his questioning with the man (the pronoun is singular). Adam immediately emerges from hiding and answers not only God’s question but the unspoken question behind it as well (i.e., “Why are you hiding?”): “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself” (v. 10).
Adam’s response reveals not only his location to God; it also reveals the nature of his problem. Adam does not come to God humbly confessing his sin and seeking forgiveness. Rather, he laments the consequences of that sin as if it were an unfortunate natural disaster for which he was not responsible. He is afraid of the Lord, but only when it is too late. Earlier, the fear of the Lord might have kept him from sin, but not fearing the Lord at the right time led to an overpowering fear of God later. Adam’s refusal to receive God’s wisdom leaves him with nothing to receive from God but his judgment.
Adam also laments his nakedness before God (v. 10). That had never been an embarrassment to Adam and Eve before. God had made them, after all, and he was not unfamiliar with the shape of their bodies! But now, with the coming of sin into the world, Adam and Eve have a powerful urge to hide from God. That relationship, once so unhindered, is now shattered in pieces. Adam immediately realizes that his fig leaves are an inadequate covering. They might have been sufficient to keep out his wife’s threatening gaze, but not that of the all-seeing God.
The Lord continues his interrogation: “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (v. 11). Again, these are questions not seeking to elicit information but rather aimed at giving Adam the opportunity to make a confession. No one needed to tell Adam that he was naked; his own guilty conscience is sufficient to cause his shame. However, Adam’s answer to God’s questions is less about taking responsibility for his action than it is about placing the responsibility elsewhere: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (v. 12). In Hebrew the sentence starts with the subject rather than the verb, highlighting the woman’s role in the transgression. Next, Adam blames God for giving the woman to him—the Lord gave him the woman, and she gave him the fruit, as if he were entirely passive throughout the process. Then he returns to blaming the woman (the feminine pronoun is emphatic: “She gave me”), and it is only with the very last word of the sentence that Adam utters anything close to a confession (“and I ate”; one word in Hebrew).
Then God turns to the woman, asking her: “What is this that you have done?” (v. 13), opening the door for her to admit her responsibility. However, she too seeks to blame someone else: “The serpent deceived me.” Once again it is only with the final word of her sentence that she made the same one-word confession (“and I ate”). The catastrophic effects of that first sin are already evident in the blame-shifting and evasion that have become humanity’s modus operandi. Instead of being “naked and . . . not ashamed” (2:25), they are now inadequately clothed and deeply ashamed.
3:14–19 Having heard Adam and Eve’s worthless defense, God pronounces his gracious sentence. He does not ask the serpent to explain his behavior: he is not permitted to speak. The Lord could justly destroy humanity outright on the spot. However, God’s sentence is remedial, not retributive. God will be the judge, notwithstanding the serpent’s denial, but he is not the harsh master Satan had portrayed him to be. The order of judgment parallels the proper order of creation, first addressing the lower order, then the woman, and then the man.
God begins by judging the serpent. In a larger narrative marked out by a focus on God’s blessing, this is the first occurrence of the word “cursed” (Hb. ʾarur; v. 14). As in English, the relative clause normally comes after the main clause; putting it first here highlights its importance in giving the reason for the curse, which has just cause and is not a capricious act on God’s part. The serpent that has been distinguished from the rest of creation by its shrewdness will now be distinguished by the judgment it experiences, which will bring it low. Just as the serpent’s offense involved eating, so too does God’s judgment curse. To “lick the dust” expresses abject humiliation and defeat, as when someone is prostrated before his conqueror (cf. Ps. 72:9; Mic. 7:17); the equivalent English idiom is to “bite the dust.” This is the opposite of triumphing with head held high. Satan’s moment of triumph will be short lived.
Not only will Satan be brought low, but his apparent victory in ensnaring the pinnacle of creation will be short lived: the Lord will place enmity between the serpent and the woman, and between their offspring as well (Gen. 3:15). This accounts for the continuing need for subterfuge on the part of Satan; very few of his followers are out-and-out Satanists, for he has nothing within himself to attract people. To overcome man’s God-given enmity Satan must pretend to be something he is not, to deceive and seduce people into a continued rebellion against God. Yet there is no question about the outcome of this multigenerational conflict. Ultimately, though he may wound the seed of the woman, the serpent will be kicked in the teeth and defeated by the seed of the very race he has just brought down.
