What Happened to Adam and Eve After They Left Eden?

God clothed Adam and Eve in “coats of skins” and sent them out of Eden to work the ground. Outside the garden they had Cain and Abel, lost Abel when Cain killed him, and had Seth when Adam was 130. Adam died at 930 (Genesis 3:21–5:5). Genesis tells those years briefly; old retellings outside the Bible add more.

The ground runs through the whole story. Adam was taken from it, he was sent out “to till the ground from whence he was taken” (Genesis 3:23), and he was told he would eat bread “till thou return unto the ground” (Genesis 3:19). Nine hundred and thirty years lay between those words and their keeping. Genesis gives them only a few verses, but they were not empty years, and God was not absent from them.

The story of Adam and Eve, from creation to death

It begins with God making man “in his own image”, “male and female”, and telling them to “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion” over every living thing (Genesis 1:27–28). Genesis 2 comes in closer. “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). God put him in the garden of Eden “to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15), gave him every tree but one, and warned him, “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17). Adam named the animals as God brought them to him, “but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:20). So God made the woman from his rib, and Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23).

So before Eve was made, Adam was already tending the garden and naming the animals, and the one command was for them both. Then came the serpent. Genesis 3 tells how he tempted the woman, how she and her husband ate, and how they hid from God among the trees. When God called them, Adam blamed the woman and the woman blamed the serpent (Genesis 3:9–13). God pronounced punishments on the serpent, the woman and the man, and Adam named his wife Eve, “because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). He gave her that name just after hearing the sentence of death. Then they left the garden. Outside it they raised children, Cain killed Abel, and Adam died at 930.

Why were Adam and Eve sent out of Eden?

God gives the reason himself: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken” (Genesis 3:22–23). They did not go out naked. They had sewn fig leaves into aprons for themselves (Genesis 3:7), and before sending them out God made them “coats of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). The judgment was real, and so was the kindness. Behind them God placed “Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life” (Genesis 3:24).

We are not told how long they had lived in the garden, or where they went when they left. Genesis says only that the cherubim stood “at the east of the garden,” and later that Cain settled “on the east of Eden” (Genesis 4:16). East is the direction the story keeps moving, away from the garden.

What was their life like outside the garden?

It was the life God had spoken of when he punished them. To Eve he had said, “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16); to Adam, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Genesis 3:19). Genesis 4 shows both coming true. Eve bore sons, and Adam’s firstborn became “a tiller of the ground,” like his father (Genesis 4:2). When Cain was born, Eve said, “I have gotten a man from the LORD” (Genesis 4:1). They are the first words Genesis gives her after Eden, and they are thanks.

Here is their long life in the order Genesis tells it, with Adam’s age wherever it gives one.

The first death in the Bible is not Adam’s. It is his son’s. Both sons brought offerings, God accepted Abel’s and not Cain’s, and “Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him” (Genesis 4:8). When God asked where Abel was, Cain answered, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9), and he was sent away to wander, carrying a mark so that no one would kill him. Genesis gives no word from Adam or Eve when it happened. Their grief is left in silence. We hear Eve again only when another son is born: “God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew” (Genesis 4:25).

Seth’s line is the one Genesis follows. Adam “begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth” (Genesis 5:3), and he lived eight hundred years more and “begat sons and daughters” (Genesis 5:4). The names, generations and ages are traced in Adam and Eve’s family tree. When Seth’s son Enos was born, “then began men to call upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26). Adam lived to see it. His own story ends in Genesis 5:5: “And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.” The ground had him back. Genesis never records Eve’s death. How the old books tell of their deaths is in how Adam and Eve died.

Did Adam and Eve repent?

Genesis does not say. When God questioned them in the garden, neither one confessed plainly. Adam answered, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat,” and Eve answered, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:12–13). After Eden, Genesis records no prayer of sorrow from either of them, and no word of forgiveness. What it does record is God’s care for them after the sin: the clothing he made, and the children Eve spoke of as given by God, first Cain and then Seth. That care was there before any repentance we are told of.

The Book of Wisdom, which Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include and Protestant Bibles do not, speaks of Adam alone. Wisdom, it says, “preserved him, that was first formed by God the father of the world, when he was created alone, And she brought him out of his sin, and gave him power to govern all things” (Wisdom 10:1–2, Douay-Rheims). The Life of Adam and Eve, a retelling outside the Bible, gives them both a long penance standing in two rivers. Whether God saved them in the end, and why Orthodox Christians honor them as saints, is taken up in did Adam and Eve go to heaven.

What is the Life of Adam and Eve?

It is an ancient retelling of their life after Eden, a noncanonical book outside the Bible. It survives in several versions that differ in detail: a Greek one, often called the Apocalypse of Moses, a Latin one, Vita Adae et Evae, and Slavonic, Armenian and Georgian versions. No one is sure where it began. Many scholars date a lost Jewish original to the first century BC or AD; Encyclopaedia Britannica says it was “probably composed sometime between 20 bc and ad 70.” Marinus de Jonge argued that the Greek Life was Christian in origin. Every copy that survives was made by Christians.

The book fills the quiet between Genesis 3 and Genesis 5. The Latin version, as R. H. Charles printed it in 1913, adds these scenes:

• Hunger. Outside the garden they find only “animals’ food,” and Adam says, “Let us repent with a great penitence.”
• Penance in the rivers. Adam tells Eve to stand in the river Tigris “up to thy neck” for thirty-seven days, while he spends forty days in the Jordan.
• A second deception. After eighteen days, Satan “transformed himself into the brightness of angels” and tells Eve that her penance has been accepted. She leaves the water, and Adam cries, “O Eve, Eve, where is the labour of thy penitence?”
• Satan’s reason. Asked why he pursues them, the devil says he was thrown out of heaven for refusing to worship Adam, God’s new image, and deceived Eve out of envy.
• Cain’s birth. Eve goes west alone and gives birth in pain; Adam prays for her, and the archangel Michael brings seeds and shows Adam “how to work and till the ground.”
• A large family. After Seth, Adam “begat thirty sons and thirty daughters.”
• Adam’s last illness. At 930 he falls sick, and Eve and Seth go to the gates of Paradise to ask for “the oil of mercy.” The archangel Michael tells them it is refused until the last days, when, the text promises, Christ will anoint believers with it.

The Greek version adds that after leaving Paradise, Adam “went upwards to the sun-rising and abode there eighteen years and two months” before Cain and Abel were born. The two versions disagree in places, and neither is Scripture. They show how early readers wondered about the long years Genesis passes over in a few verses, and how much they wanted to know that Adam and Eve were sorry. Genesis leaves us something plainer: a man and a woman going out east, in clothes God made for them, to work the ground they came from.

Related reading

• How old were Adam and Eve?
• How did Adam and Eve’s sons have children?
• Why was Satan in the Garden of Eden?
• What happened when Adam and Eve ate the fruit?
• What was the forbidden fruit?
• Were Adam and Eve real people?