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Adam and Eve

first man and woman in Abrahamic creation myth

Adam and Eve, according to the Creatio ex nihilo ("creation out of nothing") myth of the Abrahamic religions, were the first man and woman. They are central to the belief that humanity is in essence a single family, with everyone descended from a single pair of original ancestors. They also provide the basis for the doctrines of the fall of man and original sin that are important beliefs in Christianity, although not held in Judaism or Islam.

The creation of Adam, as portrayed in the Sistine Chapel
The creation of Eve
The Temptation and Expulsion

Quotes

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  • When Adam dalf and Eve span, go spire – if thou may spede –
    Where was than the pride of man that now marres his mede?
    • When Adam delved and Eve spun, go ask – if you may succeed –
      Where then was the pride of man, which now deprives him of his reward?
    • "When Adam dalf and Eve span", line 1, in The Oxford Book of Medieval English Verse (1970) edited by Celia Sisam and Kenneth Sisam p. 617, translation, p. 404
  • “Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived.” It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.
  • Adam was created with two bodies, one of which was cut away from him and formed Eve.
  • Michael and Gabriel acted as 'best men' at the nuptials of Adam and Eve. God joined them in wedlock, and pronounced the marriage benediction on them.
  • The builder mixes a thick sand with a thinner one in the mortar, by which contrivance the latter becomes very strong and the building more substantial.
    • Ibid., p. 67
  • Oh, but of course the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn't it? Symbolic?! So Jesus had himself tortured and executed for a symbolic sin by a non-existent individual? Nobody not brought up in the faith could reach any verdict other than "barking mad". (Part 2, 00:30:25)
  • Had Adam tenderly reproved his wife, and endeavored to lead her to repentance instead of sharing in her guilt, I should be much more ready to accord to man that superiority which he claims; but as the facts stand disclosed by the sacred historian, it appears to me that to say the least, there was as much weakness exhibited by Adam as by Eve. They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality.
    • Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman (1838), no. 1.
  • The Lord made Adam, the Lord made Eve, he made ‘em both a little bit naive.
    • Yip Harburg, “The Begat,” Finian’s Rainbow (1947).


  • When our first parents were driven out of Paradise, Adam is believed to have remarked to Eve: "My dear, we live in an age of transition".
  • Without the Christian explanation of original sin, the seemingly silly story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, there was no explanation of conflict. At all.
  • The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived from the very God who bade them be not conscious of it.
  • That was the birth of sin. Not doing it, but KNOWING about it. Before the apple, [Adam and Eve] had shut their eyes and their minds had gone dark. Now, they peeped and pried and imagined. They watched themselves.
    • D. H. Lawrence, “Nathaniel Hawthorne and ‘The Scarlet Letter’,” Studies in Classic American Literature, ch. 7 (1923).
  • All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action. You know that every Muslim is the brother of another Muslim. Remember, one day you will appear before Allah and answer for your deeds. So beware, do not astray from the path of righteousness after I am gone.
  • Yet for all this reverence, the Bible is one long celebration of violence. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the Lord God took one of Adam’s ribs, and made he a woman. And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. With a world population of exactly four, that works out to a homicide rate of 25 percent, which is about a thousand times higher than the equivalent rates in Western countries today.
  • The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. These atrocities are neither isolated nor obscure. They implicate all the major characters of the Old Testament, the ones that Sunday-school children draw with crayons. And they fall into a continuous plotline that stretches for millennia, from Adam and Eve through Noah, the patriarchs, Moses, Joshua, the judges, Saul, David, Solomon, and beyond. According to the biblical scholar Raymund Schwager, the Hebrew Bible “contains over six hundred passages that explicitly talk about nations, kings, or individuals attacking, destroying, and killing others. . . . Aside from the approximately one thousand verses in which Yahweh himself appears as the direct executioner of violent punishments, and the many texts in which the Lord delivers the criminal to the punisher’s sword, in over one hundred other passages Yahweh expressly gives the command to kill people.” Matthew White, a self-described atrocitologist who keeps a database with the estimated death tolls of history’s major wars, massacres, and genocides, counts about 1.2 million deaths from mass killing that are specifically enumerated in the Bible. (He excludes the half million casualties in the war between Judah and Israel described in 2 Chronicles 13 because he considers the body count historically implausible.) The victims of the Noachian flood would add another 20 million or so to the total. The good news, of course, is that most of it never happened. Not only is there no evidence that Yahweh inundated the planet and incinerated its cities, but the patriarchs, exodus, conquest, and Jewish empire are almost certainly fictions. Historians have found no mention in Egyptian writings of the departure of a million slaves (which could hardly have escaped the Egyptians’ notice); nor have archaeologists found evidence in the ruins of Jericho or neighboring cities of a sacking around 1200 BCE. And if there was a Davidic empire stretching from the Euphrates to the Red Sea around the turn of the 1st millennium BCE, no one else at the time seemed to have noticed it.
  • Ever since Eve gave Adam the apple, there has been a misunderstanding between the sexes about gifts.

