Certain details of this story have been discussed already in the comment at 2:9 on the trees and the knowledge of good and evil.
On its historicity two things should be said. First, the New Testament assumes it and argues from it, making the first Adam as literal as the last, whose genealogy is indeed traced back to him in Luke 3:23ff. According to Romans 5:18, 19; 1 Corinthians 15:20, 21, Adam was 'one man', and his sin 'one trespass', as factual as the cross and resurrection. But secondly, granted this historicity, it may still be an open question whether the account transcribes the facts or translates them: i.e. whether it is a narrative comparable to such a passage as 2 Samuel 11 (which is the straight story of David's sin) or to 2 Samuel 12:1–6 (which presents the same event translated into quite other terms that interpret it).
The doctrine latent in the chapter, that 'sin came into the world through one man and death through sin' (Rom. 5:12, RSV), emerges in sharp focus only in the New Testament. The Old Testament uses the story little, though it witnesses to man's bondage; it has the materials of the doctrine but has not formulated it. Jewry, on the other hand, knows and rejects it. According to Isidore Epstein, 'Judaism denies the existence of original sin … True, the idea that the sin of Adam had brought death on all mankind is not unknown in Jewish teaching, but the reference is invariably to physical death, and is not to be confused with the spiritual death from which in Christian doctrine none can be saved except through faith in the risen Saviour. Man can therefore achieve his own redemption by penitence …'24
It took the work of the last Adam to bring home to us our full downfall in the first Adam.
1–7. Temptation and disobedience. In verse 1, the serpent is explicitly God's handiwork, subtle as he is (for the predominant sense of subtle is 'shrewd', as in Prov. 12:23; 14:18, etc.), and the chapter speaks not of evil invading, as though it had its own existence, but of creatures rebelling. His malevolent brilliance raises the question, which is not pursued, whether he is the tool of a more formidable rebel; the inference becomes compelling in 15, where see comment. But Eve must not be under duress: her temptation comes through a subordinate (cf. Matt. 16:22, 23, concerning Jesus and Peter), which strengthens its appeal to pride but carries no compulsion.
The tempter begins with suggestion rather than argument. The incredulous tone—'So God has actually said …?'—is both disturbing and flattering: it smuggles in the assumption that God's word is subject to our judgment. The exaggeration, Ye shall not eat of any tree (RV, RSV, rightly), is a further and favourite device: dangled before Eve it will draw her into debate on her opponent's terms.
2, 3. Eve is duly drawn, and by adding neither shall ye touch it she over-corrects the error, magnifying God's strictness (she was to have many successors).
4. After the query, the flat contradiction: Ye shall not surely die (AV, RV). It is the serpent's word against God's, and the first doctrine to be denied is judgment. If modern denials of it are very differently motivated, they are equally at odds with revelation: Jesus fully reaffirmed the doctrine (e.g. Matt. 7:13–27).
5. The climax is a lie big enough to reinterpret life (this breadth is the power of a false system) and dynamic enough to redirect the flow of affection and ambition. To be as God,25 and to achieve it by outwitting him, is an intoxicating programme. God will henceforth be regarded, consciously or not, as rival and enemy. Against this human arrogance 'the obedience of the one' and his taking 'the form of a servant' show up in their true colours (Rom. 5:19; Phil. 2:7).
So the tempter pits his bare assertion against the word and works of God, presenting divine love as envy, service as servility, and a suicidal plunge as a leap into life, 'All these things will I give thee …'; the pattern repeats in Christ's temptations, and in ours.
On knowing good and evil, see on 2:9.
6. … the woman saw …—and visual evidence is potent: God allows the forbidden its full appeal. The pattern of sin runs right through the act, for Eve listened to a creature instead of the Creator, followed her impressions against her instructions, and made self-fulfilment her goal. This prospect of material, aesthetic and mental enrichment (6a) seemed to add up to life itself; the world still offers it (1 John 2:16). But man's lifeline is spiritual, namely God's word and the response of faith (Deut. 8:3; Hab. 2:4); to break it is death.
She took … and ate: so simple the act, so hard its undoing. God will taste poverty and death before 'take and eat' become verbs of salvation.
