Everyone knows what happened in the Garden of Eden.

Eve was tempted by the serpent, ate the forbidden fruit, persuaded Adam to eat it too, and humanity fell into sin.

It is one of the most familiar stories in the Bible, and perhaps that familiarity is precisely the problem. We know the story so well that we rarely stop to notice how much of what we think we know actually comes from Genesis itself and how much has been added by centuries of interpretation.

When you go back to Genesis 3 and read it slowly, the story becomes considerably more complicated. Eve certainly eats the fruit first. Genesis is perfectly clear about that. She listens to the serpent, looks at the tree, decides that its fruit appears good for food, pleasing to the eye and desirable for gaining wisdom, and then takes some and eats it.

But then comes a detail that centuries of retelling have often managed to push into the background. Eve gives some of the fruit to her husband, and he eats it too. There is no recorded protest, no suggestion that he was forced and no attempt by the narrator to portray him as an innocent victim of his wife’s manipulation. The fruit is offered, and Adam eats.

From that moment onwards, Genesis 3 begins to look rather less like the downfall of humanity caused by one woman and rather more like a story about something painfully familiar: human beings making choices and then looking for somebody else to blame when the consequences arrive.

Was Adam Standing There?

One of the most intriguing phrases in the entire passage appears in Genesis 3:6. After the woman eats, the text says that she gives some of the fruit to her husband, “who was with her”, and he eats. That tiny phrase has generated a surprising amount of debate because it raises an obvious question.

Was Adam standing beside Eve throughout the serpent’s conversation?

Some interpreters think he was. If that is the case, the implications are remarkable. Adam may have heard the whole conversation between Eve and the serpent and remained completely silent. Rather than being absent from the scene, he becomes a passive participant, watching everything unfold and acting only when the fruit reaches him.

Other scholars are more cautious, and I think that caution matters. The trouble is, the Hebrew does not make that completely clear. Adam may have been standing beside her throughout the conversation, but the words ‘with her’ could simply mean that he was there when she handed him the fruit or that he was with her more generally as her companion. The language leaves room for more than one possibility, and Genesis itself does not pause to explain exactly where Adam was during the serpent’s speech.

So I think we need to be a little careful here. It is tempting to imagine Adam standing silently beside her through the whole conversation, but Genesis does not actually tell us enough to be certain. What we can say is that Genesis does not portray him as someone who was forced into disobedience. However the fruit reaches him, he chooses to eat it.

The First Blame Game

Then God enters the garden, and the story becomes even more revealing.

Adam and Eve hide. God calls to the man and asks what has happened. Adam then gives what may be one of the most impressive examples of blame-shifting in the Bible: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”

There is something almost artful about the sentence. Adam manages to admit what he has done while simultaneously suggesting that two other people are really responsible. The woman gave him the fruit, but the sentence does not stop there. She is “the woman whom you gave to be with me”. In other words, Adam manages to bring God into the explanation as well.

Adam does not mention the serpent or explain why he chose to eat. He does not say that he misunderstood the command or that somebody physically forced him. Instead, he shifts attention away from himself.

Then God turns to Eve and asks what she has done. Her response continues the pattern: “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

By this point, something deeper than the question of who ate first is emerging. Human beings have done something they know they should not have done, and their instinct is not simply to confess it but to explain why somebody else played the decisive role.

That feels remarkably modern.

Who Was Actually Cursed?

This is one reason I find it so interesting that Eve has carried such a disproportionate share of the blame for what happened in Eden.

Genesis itself does not allow any of the main characters to walk away easily. The serpent acts; Eve eats; Adam eats. God then addresses all three.

The serpent is judged for what it has done. The woman faces consequences connected with childbirth and the relationship between woman and man. Adam is told that because he listened and ate, the ground will be cursed because of him, and his life will be marked by painful toil until he eventually returns to the dust.

Despite centuries of language about “the curse of Eve”, Genesis never actually uses the word “cursed” of Eve herself. The serpent is explicitly cursed. The ground is explicitly cursed because of Adam. The woman certainly faces consequences, but God never actually says, ‘Cursed are you,’ as he does to the serpent.

Nor does God ever say that Eve bears greater moral responsibility than Adam. When God addresses Adam, the focus falls squarely on Adam’s own choice: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree…” He listened, and he ate. The woman may have given him the fruit, but God still holds him responsible for what he did with it.

Adam has already tried to defend himself by claiming the woman gave it to him. God does not appear to accept that as a reason why Adam was not responsible.

Paul Keeps Pointing to Adam

Later biblical writers make the picture even more interesting because they do not always interpret Eden in exactly the same way.

