What Did Adam and Eve Cover Themselves With? Fig Leaves

Fig leaves. After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve “sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Genesis 3:7). Before they left Eden, God replaced those leaves with clothing of his own making: “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them” (Genesis 3:21).

So the story has two coverings in it, and as Christians read it, the difference between them is the heart of it. The first is what two frightened people stitched together for themselves. The second is what God made for them, after their sin had come into the open. We still reach for the first kind. We need to know about the second.

Why did Adam and Eve cover themselves?

Because they suddenly felt exposed. Genesis has just said of the first couple, “they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25). Then they eat, “and the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). Nothing about their bodies had changed. What changed was how they saw themselves, and each other, and God.

The Jewish commentator Rashi noticed the oddness of the verse: “Even a blind person knows when he is naked!” He explained it with an older midrash: “One charge had been entrusted to them and they now knew they had stripped themselves of it.” They had one command to keep, and they had dropped it. The nakedness they felt was more than skin.

The leaves did not help for long. When they heard God walking in the garden, they hid among the trees, and Adam said, “I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” God’s answer was a question: “Who told thee that thou wast naked?” (Genesis 3:10–11). Even covered, Adam still called himself naked. The covering was for each other; it could not cover them before God.

Why fig leaves?

Genesis names the fig and gives no reason, only that the couple “sewed” the leaves together. The Hebrew word the King James renders “aprons”, chagorah, means a belt or girdle, something tied around the waist. A girdle of leaves covers very little.

The Talmud records three answers to which tree it was. Rabbi Meir says a grapevine, Rabbi Yehuda says wheat, and Rabbi Nehemya says a fig tree, “because it was with the matter with which they sinned that they were rehabilitated” (Sanhedrin 70b). One Jewish tradition, which Rashi follows, takes the fig: “This was the tree of which they had eaten; by the very thing through which their ruin had been caused was some improvement effected in their condition.” He adds a tender explanation of why Scripture keeps the tree’s name hidden: “the Holy One, blessed be He, never wishes to grieve anything He has created.” Genesis itself never names the fruit, so whether it was an apple is a question of its own.

One early Christian read the fig leaves as the first sign of repentance. Irenaeus of Lyons thought Adam chose a rough covering on purpose, “covering himself with fig-leaves, while there were many other leaves, which would have irritated his body in a less degree.” To Irenaeus, Adam was saying in effect that he deserved a covering “which affords no gratification, but which gnaws and frets the body.”

What were the coats of skins?

The Hebrew is kotnot ‘or. A kethoneth is a tunic, a garment worn next to the body. It is the word for Joseph’s “coat of many colours” (Genesis 37:3), and for the coats Moses was told to make for Aaron’s sons “for glory and for beauty” (Exodus 28:40). The word ‘or means skin or hide. So God gave Adam and Eve real garments, tunics, where they had only managed a girdle of leaves.

Genesis does not say what animal the skins came from, or how God made them. It says only that he made them, and “clothed them.” The Lord God himself dressed the man and woman who had just disobeyed him, and he did it before he sent them out of the garden “to till the ground from whence he was taken” (Genesis 3:23). They left Eden judged, and they left it clothed by the God who had judged them.

How do Jewish readers explain the garments of skin?

The rabbis loved this verse and read it many ways. Targum Onkelos, the ancient Aramaic translation of the Torah, renders the skins as “garments of honor on the skin of their flesh.” The midrash on Genesis, Genesis Rabbah, gathers a whole conversation. One rabbi says the garments were goat hides, another “camel wool and hare wool,” and another that they were “as smooth as a fingernail and as pretty as jewels.”

The same passage records a famous variant: “In Rabbi Meir’s Torah, they found” that the verse read “garments of or”. In Hebrew, ‘or spelled with the letter ayin means skin; spelled with an aleph, it means light. In Rabbi Meir’s copy, God clothed Adam and Eve in garments of light. This is the reading behind the phrase “garments of light”: a one-letter difference in a scroll, read with wonder.

The Talmud draws a lesson for living from the verse. Asked how a person can follow God, who is “a devouring fire”, Rabbi Hama son of Rabbi Hanina answers that we follow his ways: “Just as He clothes the naked, as it is written: ‘And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin, and clothed them’ (Genesis 3:21), so too, should you clothe the naked.” Rabbi Samlai went further: “With regard to the Torah, its beginning is an act of kindness and its end is an act of kindness.” It begins with God clothing Adam and Eve, and it ends with God burying Moses.

Did God kill an animal to clothe Adam and Eve?

Genesis does not say, and readers have answered differently. Some of the rabbis pictured wool or soft hair, which can be taken without killing an animal. Rashi mentions “the hair of hares which is soft and warm.”

Christian readers have often seen a sacrifice here, and in it the first death in the Bible. Matthew Henry wrote in his Commentary on the Whole Bible, “It is supposed that they were slain, not for food, but for sacrifice, to typify the great sacrifice, which, in the latter end of the world, should be offered once for all.” He set the two coverings side by side: the fig leaves were “a covering too narrow for them to wrap themselves in… Such are all the rags of our own righteousness. But God made them coats of skins; large, and strong, and durable, and fit for them; such is the righteousness of Christ.” Henry wrote “it is supposed”, and that is honest: the verse itself does not say so.

How have Christians read the coats of skins?

The early Church read them in more than one way. Irenaeus saw mercy in them: Adam “would no doubt have retained this clothing for ever, thus humbling himself, if God, who is merciful, had not clothed them with tunics of skins instead of fig-leaves.” Gregory of Nyssa, one of the Greek Fathers, took the skins as a picture of the mortal life we now wear. “I take the coats of skins,” he wrote, “to mean that conformation belonging to a brute nature with which we were clothed.” He looked forward to the resurrection, when we will cast off “that dead unsightly tunic.”

Whatever else they saw, Christians have heard in this verse the beginning of a promise that runs through the whole Bible: God clothes those who cannot clothe themselves. In Zechariah’s vision, when Joshua the high priest stood before the angel in filthy garments, the angel said, “Take away the filthy garments from him,” and then to Joshua, “Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment” (Zechariah 3:4). When the prodigal came home, his father called, “Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him” (Luke 15:22). And Paul tells every baptised Christian, “as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27).

We are still tempted to sew our own leaves: a good reputation, a busy life, a careful distance from anyone who might see us as we are. They cover a little, and never for long. The God who walked in the garden in the cool of the day has made us something better, and he puts it on us himself. “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:10).

Related reading

• Was the forbidden fruit an apple?
• What happened when Adam and Eve ate the fruit?
• What did Adam and Eve look like?
• 19 Bible verses about shame
• 21 Bible verses about clothing