The Fall of Man is the Genesis account of Adam and Eve’s disobedience and expulsion from the garden of Eden. After the serpent persuades Eve to eat from the forbidden tree and she shares its fruit with Adam, their new knowledge is accompanied not by freedom but by shame, estrangement, hardship, and exclusion from the tree of life.

The Command and the Choice

Adam and Eve begin in the garden without shame. The LORD God permits them to eat from every tree except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, warning Adam that eating from it will bring death. The serpent challenges that warning, telling Eve that they will not surely die and that their eyes will be opened, making them like God in knowing good and evil.

Eve sees that the fruit is good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. She eats, then gives fruit to Adam, who is with her, and he eats as well. The narration presents a shared transgression, but the serpent’s deception and the couple’s decision lead directly to a changed awareness: they recognize their nakedness, sew fig leaves into coverings, and hide among the garden’s trees when they hear the LORD God.

Confrontation and Consequences

When the LORD God calls to Adam, Adam answers that he is afraid because he is naked and has hidden himself. Asked whether he ate from the forbidden tree, Adam points to the woman given to him; Eve, in turn, says that the serpent beguiled her. The exchange traces responsibility through the three participants without undoing the act or its consequences.

The judgments alter each participant’s circumstances. The serpent is cursed and condemned to crawl; enmity is set between it and the woman and between their offspring. The woman is told of increased pain and travail in childbirth and of her relation to her husband. Adam is told that the ground is cursed on his account: it will yield food through toil, produce thorns and thistles, and require the sweat of his face until he returns to the ground from which he was taken.

Expulsion and the Guarded Tree

Adam names his wife Eve because she is the mother of all living. The LORD God makes garments of skins for Adam and Eve and clothes them, a provision that follows their improvised fig-leaf coverings even as their former life in the garden ends.

The LORD God sends Adam out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken, then drives him out and stations cherubim and a flaming sword east of the garden to guard the way to the tree of life. The expulsion closes off access to eating from that tree and living forever. The story’s decisive reversal is therefore both material and existential: the first human pair move from an unashamed garden existence to labor outside it, under mortality.

Narrative Significance

The account links human disobedience to conditions that shape life beyond Eden: painful childbirth, difficult cultivation, and return to the ground. Its sequence turns a prohibition into a lasting rupture, marked first by opened eyes and concealment, then by judgment and departure. The guarded tree of life gives that departure its finality, while the clothing and the later naming of Eve register that life continues beyond the garden.