What Did Adam and Eve Look Like? The Bible Never Says, and No Real Picture Exists

Adam and EveSee all 36 articles in this series

The Bible never tells us what Adam and Eve looked like. It says that God formed Adam “of the dust of the ground” and made Eve from his rib, but it gives neither of them a face, a height, a hair colour or a skin colour. Nor does any real picture of them exist, so every painting, icon and modern image is someone’s idea of them.

What Genesis gives us instead is a family. When Adam sees Eve he says, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh,” and Paul tells the Athenians that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men” (Acts 17:26). So although we cannot picture the first man and woman, every face we meet belongs to their family.

Genesis tells how they were made and says almost nothing of how they looked: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). Eve was made from “one of his ribs” while Adam slept, and when he saw her he said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:21–23). Both of them were made “in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27).

The few details it gives about their bodies are about nakedness and clothing: “And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25). After they ate the forbidden fruit, “they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Genesis 3:7), and God made them “coats of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). The only likeness Genesis mentions is between a father and his son, when Adam’s son Seth is born “in his own likeness, and after his image” (Genesis 5:3).

Nothing survives from their lifetime, and no one who saw them wrote down what they looked like. Every picture, from the oldest wall painting to an image made by a computer today, shows what someone imagined.

Christians were already drawing them in the third century, in the house church at Dura-Europos in Syria, which was converted for worship in about AD 240. Someone added a small drawing of Adam and Eve to its painting of the Good Shepherd at some point after that painting was finished. In the Orthodox Church, icons of the Descent into Hades show Christ “joining hands with Adam and all the other Old Testament righteous”, and Alexander Schmemann, in a text the Orthodox Church in America publishes for Holy Saturday, calls that icon “a painting of theology, for no one has ever seen this event.”

Albrecht Dürer used the subject to paint an ideal human body. In his Adam of 1507, the Prado says, he was seeking “the ideal perfection of the human body”, and it adds, “the choice of a biblical subject here is mere pretext.”

The Bible says no more about Eve’s looks than about Adam’s, and what it cares about is who she was: bone of Adam’s bone, and the mother of the human family, for “Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20).

Later Jewish tradition remembered Eve as a great beauty. The Babylonian Talmud, compiled between about AD 450 and 550, ranks Sarah, who was famed for her own beauty, below Eve, and Eve below Adam (Bava Batra 58a). So it praises the beauty of the first people without ever saying what that beauty looked like.

The name certainly echoes adamah, the Hebrew word for the ground he was taken from, but scholars disagree about whether it also comes from adom, the Hebrew word for red. In Hebrew, adam is the ordinary word for a human being and for mankind, and Genesis uses it for the two of them together when God “called their name Adam” (Genesis 5:2). Genesis plays on adam and adamah when God tells Adam, “till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19). And adom sounds much the same, as we hear in the story of Esau, who “came out red” when he was born, and whose name Edom came from “that same red pottage” (Genesis 25:25, 30).

Josephus, writing in the first century, read the name as red: Adam “signifies one that is red, because he was formed out of red earth”. Strong’s concordance of 1890 also derives it from the verb meaning to be red. But the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon of 1906 defines adam as “man, mankind” and compares it with words in neighbouring languages without deriving it from red, and the NAS Exhaustive Concordance gives its origin as “from an unused word”. So the name ties Adam to the soil, and perhaps to its colour, but it is no record of his complexion.

Scripture does not say, but it does tell us that every people comes from them: God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). The Catholic Catechism draws the same conclusion: “Because of its common origin the human race forms a unity”, and the law of human solidarity, “without excluding the rich variety of persons, cultures and peoples, assures us that all men are truly brethren” (paragraphs 360–361).

Two Christian ministries have tried to answer the question, and their answers differ. Answers in Genesis, which holds that the earth is young, writes: “Based on the skin colors seen today, we can infer that Adam and Eve most likely would have had a middle brown skin color. Their children, and children’s children, could have ranged from very light to very dark.” And it adds, “We all have the same basic color, just different shades of it.”

