Q. Did God give the information about not eating of the tree’s fruit to just Adam, or was it for Adam and Eve? Or did Adam give the information to Eve after God created her?
As I read the narrative in Genesis, it seems pretty clear that God gave the command just to Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that Adam passed this command along to Eve.
Specifically, it was only after God told Adam not to eat from this tree that God then said to himself, “It is not good for the man to be alone, I will make a helper suitable for him,” and God created Eve. There is no subsequent record of God repeating the command to her. But when the serpent asks her what God said about this tree, she doesn’t respond, “This is the first I’ve heard anything about that.” She knows that they’re not supposed to eat from it. We can only infer that Adam told her this.
Significantly, it appears that Adam actually added something to what God said. God only told Adam, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” But Eve tells the serpent that God said, “You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it.” This is admittedly speculative, but we may infer that Adam was so concerned about the consequences of disobeying God that he figured, “We better not even touch the fruit,” and so that’s what he told Eve.
Later in the Bible there are warnings not to add anything to what God commands, and we can understand why. God gives us the grace to obey all of his commands so that they are not burdensome. But anyone who tries to require people to do more than God commands is asking them to do something they aren’t being given the grace for. Then it’s only too easy for someone else to come along and persuade them that they don’t have to do that. This was actually the serpent’s strategy—to persuade Eve that God had asked too much of her and that she didn’t need to obey. He just had a different version of “too much,” initially. He asked whether God had really said, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden.” Eve knew that God hadn’t said this, but she didn’t realize that He hadn’t actually said that they couldn’t even touch the fruit. And this gave the serpent something that could legitimately be contradicted, with tragic results.
So one lesson we can take from the story is that those who have the responsibility to communicate God’s commands to others need to be careful not to add anything to them. We may have a good motive, to keep people as far as possible from disobedience. But God’s grace can keep willing hearts obedient without that kind of assistance.
Good Question 
Interesting post
I always thought Eve added to the command. Not sure where I got that idea, but one of them added to the command and became the original religionist…
It is possible that it was Eve who added to the command, but it seems she had the impression that God had said not to touch the fruit, and so it may be more likely that Adam added that part when he passed the command along to Eve. Either way, as you say, one of them became the first religionist.
Adding to the commandment was never an issue….when the bible speaks about adding I would think it’s meaning.. in a way to mislead a person…Adam didn’t mislead eve and God would’ve mentioned that if that had anything to do with it…Satan knows scripture…he manipulates scripture …he did it again when he tempted jesus…so that had nothing to do with it
According to what is written in the Bible especially in the first chapters of Genesis, reading chapter 1 from verse 27 to verse 29, here God is talking to two people. In this conversation men has not fallen from the grace. chapter 2 verse 17 they were commanded not to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. verse 25 they were two in the garden, staying together naked. i understand and believe they were two. i thank you and be blessed
The first account seems to quote God’s instructions to the human pair as a kind of general summary: “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.” The second account seems to back up and relate the creation of the man and woman in more detail. In that second account we see that God gave the command about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to the man before the woman was created.
If you read the serpent says to Eve, “ Did God say to YOU that you will die”… God did not say to Eve, He said to Adam… The evil one uses the smallest details to manipulate us
While I agree with your overall point, I should observe that when the serpent asks Eve, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” the word “You” is plural. That means it applies to both Adam and Eve. In other words, the question was, “Did God really say that the two of you are not to eat from any tree in the garden”? Nevertheless you are right that the evil one tries to use the smallest details to manipulate us. God did say that there was one tree they were not supposed to eat from. The serpent tried to take that and make it a general condition that suggested God wanted something bad, not something good, for Eve and Adam.
God commanded Adam not to eat from the tree. Eves eyes were not open until after she gave to Adam to eat. She ate first and everything was fine.
Gen 3:7 says “And the eyes of them both were opened”.
Read Gen 3:6-7
No, the eyes being opened refers specifically to the realization that they were naked, not to the recognition that it would be wrong to eat the fruit. God judged and punished both Adam and Eve for eating the fruit when they should have known better. This is clear from the rest of Genesis 3.
What are your thoughts as to the reason God did not give this command directly to Eve? The whole of mankind’s eternal life weighed in the balance, did it not? And through Adam’s sin, not Eve’s, our world was fallen. Thank you.
I think that God expected, reasonably, that within the marriage of Adam and Eve, there would be full, open, and clear communication, so that telling Adam (before Eve was created) would be sufficient to communicate the command to Eve as well. And unfortunately it appears from the biblical narrative that the decision to eat the fruit was also something that Eve and Adam discussed together and agreed on. So it was not the case of one insufficiently informed person making a mistake on that basis, but of two people, deceived by the enemy of God, trusting in themselves rather than taking God at his word.
Could it be possible that in the time of fellowship between man and God in perfection, God re-echoed to both of them about this command. What does it mean when Eve said “ but God said” in verse 3?
We don’t actually know where Eve got her information. The text does not tell us explicitly. It does record that God said to the man, before the creation of woman, “From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.” After the woman was created, the serpent asked her, “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” The woman replied, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” The Bible does not record that God told the man and woman not to touch the tree, just that he told them not to eat its fruit, so there are several possibilities: (1) God added this rule later (as you suggest); (2) Adam added it when the communicated the command to Eve; (3) Eve added it as something she understood from the command. The serpent’s temptation was based on a misrepresentation of the character of God, not on the details of the instructions, so whatever Adam and Eve understood about the rule about the tree, they should not have eaten its fruit on the basis the serpent suggested, that God actually didn’t want them to be like him in knowing good from evil. I hope this is helpful.
unfortunately I feel Eve by herself was tricked by the snake, THEN Adam was persuaded by eve nothing will happen if you eat !!! But why is the word enmity placed between them ? Very interesting God told Adam if you eat of the fruit you will die is that true???
The word “enmity” applies to the future relationship between the serpent and his “seed” and the woman and her “seed.” We can understand the serpent here to represent the devil, so his “seed” is all of the evil forces in the world. The “seed” of the woman is humanity. So God has made people, ordinarily, very wary of evil forces. Unfortunately sometimes people want the wrong things and are willing to deal with evil in order to get them. But ordinarily, as I said, people would now be very wary of any conversations with the serpent, as Eve didn’t know enough not to be.
God did tell Adam that if he ate from the fruit of that tree, he would die. In other words, there was a death penalty for disobedience. However, many interpreters note that at the end of this account, “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” They see this as implicitly indicating that God offered a sacrifice for the sin and guilt of the man and woman, and that is why they were not punished with death. This sacrifice, like all of the sacrifices in the Old Testament, looked forward to Christ’s ultimately atoning sacrifice on the cross.