Life of Adam and Eve

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The Life of Adam and Eve is a Jewish pseudepigraphical writing. There is wide agreement that the original dates from the first century A.D. and was composed in a Semitic language. It recounts the lives of Adam and Eve from after their expulsion from the Garden of Eden to their deaths. It provides more detail about the Fall of Man, including Eve's version of the story. Satan explains that he rebelled when God commanded him to worship Adam. After Adam dies, he and all his descendants are promised a resurrection.

The surviving manuscripts are Christian copies in Latin and Greek.

Contents

[edit] Story

The story begins immediately after Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden and continues to their deaths. In the first chapters, Eve does penance in the icy Tigris river, but Satan talks her out of it. When Adam complains about Satan persecuting them, Satan explains that Eve is the reason he was expelled from heaven. Satan and his followers had been cast out of heaven for refusing God's command to worship Adam. Adam, unaffected by the story, serves forty days of penance in the Jordan River.

Cain and Abel are then born, and Cain murders Abel. 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. Seth is born, along with 30 other sons and 30 daughters. Adam recounts to Seth a vision of his death. As Adam is dying, Seth and Eve try to get healing oil but are prevented by Archangel Michael. Eve relates her version of the Fall of Man. Eve had been put in charge of all the female animals and half the garden. The serpent is described as having hands and feet, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil is said to be a fig tree. Adam then dies at the age of 930.

After Adam's soul is conveyed to the third heaven, God and some angels bury his body and Abel's. Adam and all his descendants are promised a resurrection. Six days later, Eve dies, and Michael tells Seth never to mourn on the Sabbath.

[edit] Texts

Since tradition considered the book of Genesis as 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; thus, the name stuck. The Greek version includes elements not present in other texts, such as the promise to Adam and all his descendants of a resurrection (35-42).

What appear to be extracts are also found in later texts, such as the Cave of Treasures. 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 does or does not appear.

[edit] Archive

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

[edit] See also

For other pseudepigraphical works about Adam and Eve, see

For other non-canonical works referenced in the Bible, see

[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).
Languages