This is not merely an etiological story about people’s fear and loathing of snakes; it has a singular conflict in view, the struggle between the second Adam, who is the ultimate promised seed of the woman, and the ancient Serpent (cf. Rom. 5:19; Rev. 12:9). Not coincidentally, the issue of “seed” is prominent in the rest of Genesis (cf. Gen. 4:25; 12:7), as humans look forward to the coming promised seed and the salvation he will bring. However, Genesis also reveals a fundamental division within humanity from this point onward, which finds expression in the conflict between the line of promise and a line of children of the devil (John 8:44), a conflict that leads to the murder of Abel by Cain (Genesis 4).
In spite of this continual opposition the curse on the serpent in Genesis 3:15 is at the same time the first proclamation of the gospel, the promise that through this seed of the woman God will restore humanity to his side and thus reverse the effects of the curse upon creation. In light of the forthcoming judgment upon the woman it is striking that the victory is assigned to the seed of the woman. The victor will not merely be a second Adam; he will also vindicate Eve.
God next judges the woman (Gen. 3:16). His judgments on the first couple strike at the heart of what it means to be a man and woman, respectively. Thus, because men and women are not the same, neither are their judgments. The woman’s judgment strikes primarily at her relationships, especially motherhood and marriage. Eve was designed for one-fleshness with her husband, but now that one-fleshness will be dogged by problems—on both sides. To begin with, the woman will desire to dominate her husband; when God says, “Your desire shall be toward your husband,” the Hebrew word for “desire” (teshuqah) is the same rare word used in Genesis 4 to describe the relationship between sin and Cain. Some have interpreted teshuqah as sexual desire, on the basis of the other use of this word in Song of Solomon 7:10; however, the usage in Genesis 4:7 is more relevant, not merely because it is adjacent and by the same author but because the same combination of teshuqah and mashal recurs. There sin is depicted as a wild animal, crouching outside the door of Cain’s heart, waiting to overpower Cain unless he masters (mashal) it. So too here the woman will constantly be in danger of repeating her disruption of the created order in relationships, while for his part the man will seek to dominate her. Now “he shall rule over” her harshly (Gen. 3:16), rather than with the sensitive, servant leadership pose he was intended to have in the beginning (cf. discussion of Genesis 2 above, though the creational order between men and women lies on the surface of Genesis 3 as well, as we have seen).
The fall also affects a woman’s natural desire to be a mother. Now, even though the bearing of children is the means through which salvation comes, the process itself is inseparably linked with pain and anguish. As Kenneth Mathews puts it, “By this unexpected twist the vehicle of her vindication (i.e., labor) trumpets her need for the deliverance she bears (cf. 1 Cor. 11:12). Painful childbirth signals hope but also serves as a perpetual reminder of sin and the woman’s part in it.” Moreover, the initial suffering associated with childbirth is simply a miniature depiction of the suffering that goes with being a mother in a fallen world. One of Eve’s sons, Abel, will be brutally and senselessly murdered; the murderer will be her own firstborn, Cain (Genesis 4; cf. Mary’s experience in Luke 2:34–35). It is not easy being a mother in a fallen world.
Nor is it always easy to become a mother in a fallen world. With God’s blessing and command that mankind should be fruitful and multiply, conception ought to have been easy (Gen. 1:27). But the fall changes that. God’s challenge to a woman he is about to use in a special way is often seen in precisely the area of her fertility. Sarah (Gen. 11:30), Hannah (1 Samuel 1), and Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist (Luke 1:7), are among many who face this challenge as a preparation for roles of remarkable importance in God’s plan.
God’s judgment upon the man likewise strikes at the heart of what it means to be a man, namely, in the realm of his work. Man was designed to work the garden in Eden and take care of it (Gen. 2:15). Now, however, his labor will lead to sweat and anxiety, not joy. Work will no longer be fulfilling and satisfying, as it was intended to be in the beginning; instead, it will be laborious and frustrating toil (cf. Eccles. 1:3; Ps. 90:9–12). Our labor-filled days are turned to sorrow, frustration, and pain. Both men and women are condemned to pain in the deepest area of their identity.
