You think you know the story of Adam, Eve, and their co-stars, the snake, the tree, and the apple, but you don't know a fig leaf about it. Here's some fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, if you dare.
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00:00You think you know the story of Adam and Eve and their co-stars, the snake, the tree, and
00:04the apple, but you don't know a fig leaf about it. Here's some fruit from the tree of knowledge,
00:09if you dare.
00:10The biblical texts are written either in Hebrew or in Aramaic or in Greek, but every translation
00:15is an interpretation.
00:17So with the Old Testament, we're talking about Hebrew mostly, but there's some original Aramaic
00:22there for sure, and plenty of room for some potential mistranslations. For example, we
00:26all know Eve was created from one of Adam's ribs, except maybe not.
00:31The Hebrew word selah appears 40 times in the Bible, but the only time it's translated
00:36as rib is when Eve shows up. Otherwise, it refers to the side of something or something
00:41hanging off the torso of an upright human. There we go. Enter the dong bone theory.
00:47According to Dr. Zioni Zebit, who holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Biblical
00:52Literature at American Jewish University, we need to be thinking a little lower. That's
00:57right. Dr. Zebit believes Eve was actually created from Adam's baculum. The penis bone
01:02is extremely common in mammals, including other primates, but human males are missing
01:07this piece of kit. Why? Well, if God took that bone from Adam to make Eve, then his
01:12descendants would presumably have boneless penises.
01:16Think about it. Men have an even number of ribs, but no baculum. So it stands to reason,
01:21Zebit says, that that's the bone God used to make women. People weren't exactly thrilled
01:26with this theory. An incensed Times of Israel reader wrote in, saying,
01:30"...that is plainly not a Bible teaching. I do not need and will not read articles that
01:34damage my faith or attempts to cause me to doubt what I know is the truth from the Bible."
01:39In other words, she considers Zebit's theory to be a...fallacy. Get it? Moving on.
01:47Like much of the Bible, Genesis includes elements seemingly borrowed from other cultures
01:51and religions. When it comes to the story of Adam and Eve, some key bits are cribbed
01:55from the Enuma Elish and Gilgamesh. But how? Well, back before the Hebrews were called
02:01Jews, they were living in exile in Babylon. That's when they learned the Enuma Elish creation
02:05myth, which involved a single, all-powerful god. But it was the myth of Gilgamesh that
02:10really stuck. In that story, Gilgamesh, the hero, gets ahold of an herb that gives him
02:14immortality. But he gets distracted, and an opportunistic snake eats the thing. In
02:19the same story, the gods create a male companion so Gilgamesh won't be lonely. But then a woman
02:24enters the picture and messes it all up. The companion realizes he's naked, and boom. There
02:29go the two buddies' idyllic lives living in harmony with nature, the animals, and each
02:33other.
02:34But that doesn't mean the Hebrew version isn't original. The Genesis stories were written
02:38after the end of the Babylonian exile. This is about 3,400 years ago, if you're trying
02:43to do the math in your head. And we're talking written. Yes, there were oral versions prior
02:48to that. How long? No one is sure. But the Hebrew people were making their own mythology,
02:53a creation story, and solidifying themselves as a people. And when you think about which
02:57parts of the old myths they kept and which they changed, it tells you what was important
03:02to the Hebrew people at the time.
03:04If you read Genesis thoroughly, you'll notice God creates the universe and everything in
03:08it twice, and there are places where the two accounts directly contradict each other.
03:13You're confusing me.
03:15Yeah, it's weird. The two stories are written in two totally different styles with different
03:19theological goals. The obvious conclusion is that they were written by two different
03:23people at two different times for two different reasons and combined later.
03:28This presents a major problem for any biblical scholars who believe Genesis is one story
03:32written completely by Moses. There have been people who've gone to great lengths to try
03:37to meld the two versions. Some even decided Adam was a hermaphrodite. That's right. In
03:42the first creation story, it says,
03:44"...and God created man to his own image. To the image of God he created him. Male and
03:49female he created them."
03:51Some early Christian theologians interpreted this to mean that Adam and Eve had serene
03:55undifferentiation. They were both sexes. Now, as you can imagine, many church leaders were
04:01uncomfortable with this idea, but the theory stuck around for centuries anyway.
04:05Ask anyone what fruit Adam and Eve ate that ticked God off, and they'll tell you it was
04:09an apple.
04:10It's an apple. An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Eat the damn apple.
04:18But spoiler alerts, the Bible never actually says what kind of fruit it was. In English
04:22translations, it's just the fruit on the tree, and it's just as vague in the original language.
