Fall of man

The fall of man, the fall of Adam, or simply the Fall, is a term used in Christianity to describe the transition of the first man and woman from a state of innocent obedience to God to a state of guilty disobedience. The doctrine of the Fall comes from a biblical interpretation of Genesis, chapters 1–3. At first, Adam and Eve lived with God in the Garden of Eden, but the serpent tempted them into eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden. After doing so, they became ashamed of their nakedness and God expelled them from the Garden to prevent them from eating the fruit of the tree of life and becoming immortal.

In Nicene Christianity, the doctrine of the Fall is closely related to that of original sin or ancestral sin. Nicene Christians believe that the Fall brought sin into the world, corrupting the entire natural world, including human nature, causing all humans to be born into original sin, a state from which they cannot attain eternal life without the grace of God. The Eastern Orthodox Church accepts the concept of the Fall but rejects the idea that the guilt of original sin is passed down through generations, based in part on the passage Ezekiel 18:20, which says a son is not guilty of the sins of his father.

Reformed Protestants believe that Jesus gave his life as a sacrifice for the elect, that they may be redeemed from their sin. Lapsarianism, understanding the logical order of God's decrees in relation to the Fall, is divided into two categories: supralapsarian (prelapsarian, pre-lapsarian or antelapsarian, before the Fall) and infralapsarian (sublapsarian or postlapsarian, after the Fall).

The narrative of the Garden of Eden and the fall of humanity constitute a mythological tradition shared by all the Abrahamic religions, with a presentation more or less symbolic of Judeo-Christian morals and religious beliefs, which had an overwhelming impact on human sexuality, gender roles, and sex differences both in the Western and Islamic civilizations. Unlike Christianity, the other major Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, do not have a concept of "original sin", and instead have developed varying other interpretations of the Eden narrative.

The phrase fall of man does not appear in Jewish scripture. According to Easton's Bible Dictionary, the term probably originates from the Book of Wisdom, a Greek work generally dated to the mid-first century BC, or to the reign of Caligula (AD 37–41).

The doctrine of the fall of man is extrapolated from the traditional Christian exegesis of Genesis 3. According to the biblical narrative, God created Adam and Eve, the first man and woman in the chronology of the Bible. God placed them in the Garden of Eden and forbade them to eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Questioning God's command against eating the fruit, the serpent tempted Eve to eat fruit from the forbidden tree, which she shared with Adam, and they immediately became ashamed of their nakedness. Subsequently, God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, condemned Adam to work in order to get what he needed to live and condemned Eve to give birth in pain, and placed cherubim to guard the entrance, so that Adam and Eve would never eat from the "tree of life".

The Book of Jubilees, an apocryphal Jewish work written during the Second Temple period, gives time frames for the events that led to the fall of man by stating that the serpent convinced Eve to eat the fruit on the 17th day, of the 2nd month, in the 8th year after Adam's creation (3:17). It also states that they were removed from the Garden on the new moon of the 4th month of that year (3:33).

Christian exegetes of Genesis 2:17 ("for in the day that you eat of it you shall die", also known as the "commandment to life"), have applied the day-year principle to explain how Adam died within a day. Psalms 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8, and Jubilees 4:40 explain that, to God, one day is equivalent to a thousand years and thus Adam died within that same "day". The Greek Septuagint, on the other hand, has "day" translated into the Greek word for a twenty-four-hour period (ἡμέρα, hēméra).