There are New Testament passages that clearly focus on Eve. In 2 Corinthians, Paul refers to the serpent deceiving Eve. In 1 Timothy, the contrast becomes sharper: Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Eve was deceived and became a transgressor. Those verses have had an enormous influence on later Christian thinking about women and authority.

Yet they are not the only way the New Testament interprets Genesis 3. When Paul wants to explain the entrance of sin and death into the world in Romans 5, he does something we do not hear much about.

He talks about Adam.

Again and again, Paul points to Adam. Sin enters the world through ‘one man’. One man’s trespass brings condemnation. One man’s disobedience affects the many. His great comparison is not between Eve and Christ but Adam and Christ.

The same happens in 1 Corinthians 15: ‘As in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.’

That leaves us with something interesting. When the New Testament talks about deception, Eve sometimes becomes the example. But when Paul asks the much bigger question of how sin and death came to shape the human story, he points to Adam.

That alone should make us hesitate before reducing Genesis to the simple story that Eve ruined everything.

How Eve Became the Villain

The story becomes even more interesting when we move beyond the Bible itself.

Over time, Eve’s reputation deteriorated considerably.

The Jewish wisdom text Sirach, written before Christianity, declares that “from a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die.” That is already a much stronger accusation than anything Genesis itself says.

And the story did not stop developing there. In some later Jewish writings, Eve’s guilt becomes greater still. She is sometimes portrayed as especially weak or blameworthy, and in some traditions the encounter with the serpent even takes on sexual overtones.

Early Christian writers added their own layers. One of the most notable examples comes from Tertullian, writing around the second and third centuries. Addressing women, he famously described women as “the devil’s gateway” and treated Eve’s guilt as something that continued to hang over women generally.

That is quite a journey from Genesis.

The woman who considers a tree, eats its fruit and gives some to a man who also eats eventually becomes the archetypal temptress. She becomes the weak one, the dangerous one, the doorway through which sin entered the world. Later interpretations sometimes linked her with sexuality, seduction and female moral weakness.

The tradition was not uniform. Irenaeus, for example, contrasted Eve with Mary, seeing Mary’s obedience as answering Eve’s disobedience.

Even with those exceptions, one version of Eve’s story became enormously influential. She was no longer simply the woman Genesis describes. She became a warning about women themselves. Those interpretations then shaped attitudes towards women, authority, sexuality, childbirth and women’s place within the church and society.

Eve became more than a biblical character.

She became a symbol.

And symbols have a habit of becoming more powerful than the stories from which they came.

The Story We Think We Know

Perhaps this is where the story becomes most important for us today.

What fascinates me is how easily later interpretation simplified that complexity. Eve gradually became the problem. Adam increasingly faded into the background, and eventually, the version of the story many people inherited became so familiar that it was difficult to distinguish between the biblical text and everything that had grown around it.

We do this more often than we realise.

We imagine we are simply reading Scripture, when in reality we are often reading it through centuries of sermons, paintings, traditions, translations, assumptions and cultural habits. By the time we arrive at the text, somebody has usually already told us what we are supposed to see.

The Eden story provides a perfect example. The fruit becomes an apple, although Genesis never says so. The serpent becomes Satan, although Genesis itself does not make that identification. Eve becomes a seductress, even though the text describes her looking at the tree and deciding that it appears desirable. Adam becomes an innocent or absent victim, even though he eats willingly.

Of course, some of those ideas did not appear from nowhere. Christians drew on other parts of the Bible and developed theological arguments around them. But if we simply return to Genesis 3, the story itself is far more restrained.

And perhaps much more challenging because of it.

Maybe Genesis Is About Us

The more carefully I read Genesis, the less it feels like a story about a woman ruining everything, and the more it feels like a story about human beings.

That is where Genesis suddenly becomes uncomfortably familiar.

We see it all the time, and if we are honest, we have all done it. Something goes wrong, and almost immediately, the search begins for the person who can carry the blame. Sometimes one person genuinely is primarily responsible. Often, the reality is much more complicated. Yet simple villains are comforting because they allow everyone else to feel innocent.

Perhaps that is one reason Eve proved such a convenient figure. If humanity’s problem began because one woman made one disastrous decision, the rest of us can stand at a safe distance from the story and judge what she did.

Genesis does not let us stand there for long. Adam’s response remains painfully recognisable: the woman you gave me.

Eve’s response remains recognisable too: the serpent deceived me.

The explanations differ, but the instinct beneath them is the same.

Responsibility belongs somewhere else.

And perhaps that is the strangest irony of the whole story.

For centuries, we have blamed Eve for humanity’s tendency to sin. Yet in doing so, we may have repeated one of the first things Adam does after eating the fruit.

We found somebody else to blame.

Maybe Genesis was never trying to give us a woman to blame.

Maybe it was trying to show us ourselves.