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Summary
- The Bible does not describe Adam and Eve’s faces, height, hair or skin. It says God formed Adam “of the dust of the ground” and made Eve from his rib (Genesis 2:7, 2:21–23).
- No real picture of them exists. A small drawing of Adam and Eve was added to a wall painting in the house church at Dura-Europos, converted for worship in about AD 240.
- In Hebrew, adam means a human being and sounds like adamah, ground. Whether it also comes from the word for red is debated: Josephus and Strong’s say yes, other lexicons do not.
- Scripture gives no skin colour. Answers in Genesis writes that they “most likely would have had a middle brown skin color”; Reasons to Believe writes that “it’s reasonable to think they would have had dark skin.”
- The Tech Interactive’s Ask a Geneticist explains that “Y-Adam and mtEve are just nicknames for the most recent common ancestors of our maternal and paternal lines.”
- Whether they had navels has been argued since Sir Thomas Browne objected in 1646 to painters who gave them one.
Bibliography (Click to show)
- King James Version: Genesis 1:27, 1:28; 2:7; 2:21–23; 2:25; 3:7; 3:19–21; 5:2–3; 25:25, 25:30; Acts 17:26; Colossians 1:15, BibleGateway.
- Hebrew lexicon entries 119, 120, 122 and 127 (Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, NAS Exhaustive Concordance, Brown-Driver-Briggs), Bible Hub.
- Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.1.2, tr. William Whiston (1737), Project Gutenberg.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 360–364, vatican.va.
- Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 10, Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
- Ken Ham, “Are There Really Different Races?”, Answers in Genesis (2007), answersingenesis.org.
- Reasons to Believe, “What Did Adam and Eve Look Like?” (2026), reasons.org.
- Nina G. Jablonski and George Chaplin, “The colours of humanity: the evolution of pigmentation in the human lineage”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2017), PubMed.
- The Tech Interactive, Ask a Geneticist, “Is it true that the biblical Adam and Eve existed?” (2015), thetech.org.
- Terry Mortenson, “When Was Adam Created?”, Answers in Genesis (2017), answersingenesis.org.
- BioLogos, “Were Adam and Eve Historical Figures?” (updated 2023), biologos.org.
- Yale University Art Gallery, “Christian Building”, Dura-Europos: Excavating Antiquity, yale.edu.
- Alexander Schmemann, “Great and Holy Saturday”, including “The Icon of the Descent into Hades”, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org.
- Museo Nacional del Prado, Albrecht Dürer, Adam (1507), museodelprado.es.
- Babylonian Talmud, Bava Batra 58a, William Davidson Edition, Sefaria.
- Genesis Rabbah 14:7 and 20:12, The Sefaria Midrash Rabbah (2022), 14:7 and 20:12, Sefaria.
- Ramban (Nachmanides) on Genesis 5:4, tr. Charles B. Chavel, Sefaria.
- Sefaria library records for composition dates of Genesis Rabbah, Bava Batra and Ramban on Genesis, Sefaria.
- Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica 5.5, “Of the picture of Adam and Eve with Navels” (1646), University of Chicago.
- Philip Henry Gosse, Omphalos (1857), Project Gutenberg.
- Ephraim Syrus (Ephrem the Syrian), Hymns on the Nativity 16 and Hymns for the Feast of the Epiphany 6, tr. A. Edward Johnston, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 13 (1898), Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
- The Book of the Cave of Treasures, tr. E. A. Wallis Budge (1927), Internet Archive.
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