04:27The Hebrew word used is peri. This could mean almost any fruit, and Jewish scholars have
04:32argued for a fig, grape, citron, pomegranate, or even wheat, which isn't a fruit and doesn't
04:39grow on a tree, but whatever.
04:41So what's with the apple thing? Well, in the 4th century AD, Pope Damasus decided the Bible
04:45needed to be translated into Latin. The scholar Jerome was given the job, and when he got
04:50to the mention of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he decided to zhuzh up the
04:54prose a bit — punch it up, as it were. You see, in Latin, malus means evil, but it also
05:00means apple. So the fruit of the tree that let Adam and Eve know evil was an apple — or
05:05evil.
05:06Fourth-century comedy, folks. And the idea went sort of viral 13 centuries later. In
05:11the 17th century, John Milton really cemented the apple idea in Paradise Lost by calling
05:16the forbidden fruit an apple twice. After that, artists all pretty much depicted Adam
05:20and Eve eating an apple. And here we are.
05:23Evolution — or God, if you prefer — gave humans big skulls and slim hips, so childbirth
05:29is extremely painful. Fortunately, we now have lovely drugs to take some of that agony
05:33away.
05:34Give me drugs, drugs, drugs! Give me the drugs!
05:37But even before epidurals, there were plenty of ways to make birthing a baby less horrible
05:41for the mother. But men said, nah, hold off on that. Eve messed everything up by eating
05:46the forbidden fruit, which means women need to suffer. Forever.
05:50Why shouldn't we eat it? Looks all right to me.
05:54God does punish Eve in Genesis 3.16 when he says,
05:57"...in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children."
06:00Except, hang on a minute. The word for sorrow means labor, toil, or work — everywhere
06:05else in the Bible. And it's only when talking about giving birth that translators decided
06:09that sorrow also included pain. Women in labor probably don't care about the deep theological
06:14implications, they just want the pain to stop. But religious men through the centuries have
06:18sure given it a lot of thought.
06:21According to the Journal of Anesthesia History, Martin Luther wrote that women should be thrilled
06:25to gloriously suffer to bring forth babies, and a male New England pastor once opined
06:30that alleviating the pain of women in childbirth would, quote, "...deprive God of the pleasure
06:35of their deep, earnest cries of health."
06:38Martin Luther also ate a spoonful of his own poop daily, so he might not be the best advice
06:43giver.
06:44Anyway, this theological argument resulted in a huge backlash in the 1800s when pain
06:49medication started being used during labor. Since God allegedly demanded that there be
06:53pain, taking it away was a sin. And some people still feel this way, even today.
06:59Adam and Eve aren't Christian or Jewish exclusive. They actually make an appearance in the Quran.
07:04But the Islamic version of their story has some key differences. It starts out pretty
07:08much the same. God makes Adam and Eve and tells them that they can't eat from the special
07:12tree. Then Satan comes along and tricks them into eating from that tree. But in this version,
07:16Satan tricks them both, not just Eve. They both eat from the tree, and they're both equally
07:21to blame. Nowhere in the Quran is Eve a temptress, nor does God punish her for what she did.
07:26And there is no concept of original sin in Islam, either. Adam and Eve were punished
07:31for what they did, but that punishment was for them alone, not to all of humanity forever.
07:35Now, throughout history, people have set out to find the Garden of Eden. And it's a big
07:40task since Genesis gives us only one clue that Eden was located where one river splits
07:45into four.
07:46For centuries, people have looked everywhere from the depths of the Persian Gulf to rural
07:52Missouri and even the planet Mars.
07:55Sure, Mars sounds bonkers, but Missouri? This is a theory put forth by none other than Latter-day
08:01Saints founder Joseph Smith himself. In fact, the Mormon Church owns the land today where
08:06they say Eden was located. Christopher Columbus thought he was close when he landed on Hispaniola,
08:12even closer in Venezuela. The explorer David Livingston declared Eden to be at the source
08:17of the Nile, although he was out of his mind with malaria when he said it.
08:21In 1881, Methodist minister William Warren wrote a book explaining how he figured out
08:25Eden was located at the North Pole. But almost at the same time, other people were publishing
08:30proof that it was outside Damascus or in California's Santa Clara Valley.
08:35There have been claims that Eden was in Ohio, Florida, and Mongolia, and some residents
08:39of the Seychelles were hoping to rediscover Eden, alleged to be on one of their islands,
08:43in time for Queen Elizabeth II's visit in 1972. Spoiler, they didn't. Other theories
08:50include Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bahrain, South Carolina, Somalia, or underwater in the Persian
08:56Gulf.