… and he ate: led, as the woman had been, instead of leading; a curious way to achieve divinity. The man and the woman have been sold a false idea of evil, as something beyond good; of wisdom, as sophistication; and now of greatness, as greed.
7. The opening of the verse, utterly unexpected after 2:17, forces the reader to re-examine the meaning of the death that was threatened there. Augustine comments: 'If … it be asked what death God threatened man with …, whether … bodily or spiritual or that second death, we answer: It was all … He comprehends therein, not only the first part of the first death, wheresoever the soul loses God, nor the latter only, wherein the soul leaves the body … but also … the second which is the last of deaths, eternal, and following after all.'26
The serpent's promise of eyes … opened came true in its fashion (and cf. 22), but it was a grotesque anticlimax to the dream of enlightenment. Man saw the familiar world and spoilt it now in the seeing, projecting evil on to innocence (cf. Titus 1:15) and reacting to good with shame and flight. His new consciousness of good and evil was both like and unlike the divine knowledge (3:22), differing from it and from innocence as a sick man's aching awareness of his body differs both from the insight of the physician and the unconcern of the man in health.
The fig leaves were pathetic enough, as human expedients tend to be, but the instinct was sound and God confirmed it (21), for sin's proper fruit is shame. The couple, now ill at ease together, experienced a foretaste of fallen human relations in general. There is no road back, as the nudists and those who make a cult of frankness, the spiritual nudists, suppose. God's way is forward, for when the body is redeemed (Rom. 8:23) and love is perfect, we shall be not back in Eden but clothed with glory (2 Cor. 5:4).
8–13. Confrontation. In verse 8, it is the sound (RSV), not the voice (AV, RV) that they first hear. With the impulse to hide from the presence (literally 'face') of the Lord, compare ultimately Revelation 6:16, and in contrast, Revelation 22:4.
9. God's first word to fallen man has all the marks of grace. It is a question, since to help him he must draw rather than drive him out of hiding. Only a voice penetrates his concealment. With this 'Where …?', cf. the searching 'Why …?' to Saul, and 'What …?' to Legion. Cain was to hear all three (4:6, 9, 10).
10. Adam's answer conceals the cause behind the symptoms; but afraid (the first mention of fear) is significant: this shrinking from God remains part of our fallen condition.
12, 13. The second answer admits the truth, but angles it against the woman and ultimately God. Man is learning quickly, but his retreat into verbal hiding only puts a fresh obstacle in the way of mercy. God, by addressing man, woman and serpent in that order, has shown how he regards their degrees of responsibility.
14–19. Sentence. Prose here gives way to rhythmic speech, as in 2:23 and in oracles generally. Note, in all that follows, the undiminished sovereignty of God. Man's dominion (chapter 2) and man's sin (chapter 3) 'simply set sovereignty in a different context'27: they do not threaten it.
14. No question is put to the serpent: only his sentence. These words do not imply that hitherto serpents had not been reptiles (still less that the story is merely aetiological, i.e. a 'Just So Story' on how the serpent lost its legs28—an interest belied by the tragic context), but that the crawling is henceforth symbolic (cf. Isa. 65:25)—just as in 9:13 a new significance, not new existence, will be decreed for the rainbow.
15. There is good New Testament authority for seeing here the protevangelium, the first glimmer of the gospel. Remarkably, it makes its début as a sentence passed on the enemy (cf. Col. 2:15), not a direct promise to man, for redemption is about God's rule as much as about man's need (cf. Ezek. 36:22, 'not … for your sake …'). The prospect of struggle, suffering and human triumph is clear enough,29 but only the New Testament will unmask the figure of Satan behind the serpent (Rom. 16:20; Rev. 12:9; 20:2), and show how significant was the passing over of Adam for the woman30 and her seed (cf. Matt. 1:23; Gal. 4:4;? 1 Tim. 2:15). The latter, like the seed of Abraham, is both collective (cf. Rom. 16:20) and, in the crucial struggle, individual (cf. Gal. 3:16),31 since Jesus as the last Adam summed up mankind in himself. RSV'S personal pronoun he, allowed but not required by the Hebrew, has a pre-Christian precedent in the LXX here.32
16. Pain and bondage now appear on the horizon. Two kindred words are used in 16 for the repeated sorrow (AV, RV) or pain (RSV), the first of which exactly recurs in 17c for the 'toil' (RV, RSV) or 'sorrow' (AV) imposed on Adam. A possible rendering each time would be 'travail'.
