Life of Adam and Eve

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The Life of Adam and Eve is a Jewish pseudepigraphical writing, the original of which was perhaps written around 70 BC.

The story begins immediately after Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden and continues to the death of Adam and then the death of Eve. The text includes a description of The Fall of Man from the point of view of Eve, and she is said by the text to have been put in charge of all the female animals, and half of the garden. Greater detail of the scene is given than in Genesis; the serpent of the garden is described as having hands and feet, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil is said to be a fig tree. There is no trace of the common story found elsewhere that Cain and Abel had twin sisters and Cain's killing of Abel is passed over quickly. We are told however that Adam and Eve had thirty sons and thirty daughters.

The texts that have survived are later variants written in Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Armenian, Georgian and Coptic (fragments only). These obviously go back for the most part to a single source and contain (except for obvious inserts in individual texts) no undeniable Christian teaching. Each language version contains material unique to itself as well as variations in the texts found in that language in what appears and doesn't appear.

Since traditions put the book of Genesis as having been authored by Moses, this tradition was extended to the Greek variant of the Life of Adam and Eve. Consequently, and somewhat confusingly, the book became known as the Apocalypsis Mosis, literally the Revelation of Moses, and was formally titled that by Tischendorf, its first editor, and the name stuck.

What appear to be extracts are also found in other later texts such as the Cave of Treasures. For other pseudepigraphical works about Adam and Eve see Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan, Apocalypse of Adam and Testament of Adam.

The Adam and Eve Archive is an ongoing project by Gary Anderson and Michael E. Stone to present all the original texts in the original languages and in translation. It currently contains English translations of the most important texts and also a synopsis guide allowing the viewer to easily jump from a section in one source to the parallel sections in other sources.

[edit] External links

  • English Translations by L.S.A. Wells from The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, Volume II Pseudepigrapha edited by R.H. Charles (ISBN 0-19-826152-7)
  • Latin Life of Adam and Eve
  • The Book of Adam, translated from Georgian by J.-P. Mahe.
  • Pseudepigrapha
  • Free Books: Apocrypha (PDF version)
  • The Penitence of Adam, the original Armenian text in graphic form and edited and translated into English from M.E. Stone, Texts and Concordances of the Armenian Adam Literature (Society of Biblical Literature: Early Judaism and its Literature, 12; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996) (ISBN 0-7885-0278-6).
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