08:57There's four rivers coming out of Eden to water the garden. So you can see the garden
09:01in the center of Eden and four rivers coming from Eden into it.
09:05The most commonly accepted location over the years has been Iraq. Not that it's really
09:09that simple. If you go to Iraq looking to visit paradise, you'll have your choice of
09:13two competing real gardens of Eden.
09:16But don't sleep on that Armenia theory. We've talked about this before in a video, but the
09:20short version is that Eastern Turkey is basically ancient Armenia, and they have rivers and
09:25pomegranates. A lot fits.
09:28Lots of people assume that all Christians believe the Genesis creation story is absolutely
09:32literal and that Adam and Eve actually existed. There definitely are people who believe that,
09:37but in America, at least, they're dwindling. According to a 2024 Gallup poll, only 37 percent
09:43of adult American Christians surveyed believed God created Adam and Eve as fully human individuals
09:48about 10,000 years ago, while 34 percent believed evolution happened, but with God's guidance
09:53in some way.
09:54And both of these responses have been trending downward since the end of the 20th century.
09:58In fact, 24 percent of the group surveyed believed in a God-free evolution process.
10:03That number has more than doubled since 1999, so for the moment, science appears to be gaining
10:09ground. Trinity Western University's biology professor Dennis Venema told NPR,
10:14It's actually an opportunity to have an increasingly accurate understanding of the world, and from
10:18a Christian perspective, that's an increasingly accurate understanding of how God brought
10:22us into existence. They may actually be following what the original writers of Genesis had in
10:28mind.
10:29Christian scholars have long believed it was originally written as allegory and poetry
10:32rather than history. It wasn't until St. Augustine started thinking deep theological thoughts
10:36about creation in the 4th century A.D. that anyone suggested the story of the snake and
10:41the rib and the apple of evil be taken literally.
10:44For almost 400 years post-Jesus, early Christians didn't have a set book of theology. Anyone
10:50who wanted to could come up with their own stories or write their own version of history
10:53to help create and explain this new religion. And one of the subjects that interested early
10:58Christian authors was the children of Adam and Eve. Various books discussed the daughters
11:02of Adam and Eve, giving two of them names and full-life stories. But when it came to
11:07the now-official Bible and the Torah, you might think it's canon that Adam and Eve only
11:11had three children — Cain, Abel, and Seth. Or Seth. He's always the forgotten one.
11:16But even Genesis mentions many more children for the pair, although it gives no other details.
11:21But Genesis 5-4 is crystal clear, reading,
11:24"...the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were 800 years, and he begat sons and
11:29daughters."
11:30"...and all these holy people got themselves begat through original sin?"
11:35The pluralization of these words indicates that there would have been at least two more
11:38children of each sex, bringing the minimum number of kids they had to seven. But as Adam
11:43lived to be 800 years old, it's not much of a stretch for biblical scholars who are so
11:47inclined to assume that there were plenty more.
11:50It can be argued that a certain short passage in Genesis, where a talking snake convinces
11:55Eve to eat from a special tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden, is one of the most
11:58impactful stories in existence.
12:00"...it was the snack that changed history."
12:04It's been used for any number of theological, social, and political purposes throughout
12:08millennia. But the actual story is a lot more complicated than you may have been taught
12:12in Sunday school.
12:13First, while Genesis is clear that the animal involved is a snake, it never says anything
12:18about the snake being the devil. This detail was apparently added by later Jewish and Christian
12:23writers, and obviously the Islam version we mentioned before, and seems like a logical
12:27inference until you think about it a little more deeply.
12:31God had just created the animals, after all, so did he create the snake as Satan? How far
12:35ahead was he thinking? And if so, what does that mean for the story?
12:40Some argue that the snake isn't even a key part of the original story and doesn't deserve
12:43all the attention later retellings give to it. It's also significant that Eve never actually
12:48hears the commandment from God not to eat from a tree. She only got a paraphrased version
12:53from Adam.
12:54So when the snake appears and sweet-talks her with good conversation and the art of
12:58persuasion, Eve's convinced it's a good idea to taste the fruit of knowledge. Knowledge
13:02is a good thing, after all, isn't it?
13:04"...you can't see what's so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil anyway."
13:09Many Christian denominations believe in the concept of original sin, which is the idea
13:13that all humans are born already in a sinful state. How can a baby fresh from the womb
13:18already have done wrong? Because Adam and Eve passed on their terrible sin of disobedience
13:22in the Garden of Eden to every single person who came after them. Or so the theory goes.
13:27"...why did Adam eat the apple? When God told him not to. He was willing to deny God to
13:33please Eve. And that's the ultimate of romance."