RSV's your pain in childbearing catches the meaning of the Hebrew idiom which AV, RV render too literally.33 The phrase your desire shall be for your husband (RSV), with the reciprocating he shall rule over you, portrays a marriage relation in which control has slipped from the fully personal realm to that of instinctive urges passive and active. 'To love and to cherish' becomes 'To desire and to dominate'. While even pagan marriage can rise far above this, the pull of sin is always towards it. An echo of the phrase, in 4:7b, conjures up still more vividly its suggestion of the jungle.
17. In mercy, the curse is on man's realm, not man himself; but nothing constructive is said to Adam, in whom all die. Sorrow … sweat … and dust answer the fantasy 'you will be like God', and lead to the cry 'all things are full of weariness' (Eccle. 1:8, RSV).
18. Thorns … and thistles are eloquent signs of nature untamed and encroaching; in the Old Testament they mark the scenes of man's self-defeat and God's judgment, e.g. in the sluggard's field (Prov. 24:31) and the ruined city (Isa. 34:13). They need not be envisaged here as newly created, but as henceforth a perennial threat (as the unconquered Canaanites would be to Israel, Num. 33:55); for man in his own disorder would never now 'subdue' the earth. The nature-miracles of Jesus give some idea of the control which man under God might have exercised (cf. Heb. 2:8, 9).
20. The naming of Eve. After the sentence of death, this name, 'life', with its play on the word living, is very striking; its connection with Eve's role as mother further suggests that Adam heard the promise of 15 in faith.
21. The coats of skins. It is unduly subtle, and a distraction, to foresee the atonement here: God is meeting immediate rather than ultimate needs, for both are his concern. The coats of skins are forerunners of the many measures of welfare, both moral34 and physical, which man's sin makes necessary. Social action, now delegated to human hands (Rom. 13:1–7; Jas 2:16), could not have had an earlier or more exalted inauguration.
22–24. Paradise lost. On man's new knowledge, see the middle comment on 7. The expulsion is by decree; it could also be expressed as by logical necessity, since eternal life is fellowship with God (John 17:3), which man has now repudiated. The point is re-emphasized in the phrase the ground from which he was taken, an echo of 19; it is that half of the truth about him (2:7) by which he has chosen to live; and he must end where he belongs (cf. Phil. 3:19–21).
24. Every detail of this verse, with its flame and sword and the turning every way, actively excludes the sinner. His way back is more than hard, it is resisted: he cannot save himself. The cherubim,35 God's multiform and awesome thronebearers in Ezekiel's visions (cf. Ezek. 1:5 with Ezek. 10:15), are seen elsewhere as symbolic guardians of the holy of holies, their forms embroidered on the veil that barred access to it, and modelled above the ark (Exod. 36:35; 37:7–9). At the death of Christ this veil was rent in two (Matt. 27:51) and the way to God thrown open (Heb. 10:19–22) in fact as well as symbol.
Additional note on sin and suffering
Three kinds of disorder, covering the greater part of human suffering, make their germinal appearance in this chapter.
In personal relations there are the first signs of mutual estrangement (7) and the brutalizing of sexual love (16b). Here in embryo are the mistrusts and passions which will ravage society. In the spiritual realm man has become, in his self-contradiction, simultaneously in flight (and banishment) from God (8, 24) and in battle with evil (15). On the physical plane, his life is to be a painful struggle to renew (16) and sustain (19) its basic processes, which are in some degree disturbed.
This multiple disarray is, from one aspect, his punishment, pronounced by God; from another, it is the plain outcome of his anarchy. Leaderless, the choir of creation can only grind on in discord. It seems, indeed, from Romans 8:19–23 and from what is known of the pre-human world, that there was a state of travail in nature from the first, which man was empowered to 'subdue' (1:28) (perhaps little by little as he spread abroad to 'fill the earth'), until he relapsed instead into disorder himself. Even now his power over nature (Ps. 8:6–8; Jas 3:7) reflects this primal ability; the ordering influence of the Man, Christ Jesus, shows what was its full potential, one day to be realized everywhere and for ever (Rom. 8:19).