The man is also rebuked because he abdicates his leadership role in the marriage and “listened to the voice of your wife” (Gen. 3:17). The same problem recurs in Genesis 16:2: there Abram “listened to the voice of Sarai” and took Hagar as a concubine. This does not mean it is always wrong for a man to listen to his wife—Abraham is specifically instructed by God to listen to Sarah in Genesis 21:12. But a proper creational order is to be observed in that relationship.
The ultimate judgment on both men and women is death (3:19). This is the complete refutation of the serpent’s lie. He had claimed, “You will be like God”—the one who never dies (cf. v. 5). Instead death lies at the heart of the curses on both the woman and the man. Death leads to great pain in relationships. One day, if the Lord tarries, we shall all have to say goodbye to those we love. And death relativizes the joys and sorrows of our work, for one day we shall leave that behind as well if the Lord does not first return. Final judgment on humanity may have been postponed, but it has not been abolished. From dust we are, and to dust we shall return (cf. Ps. 90:3–6).
3:20–24 The proper reordering of male-female relationships is reiterated in Adam’s immediate response to God’s word of judgment and hope: “The man called his wife’s name Eve” (Gen. 3:20). From “the woman and her man” (cf. v. 6) we have returned to “the man and his woman,” so to speak. The name Adam gives his wife (Hb. khavvah, “Eve”) is a play on the verb “to live” (khayyah) and reflects not only his recognition that there will be a continued existence for himself and Eve but also his faith that through Eve God’s promise of restored blessing will ultimately be established (cf. v. 15). Through Eve’s seed God will ensure that his final word on humanity is “life” and not the “death” that Adam and Eve have merited because of their sins.
God also provides more effective coverings for Adam and Eve’s nakedness in the form of tunics of animal skin (v. 21). Older scholars often derived an atoning significance from this provision of God, in which animals lose their lives in order to cover the effects of human sin; however, that seems to be deriving the right doctrine from the wrong text. In the passage there is no mention of God’s killing the animals, let alone of their foreshadowing a sacrificial ritual. Rather the focus is on the fact that God provides an effective covering for Adam and Eve’s shame, replacing the inadequate works of their own hands (the fig leaves) with something much better. To be sure, the theme of clothing as a metaphor for redemption does appear later in the Bible (e.g., Zechariah 3), and that theme may certainly be seen foreshadowed here, but this verse does not directly connect Adam and Eve’s clothing with the need for blood sacrifices. The focus is far more on God’s continued providential care for his children in covering their shame, even after the fall (cf. Matt. 6:28–30).
At the same time, Adam and Eve’s sin has immediate and tragic consequences, as they are driven out of the garden (Gen. 3:22–24). Because the man has aspired to become like God in knowledge, he must not now be allowed to “take” and “eat” from the tree of life in a repetition of his rebellion involving the tree of knowledge. Once again the headship of Adam is acknowledged, and he is held responsible for the sin that has caused humanity’s expulsion. It is not entirely clear from the text whether Adam and Eve have previously been permitted to eat the fruit of the tree of life; it is not included in the prohibition of 2:17. However, a key consequence of their sin is a loss of access to the Lord’s presence, which the tree of life concretely represents. The wages of their sin is indeed death (Rom. 6:23).
From now on they will have to work the ground outside the garden, which, while still good, is now under God’s curse and will yield its fruit only in response to strenuous labor (cf. Gen. 3:17–19; the phrase “sweat of your face” is literally the more vivid “sweat of your nose”). Toiling in the dust from which he had been taken will be a constant reminder to Adam of his mortality, since that same dust will be his final resting place (v. 23). Meanwhile, the entrance to the garden of Eden—and with it to the presence of God—is closed, guarded by cherubim, along with a flaming sword (v. 24). The cherubim are stationed on the east side of the garden because that is where the entrance is, as with the tabernacle. As composite creatures the cherubim sum up and unite the highest forms of all creation (cf. Ezek. 1:5; 10:15) and are the fearsome guardians assigned to guard (shamar) God’s holiness. They will not fail to protect the sanctity of the garden, as Adam has failed (Gen. 2:15). No longer will access into the presence of the Lord be easy and untroubled for humanity, as it once was. For now the doorway into the Most Holy Place has been firmly closed in their faces, and mankind is left to make its own way “east of the garden of Eden.”