  • The first idea was not our own. Adam
    In Eden was the father of Descartes
    And eve made air the mirror of herself,

    Of her sons and of her daughters.

  • Adam and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
  • It all began with Adam. He was the first man to tell a joke — or a lie. How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before. Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.
  • Adam was but human — this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
  • Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
  • Adam and Eve had many advantages but the principal one was, that they escaped teething.
  • Let us be thankful to Adam our benefactor. He cut us out of the 'blessing' of idleness and won for us the 'curse' of labor.
    • Mark Twain, Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar (1897).
  • Adam and Noah were ancestors of mine. I never thought much of them. Adam lacked character. He couldn't be trusted with apples. Noah had an absurd idea that he could navigate without any knowledge of navigation, and he ran into the only shoal place on earth.
    • Mark Twain, Speech, November 9, 1901. Reported in The New York Times, November 10, 1901.
  • Adam, man's benefactor — he gave him all he has ever received that was worth having — Death.
  • After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
  • Adam's temperament was the first command the Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only command Adam would never be able to disobey. It said, "Be weak, be water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable." The later command, to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam himself, but by his temperament — which he did not create and had no authority over.
    • Mark Twain, "The Turning Point of my Life", §3, Harper's Bazar, February 1910, as reprinted in Essays and Sketches of Mark Twain (1995), ed. Stuart Miller, ISBN 1566198798 .
  • It is and has always been God’s intention that we should live in friendship and harmony. That was the point of the story of the Garden of Eden, where there was no bloodshed, not even for religious sacrifice. The lion and the lamb gamboled together and all were vegetarian. Then the primordial harmony that was God’s intention for all God’s creation was shattered and a fundamental brokenness infected the entire creation. Human beings came to be at loggerheads, blaming one another and being at one another’s throats. They were alienated from their Maker. Now they sought to hide from the God who used to stroll with them in the garden. Creation was now “red in tooth and claw.” Where there had been friendship, now we experienced enmity. Humans would crush the serpent’s head before it bruised their heels. This story is the Bible’s way of telling a profound existential truth in the form of highly imaginative poetry.

Bible

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The Bible on Wikiquote
 
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. ~ Genesis
  • And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
  • God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
  • When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.
    And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.
    And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?
    And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.
    And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?
    And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.
    And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.
  • Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them. And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
  • And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
  • And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.

All Church Humour

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Anonymous All Church Humour.

 
After several days absence from the Garden of Eden, Adam returned to find the lonely Eve sulking and suspicious of his actions. “Really, now darling”, said Adam, “How could you possibly be jealous of me?...
  • The story of Adam and Eve takes a lot of believing. It’s probably just a rib.
    • In p. 11


  • The Bible says that the last thing God made was Eve. He must have made her on Saturday night – it shows fatigue.
    • In p. 11
  • Surely God must have been disappointed in Adam: He made Eve so different.
    • In p. 11
  • After several days absence from the Garden of Eden, Adam returned to find the lonely Eve sulking and suspicious of his actions. “Really, now darling”, said Adam, “How could you possibly be jealous of me? Don’t you realize that I am the first man and you’re the first woman – the only two humans in existence There just are'nt any others”.
    Yes, I know replied Eve. Still...
    Adam was finally able to soothe his wife and soon they both drifted off to sleep. In the midst of the wee dark hours of morning, Eve arose from her sleep, pulled the bearskin covering off Adam and then counted his ribs!
    • In p. 12
  • In the Garden of Eden sat Adam,
    Disporting himself with his madam,
    She was filled with elation,
    For in all of creation,
    There was only one man – and she had’m.
    • In p. 12
  • An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Russian were arguing about the nationality of Adam and Eve.
    “They must have been English”, declares the Englishman. "Only a gentleman would share his last apple with a woman.”
    ”They were undoubtedly French", says, the Frenchman. “Who else could seduce a woman so easily?”
    "I think they were Russians", says the Russian. "After all, who else could walk stark-naked, feed on one apple between the two of them and think they are in Paradise?"
    • In p. 12
  • Devil was more generous than Adam,
    That never laid the fault upon his madam
    But like a gallant and heroic self,
    Took freely all the crime upon Himself.
    • In p. 12

See also

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