Adam and Eve, in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, the original human couple, parents of the human race.
In the Bible, there are two accounts of their creation. According to the Priestly (P) history of the 5th or 6th century BCE (Genesis 1:1–2:4), God on the sixth day of Creation created all the living creatures and, “in his own image,” man both “male and female.” God then blessed the couple, told them to be “fruitful and multiply,” and gave them dominion over all other living things. According to the lengthier Yahwist (J) narrative of the 10th century BCE (Genesis 2:5–7, 2:15–4:1, 4:25), God, or Yahweh, created Adam at a time when the earth was still void, forming him from the earth’s dust and breathing “into his nostrils the breath of life.” God then gave Adam the primeval Garden of Eden to tend but, on penalty of death, commanded him not to eat the fruit of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
Subsequently, so that Adam would not be alone, God created other animals but, finding these insufficient, put Adam to sleep, took from him a rib, and created a new companion, Eve. The two were persons of innocence until Eve yielded to the temptations of the evil serpent and Adam joined her in eating the forbidden fruit, whereupon they both recognized their nakedness and donned fig leaves as garments. Immediately God recognized their transgression and proclaimed their punishments—for the woman, pain in childbirth and subordination to man and, for the man, relegation to an accursed ground with which he must toil and sweat for his subsistence.
Their first children were Cain and Abel. Abel, the keeper of sheep, was highly regarded by God and was killed by Cain out of envy. Another son, Seth, was born to replace Abel, and the two human stems, the Cainites and the Sethites, descended from them. Adam and Eve had “other sons and daughters,” and death came to Adam at the age of 930.
The Hebrew Bible, or Christian Old Testament, does not elsewhere refer to the Adam and Eve story, except for the purely genealogical reference in I Chronicles 1:1. Allusions occur in the apocryphal books (i.e., highly regarded but noncanonical books for Jews and Protestants; deuterocanonical books for Roman Catholics and Orthodox). The story was more popular among the writers of the pseudepigrapha (i.e., noncanonical books for all traditions), which include the Life of Adam and Eve, told with much embellishment.