Kidner, D. (1967). Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary (Vol. 1, pp. 71–78). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
On its historicity two things should be said. First, the New Testament assumes it and argues from it, making the first Adam as literal as the last, whose genealogy is indeed traced back to him in Luke 3:23ff. According to Romans 5:18, 19; 1 Corinthians 15:20, 21, Adam was 'one man', and his sin 'one trespass', as factual as the cross and resurrection. But secondly, granted this historicity, it may still be an open question whether the account transcribes the facts or translates them: i.e. whether it is a narrative comparable to such a passage as 2 Samuel 11 (which is the straight story of David's sin) or to 2 Samuel 12:1–6 (which presents the same event translated into quite other terms that interpret it).
The doctrine latent in the chapter, that 'sin came into the world through one man and death through sin' (Rom. 5:12, RSV), emerges in sharp focus only in the New Testament. The Old Testament uses the story little, though it witnesses to man's bondage; it has the materials of the doctrine but has not formulated it. Jewry, on the other hand, knows and rejects it. According to Isidore Epstein, 'Judaism denies the existence of original sin … True, the idea that the sin of Adam had brought death on all mankind is not unknown in Jewish teaching, but the reference is invariably to physical death, and is not to be confused with the spiritual death from which in Christian doctrine none can be saved except through faith in the risen Saviour. Man can therefore achieve his own redemption by penitence …'24
It took the work of the last Adam to bring home to us our full downfall in the first Adam.
1–7. Temptation and disobedience. In verse 1, the serpent is explicitly God's handiwork, subtle as he is (for the predominant sense of subtle is 'shrewd', as in Prov. 12:23; 14:18, etc.), and the chapter speaks not of evil invading, as though it had its own existence, but of creatures rebelling. His malevolent brilliance raises the question, which is not pursued, whether he is the tool of a more formidable rebel; the inference becomes compelling in 15, where see comment. But Eve must not be under duress: her temptation comes through a subordinate (cf. Matt. 16:22, 23, concerning Jesus and Peter), which strengthens its appeal to pride but carries no compulsion.
The tempter begins with suggestion rather than argument. The incredulous tone—'So God has actually said …?'—is both disturbing and flattering: it smuggles in the assumption that God's word is subject to our judgment. The exaggeration, Ye shall not eat of any tree (RV, RSV, rightly), is a further and favourite device: dangled before Eve it will draw her into debate on her opponent's terms.
2, 3. Eve is duly drawn, and by adding neither shall ye touch it she over-corrects the error, magnifying God's strictness (she was to have many successors).
4. After the query, the flat contradiction: Ye shall not surely die (AV, RV). It is the serpent's word against God's, and the first doctrine to be denied is judgment. If modern denials of it are very differently motivated, they are equally at odds with revelation: Jesus fully reaffirmed the doctrine (e.g. Matt. 7:13–27).
5. The climax is a lie big enough to reinterpret life (this breadth is the power of a false system) and dynamic enough to redirect the flow of affection and ambition. To be as God,25 and to achieve it by outwitting him, is an intoxicating programme. God will henceforth be regarded, consciously or not, as rival and enemy. Against this human arrogance 'the obedience of the one' and his taking 'the form of a servant' show up in their true colours (Rom. 5:19; Phil. 2:7).
So the tempter pits his bare assertion against the word and works of God, presenting divine love as envy, service as servility, and a suicidal plunge as a leap into life, 'All these things will I give thee …'; the pattern repeats in Christ's temptations, and in ours.
On knowing good and evil, see on 2:9.
6. … the woman saw …—and visual evidence is potent: God allows the forbidden its full appeal. The pattern of sin runs right through the act, for Eve listened to a creature instead of the Creator, followed her impressions against her instructions, and made self-fulfilment her goal. This prospect of material, aesthetic and mental enrichment (6a) seemed to add up to life itself; the world still offers it (1 John 2:16). But man's lifeline is spiritual, namely God's word and the response of faith (Deut. 8:3; Hab. 2:4); to break it is death.
She took … and ate: so simple the act, so hard its undoing. God will taste poverty and death before 'take and eat' become verbs of salvation.
… and he ate: led, as the woman had been, instead of leading; a curious way to achieve divinity. The man and the woman have been sold a false idea of evil, as something beyond good; of wisdom, as sophistication; and now of greatness, as greed.
