How Many Times Is Eve Mentioned in the Bible? 4, or 5 With Tobit

Eve is named four times in Protestant Bibles, twice in each Testament. In the King James Version they are Genesis 3:20 and 4:1, 2 Corinthians 11:3 and 1 Timothy 2:13. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, which include the Book of Tobit, name her a fifth time. Everywhere else Scripture calls her “the woman” or Adam’s “wife”.

Four is a small number for the first mother. Through the story of the garden she is “the woman” or Adam’s “wife”, never Eve. Then God tells Adam, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Genesis 3:19), and the very next thing Adam does is give her a name of life: “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). Death has just been spoken over the two of them, and he names her for the children who are still to come.

Where is Eve named in the Bible?

The two Genesis verses carry the Hebrew name, Chavvah, which Strong’s concordance glosses “life-giver”; it appears in no other verse of the Hebrew Bible. The two New Testament verses carry its Greek form, Heua, and Thayer’s lexicon lists no others. Bibles that include the Book of Tobit add a fifth, in a prayer of Tobias. The Douay-Rheims has “Thou madest Adam of the slime of the earth, and gavest him Eve for a helper” (Tobit 8:8), and the RSV Catholic Edition and the NRSV Updated Edition have the same prayer at Tobit 8:6. Catholic Bibles include Tobit, and so do Orthodox ones: the Orthodox Church in America counts it among the books of the “longer canon” that are “fully part of the Old Testament”.

These counts are whole words in the King James Version, without the Apocrypha. A translation that adds “Eve” where the Hebrew says only “his wife” will give a slightly higher number, so check the verse before trusting a total.

Is Eve mentioned only twice in the Bible?

She is named twice in each Testament, so “twice” is right for either one and wrong for the whole Bible. You may also see six, with 1 Chronicles 1:1 and Genesis 4:2 added to the list. Neither verse has her name. Chronicles opens its long genealogy with “Adam, Sheth, Enosh,” and passes over her, and Genesis 4:2 tells of Abel’s birth without naming his mother.

Genesis 4:25 is the verse that comes closest. “And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.” It is Eve who speaks, and Eve who names the child, but the verse calls her only “his wife”.

What is Eve called the rest of the time?

Mostly “the woman”. Between her making in Genesis 2:22 and God’s word to her in 3:16, the King James text uses “woman” for her eleven times. Adam gives her that word himself, the first time he sees her: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:23). When Genesis looks back on the creation of both of them, it gives them one name together: “Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam” (Genesis 5:2).

So for most of the story we know her as the woman, and yet we hear her voice. She answers the serpent (Genesis 3:2–3). She answers God, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:13). Outside the garden she speaks twice more, and both times she speaks of God. When Cain is born she says, “I have gotten a man from the LORD” (Genesis 4:1), and when Seth is born, “God… hath appointed me another seed” (Genesis 4:25). The first words we have from her after Eden name the LORD. Why Adam chose the name, and when, is told more fully in why Adam named the woman Eve.

How does the New Testament speak of Eve?

Paul names her twice, and both times he remembers the garden. Writing to the church at Corinth, he speaks like a father who has promised his daughter in marriage: “I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:2–3). He uses her name as a warning.

To Timothy he writes, “For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety” (1 Timothy 2:13–15). Churches draw different conclusions from these verses about the ministry of women today. The name itself appears in one short clause about the order of creation.

When Paul tells how sin first came into the world, he names one man: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). The one man is Adam, and the rest of the chapter sets Christ against him.

Why is Mary called the new Eve?

The promise in Genesis 3:15 is given to “the woman”, not to Eve by name. God tells the serpent, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Protestant commentator Matthew Henry both hear Christ in it first. The Catechism calls the verse the Protoevangelium, “the first announcement of the Messiah and Redeemer”, and Henry wrote, “A gracious promise is here made of Christ, as the deliverer of fallen man from the power of Satan.” Henry adds that Christ “was likewise to be the seed of a woman only, of a virgin”.

Where readers part is over “the woman” herself. Irenaeus of Lyons set Mary beside Eve in one line: “the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary.” The Catechism (paragraph 411) says that “many Fathers and Doctors of the Church have seen the woman announced in the ‘Proto-evangelium’ as Mary, the mother of Christ, the ‘new Eve’.” The Orthodox teach the title too: a study guide of the Orthodox Church in America asks students to contrast “the attitude of Mary as the ‘New Eve’” with Eve’s disobedience in the garden. Henry’s comment on the verse speaks of the virgin birth and gives Mary no title.

Either way, the promise came to us through a woman. Eve was named the mother of all living just after the sentence of dust, and Paul, who twice remembered how she was deceived, also wrote down how that promise was kept: “But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman” (Galatians 4:4).

Related reading

• Why did Adam name the woman Eve?
• Facts and statistics about Eve in the Bible
• What were Eve’s first words to Adam?
• How often does Adam’s name appear in the Bible?
• How old were Adam and Eve?