13:36But original sin wasn't actually a thing for the first 400 or so years after Jesus. In
13:41fact, many early Christian theologians, including the influential bishop St. Uranius of Smyrna,
13:47argued that if humans ever had original sin, Jesus erased it when he was crucified. One
13:52of the early discussions among church fathers was about baptizing infants. Jesus was baptized
13:57as an adult, so why would it be important for present-day Christians to be baptized
14:01as babies instead? Many theologians tie this back to original sin, presenting deep philosophical
14:07explanations of how Adam's soul most likely passed it on.
14:10Finally, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote the defining works on the question of original
14:14sin around AD 400. Working with the incorrect assumption that infant baptism had always
14:19been required, he retconned original sin to give a reason for the whole thing. And from
14:24then on? Bam. Original sin became a Christian fact. Even though it wasn't.
14:30Even after Christians settled on the concept of original sin, they weren't done discussing
14:34just how much Adam and Eve had screwed humanity by eating that one piece of indeterminate
14:38fruit. Christian theologians have argued the idea that four wounds resulted from Adam
14:43and Eve's fall from grace. Those would be ignorance or spiritual darkness, malice, weakness
14:48of the spiritual variety, and concupiscence. A juicy word that just means misdirected desires.
14:54But not just sexual ones. Greed, thirst for fame, and pretty much anything that isn't
14:59given by God falls under wound number four.
15:02What do you call this thing?
15:04It's a bed.
15:06In other words, every important thing that makes us human was deeply wounded by that
15:10one healthy snack. In around 700 AD, the Venerable Bede started tossing these ideas around, but
15:15it was Thomas Aquinas who really ran with them in his seminal Christian work Summa Theologica.
15:21The temptations that bedeviled man in the beginning still bedevil him today.
15:26What this means for Christians is that, basically, you're doomed to fail and eventually die.
15:31Various Christian denominations have different ways of fixing this problem, including good
15:35works and baptism. They can't solve the death problem, though, so the idea became that even
15:39though you will expire, your soul will not.
15:42The story of Adam and Eve is absolutely stuffed with what are effectively dad jokes. Take
15:47a look at this one from Genesis 2-5. After God creates everything except humans, it reads,
15:52"'There was not a man to till the ground.'" Get it? No gardeners. They're grown, right?
15:58And then the author really brings the punchline home with a callback to the joke in Genesis
16:023-19, when God tells Adam he's going to be punished for his disobedience.
16:06"'In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread till thou return unto the ground. For
16:12out of it was thou taken.'"
16:14Hilarious, right? No. Why would anyone think that's funny? It's complicated. Remember,
16:20Genesis was originally written in Hebrew, and the jokes don't work in English — or
16:24most other languages. And it seems that translators over the centuries didn't think it was a
16:28big deal to keep the puns.
16:30It's not funny.
16:32But in Hebrew, those puns have real meaning that help readers interpret the text. A close
16:36English equivalent would be if Adam's name was translated as Earthling. So when the text
16:41mentions Adam and the Earth together, it would be saying something along the lines of, one
16:45day you're going back to the Earth, but until then you are going to farm the Earth, Earthling.
16:50This gives those lines deeper meaning even today. And in a sustenance society like that
16:55of the Hebrews, who lived in an arid region, this would have been a very overt reference
16:59to how difficult and finite life is.
17:02According to Gallup, as of 2024, 58% of U.S. adults believe in human evolution, either
17:08with God's help or without. On the other hand, 37% of adults in the U.S. believe in the biblical
17:13story of creation.
17:14Those creationists take the Adam and Eve story literally, and believe they were real people
17:18who existed, at most, 10,000 years ago. But where does that date come from?
17:23The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, loves a good genealogy. Just take a look at
17:28the infamous so-and-so begat so-and-so who begat so-and-so parts. And based on the two
17:33lists of who begat whom in Genesis, which cover the generations between Adam and Abraham,
17:38plus the many other begat lists that ultimately culminate with Jesus, historical theologians
17:43have settled on about 4,000 B.C. as the date of the creation of the Earth. However, for
17:48various reasons, others believe the genealogies are missing some names. A lot of names, in
17:53fact, and that that date could be as much as 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
17:57But theologians have gotten even more specific. Around AD 700, the Venerable Bede wrote that
18:03the creation took place in the spring. Fair enough. But in 1642, rabbinical scholar John
18:08Lightfoot famously determined that,
18:10"...man was created by the Trinity on October 23, 4004 B.C. at 9 o'clock in the morning."
18:17So Adam was a Scorpio, apparently. And in 1650, Archbishop James Usher calculated that
18:24Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden on Monday, November 19. In other words,
18:29nobody knows the real timeline.