Reasons to Believe, which holds an old earth, starts by asking whether Adam and Eve “match the light-skinned, brown-haired portraits we often see in Western Christianity”. It places Eden “in the modern Persian Gulf region” and Adam and Eve about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago, and writes that because they “lived fairly close to the equator, it’s reasonable to think they would have had dark skin.” It goes on to say that “It’s likely that Adam and Eve had brown eyes” and that they “probably had black hair that was tightly curled in texture.”

Scientists, for their part, speak of whole populations rather than of one couple. In a 2017 review the anthropologists Nina Jablonski and George Chaplin describe how, “From an original condition of protective, dark, eumelanin-enriched coloration in early tropical-dwelling Homo and Homo sapiens, loss of melanin pigmentation occurred under natural selection as Homo sapiens dispersed into non-tropical latitudes of Africa and Eurasia.” And when the Tech Interactive’s Ask a Geneticist was asked whether the biblical Adam and Eve existed, it explained that “Y-Adam and mtEve are just nicknames for the most recent common ancestors of our maternal and paternal lines,” and that “these two individuals were part of a whole population of our ancestors”.

So any answer about their skin depends on where and when Adam and Eve lived, and Christians who read them as historical people place them anywhere from about 6,000 to 200,000 years ago.

Genesis gives them no childhood, for they are made as adults and told at once, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Jewish teachers pictured them as young adults. Genesis Rabbah, dated to about AD 400, records Rabbi Yoḥanan’s view that they were made with the bodies of people “approximately twenty years old”, and Rabbi Elazar bar Rabbi Shimon’s that “Eve, too, was created in her full form.”

The Bible never says how tall Adam and Eve were. Nachmanides, the thirteenth-century Jewish commentator, held that the first man was made “in absolute perfection as regards beauty, strength, and height”, while Reasons to Believe, working from the scientific record, says the first members of our species “were about 5.5 feet in average height” and thinks Adam and Eve were most likely the same.

The Bible does not say, and Christians have argued about it for centuries, because a navel marks a birth and neither of them was born. Sir Thomas Browne complained in 1646 that painters, even in “the Authentick draughts of Urbin, Angelo and others” (Raphael and Michelangelo), gave the first couple navels, though a navel “cannot be well imagined at the creation or extraordinary formation of Adam”. Philip Henry Gosse argued the opposite in 1857: a created adult would bear every mark of a normal adult body, and “The Man would not have been a Man without a navel.” Reasons to Believe sides with Browne: “there’s no reason to think they had a belly button.”

Genesis records only one change: before, they were naked and “not ashamed”, and afterwards “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). It says nothing about their faces or bodies changing, and Reasons to Believe agrees that “The Bible doesn’t provide any evidence that Adam and Eve’s physical appearance changed after the fall.”

Later Jewish and Christian writers pictured the first man shining with light. In the Talmud, Rabbi Bena’a says of Adam’s heels that “they shone so brightly that they are similar to two suns” (Bava Batra 58a). Genesis Rabbah reports that Rabbi Meir’s copy of the Torah read garments of light where Genesis 3:21 has garments of hide, for the two Hebrew words sound alike. And the Cave of Treasures, a Syriac Christian retelling of Bible history, says the angels saw “the image of his face burning with glorious splendour like the orb of the sun, and the light of his eyes was like the light of the sun, and the image of his body was like unto the sparkling of crystal.”

Ephrem the Syrian, the fourth-century hymn writer of the Syrian Church, sang of a glory that Adam lost and Christ restored. “Adam put off his glory in a moment; ye have been clothed with glory in a moment,” he told the newly baptized, and of Christ he wrote, “He rose and raised Adam into Glory.”

Two catechisms explain what it means to be created in the image of God, and neither speaks of a face. The Catholic Catechism teaches that “The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual”, and that “The human body shares in the dignity of” that image (paragraphs 362 and 364). The Westminster Shorter Catechism, the Presbyterian standard, answers that “God created man male and female, after his own image, in knowledge, righteousness and holiness, with dominion over the creatures.”

We will never see the faces of the first man and woman, but in the New Testament the image of God is a person we can come to know, Christ, “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15).

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• Adam and Eve’s family tree
• What does the name Adam mean?
• What did Adam and Eve cover themselves with?
• How long were Adam and Eve in Eden?
• What did Jesus look like?

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