17 texts
"Now look again in the picture," God said. "See who it is that seduced Eve and what is the fruit of the tree. You will know what shall be and how it shall be for your seed among th...
God told Enoch how He built the world in six days — and how it all went wrong. On the third day, He planted paradise and enclosed it with flaming angel-guards. On the fourth, He se...
Eve dreamed of blood. Her son's blood. Pouring into the mouth of his brother. After their expulsion from Paradise, Adam and Eve journeyed eastward toward the sunrise and settled th...
A dying man asked his wife and son to walk to the edge of Paradise and beg for mercy. They came back with a prophecy -- and a death sentence. Adam lay groaning on his bed, the seve...
The serpent did not act alone. Behind the serpent stood a jealous angel -- and behind the angel stood a grudge older than humanity itself. Eve gathered all her children and grandch...
The serpent wept for her. That was the cruelest part. It pretended to grieve for her ignorance while plotting her destruction. "May God live!" the serpent said to Eve, its voice dr...
God pronounced three curses. One for the man. One for the woman. One for the serpent. And with those three curses, the world as it had been ended forever. To Adam, God said: "Since...
A dying man's last request was simple: pray for me. What happened next was something no human eye had ever seen. "Now you know how we were deceived," Eve told her children, finishi...
The seven heavens opened. The sun and moon went dark. And every angel in creation wept for the first man who ever died. Seth rose from his father's body and went to his mother. "Wh...
Six days. That was how long the archangel Michael had said it would take. And on the sixth day, exactly as foretold, Adam died. When Adam felt the hour of death closing in, he gath...
Jewish tradition, with its layers upon layers of interpretation, gives us some pretty incredible insights. Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, a fascinating early medieval text, paints a pictu...
We know he was driven out, but... where to? It's a question that's haunted Jewish tradition for millennia. The book of Genesis tells us, "So he drove out the man" (Gen. 3:24). Simp...
having a voice, but God has feet that enable him to walk. In the Talmud, Rabbi Abahu said: "The Holy One, blessed be He, said: 'I am He who walked in the Garden of Eden'" (Taanit 2...
Turns out, there's more to it than just a quick wardrobe fix. Our sages saw layers of meaning woven into that very first act of covering up. In The Midrash of Philo, we find a fasc...
We all know the story: the serpent, the forbidden fruit, the expulsion. But what about that strange line in (Genesis 3:8), "They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the gard...
Take the very first name ever given to a woman: Chava, or as we know her, Eve. Philo, the great Jewish philosopher from Alexandria, Egypt, writing around the first century CE, give...
But the Torah actually tells us something much more… intimate. It says, “And the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and clothed them" (Genesis 3:21). Garments of...
