Fall of man

Traditional interpretations

Christian exegetes have applied the day-year principle to Genesis 2:17, where God says Adam will die on the day he eats the fruit. Psalms 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8, and Jubilees 4:40 explain that to God a day equals a thousand years, so Adam died within that same divine day. The Greek Septuagint, however, translates the word for day as a twenty-four-hour period. According to Meredith Kline, the threatened death is not physical death but eternal perdition, because in covenant theology the curse is balanced by the blessing of glorified eternal life symbolized by the tree of life and the Sabbath.

During the antediluvian age, human longevity approached a millennium—Adam lived 930 years—leading some to interpret the death as becoming mortal, though the grammar and narrative do not support this, as Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden to prevent them from eating from the tree of life and gaining immortality. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that the account uses figurative language but affirms that human history is marked by the original fault of the first parents.

St. Bede and Thomas Aquinas taught that the fall brought four wounds to human nature: original sin, concupiscence, physical frailty and death, and darkened intellect and ignorance, which negated the gifts of original justice, integrity, immortality, and infused knowledge.

Other traditions

Gnosticism emerged in the late first century CE within non-rabbinical Jewish and early Christian groups. It prioritized personal spiritual knowledge, or gnosis, over faith in church teachings and authority. Gnostics believed in a supreme, unknowable God distinct from the Demiurge, a lesser being who created the material world. In this view, the serpent in Eden was a liberator, bringing knowledge to Adam and Eve and freeing them from the Demiurge’s control.

Gnostic Christian cosmology was dualistic, pitting good against evil, and often identified the Old Testament’s Hebrew God as the evil Demiurge, while the New Testament’s Unknown God was the true, good deity. In systems like the Archontic, Sethian, and Ophite, this Demiurge, called Yaldabaoth or Yahweh, trapped souls in physical bodies within a painful world. Not all Gnostics saw the creator as malevolent; Valentinians considered him merely ignorant and incompetent, striving to make a good world but failing. Proto-orthodox Early Church Fathers labeled all Gnostics heretics.

Literature and art

The fall of man has been depicted in art by Albrecht Dürer in Adam and Eve (1504) and by Titian in The Fall of Man (c. 1550). C. S. Lewis's novel Perelandra (1943) explores the fall on a new Garden of Eden on Venus, where the protagonist Dr. Ransom is sent to prevent a new fall. Albert Camus's The Fall (1956) uses a first-person confession in Amsterdam to examine the consequences of a refusal to rescue a drowning woman, touching on baptism and grace.

J. R. R. Tolkien's Tale of Adanel, part of Morgoth's Ring, reimagines the fall within Middle-earth's mythos, with Melkor seducing the first Men to worship him instead of Eru Ilúvatar. Daniel Quinn's novels Ishmael (1992) and The Story of B (1996) propose that the fall story originated from another culture observing the rise of totalitarian agriculture. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series presents the fall positively, as the moment humans achieve self-awareness and freedom.

Did You Know?

• The phrase 'fall of man' does not appear in Jewish scripture.
• The Book of Jubilees dates the serpent's temptation to the 17th day of the 2nd month in the 8th year after Adam's creation.