18:31The men featured in Genesis must have been doing plenty of exercise in getting their
18:34fiber because they lived a long, long time. Genesis 5 lists a bunch of their ages when
18:40they died, and it says Adam made it to 930 years old, while his son Seth was 912 before
18:46he kicked the bucket. For those people who believe the stories in Genesis are literal,
18:50this presents an interesting conundrum. How could Adam and his progeny live almost a thousand
18:55years when so few people these days even make it to a hundred?
18:59Some religious scholars have proposed that the vitality of creation, combined with the
19:02Garden of Eden's high-quality food and even the fruit of the Tree of Life, along with
19:07the act of leading a pious life, promoted an exceptional lifespan. Others have taken
19:12a more scientific stance, blaming our shorter modern lifespans on genetic deterioration
19:16that has been ongoing since the days of Adam.
19:19And then there's a hint in the biblical narration just prior to the Great Flood. Genesis 6.3
19:24states,
19:25"...and the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is
19:29flesh, yet his days shall be a hundred and twenty years."
19:33In other words, humans were supposed to live a long, long time, but once we became so wicked
19:38that God had to send a flood, he reduced our lifespans as punishment. But he still wasn't
19:42satisfied, apparently, because God then reduced lifespans even further until settling on 70
19:47years, according to Psalm 90, which states,
19:49"...the days of our years are threescore years and ten."
19:52In case you forgot, a score is 20 years, so fourscore and seven years is just 87 years,
19:58but with more flair. Anyway, many Christians believe that Adam's lifespan wasn't meant
20:03to be literal, but was symbolic, and once represented something important and extremely
20:08complex and convoluted in ancient Hebrew numerology.
20:12According to Genesis, the first-ever death on Earth was when Cain murdered his brother
20:16Abel. But it would be many hundreds of years, when Adam died at the ripe old age of 930,
20:22before the world saw its first death from natural causes. Genesis is light on the details
20:26around this momentous event, which means other Jewish writers, as well as some early Christian
20:31ones, stepped in to fill the gaps. One such book of unknown provenance that covers this
20:35topic is The Life of Adam and Eve, also known as The Apocalypse of Moses, the ancient Greek
20:41translation of the Adam and Eve story.
20:43In this version, Adam is old and not feeling great. He says God has hit him with 72 different
20:48ailments over his lifetime, including eye pain and hearing loss. But now Adam knows
20:52he's dying, and while Eve and Seth try to save him with oil from the Garden of Eden,
20:56it's a lost cause. An angel tells them Adam had just three days to live, and reminds them
21:02that because they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, now humans all have to die.
21:07This is what you might call the tree of knowledge. It separates the men from the boys."
21:13Come on, Eve! The memory ticks Adam off all over again, and even though he's on his deathbed,
21:19he makes sure Eve knows it's all her fault that it's happening, saying,
21:23"'Eve, what hast thou wrought in us? Thou hast brought upon us great wrath, which is
21:27death.'"
21:28God says to Adam, what happened? Adam says, hey, not me, Eve made me do it.
21:35After Adam dies, Eve asks to die too, and God grants her wish. But it's not quite over.
21:41According to the book, Michael came and taught Seth how to prepare Eve for burial, and saith,
21:45"'Lay out in this wise every man that dieth till the day of the resurrection.'"
21:51You would think it would be near impossible to know where the first two people on Earth
21:54were buried, even if they did live less than 10,000 years ago, according to creationists.
21:59But tradition is clear on exactly where they were laid to rest, and it's the second holiest
22:04location in Judaism after the Temple Mount. Called the Cave of Machpelah, or the Cave
22:09of the Patriarchs, it's located in Hebron, a city in the West Bank.
22:13According to the Kabbalah text Zohar, after the fall of man, Adam realized that there
22:17was a gateway to the Garden of Eden in the ground when he saw light coming from it. He
22:20picked that spot as his and Eve's final resting place, digging a cave for the gravesite.
22:25When Adam's descendant Abraham stumbled upon the cave, he picked it as his burial site,
22:30as did other Old Testament headliners Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Leah. That adds
22:35up to four major Jewish power couples buried in one place, which also happens to be a portal
22:40to the Garden of Eden.
22:41That must have been some cave!
22:44The large building that surrounds the graves was built in the first century B.C. by King
22:49Herod of baby-killing fame. The location has been under Muslim jurisdiction for about 700
22:54years, and non-Muslims have generally not been allowed into the caves since then, although
22:58a few Jews and Christians have managed to sneak in. But have any of them found a way
23:02into the Garden of Eden? No, they're not talking.