7. The opening of the verse, utterly unexpected after 2:17, forces the reader to re-examine the meaning of the death that was threatened there. Augustine comments: 'If … it be asked what death God threatened man with …, whether … bodily or spiritual or that second death, we answer: It was all … He comprehends therein, not only the first part of the first death, wheresoever the soul loses God, nor the latter only, wherein the soul leaves the body … but also … the second which is the last of deaths, eternal, and following after all.'26
The serpent's promise of eyes … opened came true in its fashion (and cf. 22), but it was a grotesque anticlimax to the dream of enlightenment. Man saw the familiar world and spoilt it now in the seeing, projecting evil on to innocence (cf. Titus 1:15) and reacting to good with shame and flight. His new consciousness of good and evil was both like and unlike the divine knowledge (3:22), differing from it and from innocence as a sick man's aching awareness of his body differs both from the insight of the physician and the unconcern of the man in health.
The fig leaves were pathetic enough, as human expedients tend to be, but the instinct was sound and God confirmed it (21), for sin's proper fruit is shame. The couple, now ill at ease together, experienced a foretaste of fallen human relations in general. There is no road back, as the nudists and those who make a cult of frankness, the spiritual nudists, suppose. God's way is forward, for when the body is redeemed (Rom. 8:23) and love is perfect, we shall be not back in Eden but clothed with glory (2 Cor. 5:4).
8–13. Confrontation. In verse 8, it is the sound (RSV), not the voice (AV, RV) that they first hear. With the impulse to hide from the presence (literally 'face') of the Lord, compare ultimately Revelation 6:16, and in contrast, Revelation 22:4.
9. God's first word to fallen man has all the marks of grace. It is a question, since to help him he must draw rather than drive him out of hiding. Only a voice penetrates his concealment. With this 'Where …?', cf. the searching 'Why …?' to Saul, and 'What …?' to Legion. Cain was to hear all three (4:6, 9, 10).
10. Adam's answer conceals the cause behind the symptoms; but afraid (the first mention of fear) is significant: this shrinking from God remains part of our fallen condition.
12, 13. The second answer admits the truth, but angles it against the woman and ultimately God. Man is learning quickly, but his retreat into verbal hiding only puts a fresh obstacle in the way of mercy. God, by addressing man, woman and serpent in that order, has shown how he regards their degrees of responsibility.
14–19. Sentence. Prose here gives way to rhythmic speech, as in 2:23 and in oracles generally. Note, in all that follows, the undiminished sovereignty of God. Man's dominion (chapter 2) and man's sin (chapter 3) 'simply set sovereignty in a different context'27: they do not threaten it.
14. No question is put to the serpent: only his sentence. These words do not imply that hitherto serpents had not been reptiles (still less that the story is merely aetiological, i.e. a 'Just So Story' on how the serpent lost its legs28—an interest belied by the tragic context), but that the crawling is henceforth symbolic (cf. Isa. 65:25)—just as in 9:13 a new significance, not new existence, will be decreed for the rainbow.
15. There is good New Testament authority for seeing here the protevangelium, the first glimmer of the gospel. Remarkably, it makes its début as a sentence passed on the enemy (cf. Col. 2:15), not a direct promise to man, for redemption is about God's rule as much as about man's need (cf. Ezek. 36:22, 'not … for your sake …'). The prospect of struggle, suffering and human triumph is clear enough,29 but only the New Testament will unmask the figure of Satan behind the serpent (Rom. 16:20; Rev. 12:9; 20:2), and show how significant was the passing over of Adam for the woman30 and her seed (cf. Matt. 1:23; Gal. 4:4;? 1 Tim. 2:15). The latter, like the seed of Abraham, is both collective (cf. Rom. 16:20) and, in the crucial struggle, individual (cf. Gal. 3:16),31 since Jesus as the last Adam summed up mankind in himself. RSV'S personal pronoun he, allowed but not required by the Hebrew, has a pre-Christian precedent in the LXX here.32
16. Pain and bondage now appear on the horizon. Two kindred words are used in 16 for the repeated sorrow (AV, RV) or pain (RSV), the first of which exactly recurs in 17c for the 'toil' (RV, RSV) or 'sorrow' (AV) imposed on Adam. A possible rendering each time would be 'travail'.
RSV's your pain in childbearing catches the meaning of the Hebrew idiom which AV, RV render too literally.33 The phrase your desire shall be for your husband (RSV), with the reciprocating he shall rule over you, portrays a marriage relation in which control has slipped from the fully personal realm to that of instinctive urges passive and active. 'To love and to cherish' becomes 'To desire and to dominate'. While even pagan marriage can rise far above this, the pull of sin is always towards it. An echo of the phrase, in 4:7b, conjures up still more vividly its suggestion of the jungle.
17. In mercy, the curse is on man's realm, not man himself; but nothing constructive is said to Adam, in whom all die. Sorrow … sweat … and dust answer the fantasy 'you will be like God', and lead to the cry 'all things are full of weariness' (Eccle. 1:8, RSV).
18. Thorns … and thistles are eloquent signs of nature untamed and encroaching; in the Old Testament they mark the scenes of man's self-defeat and God's judgment, e.g. in the sluggard's field (Prov. 24:31) and the ruined city (Isa. 34:13). They need not be envisaged here as newly created, but as henceforth a perennial threat (as the unconquered Canaanites would be to Israel, Num. 33:55); for man in his own disorder would never now 'subdue' the earth. The nature-miracles of Jesus give some idea of the control which man under God might have exercised (cf. Heb. 2:8, 9).
20. The naming of Eve. After the sentence of death, this name, 'life', with its play on the word living, is very striking; its connection with Eve's role as mother further suggests that Adam heard the promise of 15 in faith.
21. The coats of skins. It is unduly subtle, and a distraction, to foresee the atonement here: God is meeting immediate rather than ultimate needs, for both are his concern. The coats of skins are forerunners of the many measures of welfare, both moral34 and physical, which man's sin makes necessary. Social action, now delegated to human hands (Rom. 13:1–7; Jas 2:16), could not have had an earlier or more exalted inauguration.
22–24. Paradise lost. On man's new knowledge, see the middle comment on 7. The expulsion is by decree; it could also be expressed as by logical necessity, since eternal life is fellowship with God (John 17:3), which man has now repudiated. The point is re-emphasized in the phrase the ground from which he was taken, an echo of 19; it is that half of the truth about him (2:7) by which he has chosen to live; and he must end where he belongs (cf. Phil. 3:19–21).
24. Every detail of this verse, with its flame and sword and the turning every way, actively excludes the sinner. His way back is more than hard, it is resisted: he cannot save himself. The cherubim,35 God's multiform and awesome thronebearers in Ezekiel's visions (cf. Ezek. 1:5 with Ezek. 10:15), are seen elsewhere as symbolic guardians of the holy of holies, their forms embroidered on the veil that barred access to it, and modelled above the ark (Exod. 36:35; 37:7–9). At the death of Christ this veil was rent in two (Matt. 27:51) and the way to God thrown open (Heb. 10:19–22) in fact as well as symbol.
Additional note on sin and suffering
Three kinds of disorder, covering the greater part of human suffering, make their germinal appearance in this chapter.
In personal relations there are the first signs of mutual estrangement (7) and the brutalizing of sexual love (16b). Here in embryo are the mistrusts and passions which will ravage society. In the spiritual realm man has become, in his self-contradiction, simultaneously in flight (and banishment) from God (8, 24) and in battle with evil (15). On the physical plane, his life is to be a painful struggle to renew (16) and sustain (19) its basic processes, which are in some degree disturbed.
This multiple disarray is, from one aspect, his punishment, pronounced by God; from another, it is the plain outcome of his anarchy. Leaderless, the choir of creation can only grind on in discord. It seems, indeed, from Romans 8:19–23 and from what is known of the pre-human world, that there was a state of travail in nature from the first, which man was empowered to 'subdue' (1:28) (perhaps little by little as he spread abroad to 'fill the earth'), until he relapsed instead into disorder himself. Even now his power over nature (Ps. 8:6–8; Jas 3:7) reflects this primal ability; the ordering influence of the Man, Christ Jesus, shows what was its full potential, one day to be realized everywhere and for ever (Rom. 8:19).
Kidner, D. (1967). Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary (Vol. 1, pp. 71–78). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
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