Why Was Adam Alone Given the Command? Gen. 2:16-17, Hierarchy, and Reading Between the Lines

Some people think Gen. 2:16-17 – where God told the first human not to eat from a certain tree – has something to do with the male-female relationship. For them, it is one of the details that demonstrates the man is the leader of the pair, the teacher of the woman, and that he possesses greater responsibility and authority than the woman, including authority over her. 

Here’s how the text puts it:

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Gen. 2:16-17)

And here’s a comment one of my readers recently sent me:

My pastor uses this idea as the first incidence of hierarchy in terms of responsibility between the genders.

I can understand how someone might arrive at this conclusion. However, the command pertains to the first human’s relationship with God, with his obedience and submission to the Lord, not to the first man’s relationship with the first woman.

How do I know? Because the text never mentions the command in connection with the couple’s interaction with each other. We never read that the man teaches the woman God’s command. We do not even read that the pair discussed what God had said or what they were and were not permitted to eat. Neither does the text state – or even imply – that God granted the man the responsibility to teach the woman. In fact, we never learn how the woman learned the prohibition at all.

This omission has led to a lot of speculation because, for many of us, the text is silent on the very thing we most want to know: How did Eve learn the command? And why does she get it wrong in the end?

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” (Gen. 3:1-3)

Some say Adam must have taught Eve (for how else would she have known) and that he did so correctly. But Eve wasn’t paying attention and added her own two cents – the part about not even touching the fruit. Others think Adam taught Eve the command but miscommunicated it, perhaps intentionally adding to God’s words by placing a fence around them, much like a good Pharisee. Still others believe that Eve learned the command directly from God. Some of these also think God himself may have included the part about not touching the fruit when he spoke with Eve; others believe Eve added this idea.

The problem with all these theories is that they are just that – theories. Frankly, we don’t know. 

And yet this is what we all want to know. We want to know how Eve learned about the tree in the center of the garden so we can use it to buttress our assumptions regarding the proper relationship between women and men. We want to know Eve heard directly from God to prove equality of responsibility. We want to know Adam taught Eve to prove inequality of responsibility.

Yet the text refuses to help us out. Why does the Bible, of all books, intentionally omit the answer to everyone’s burning question?

Because, simply, the command has nothing to say to male-female dynamics or roles or expectations. Rather, it pertains to the relationship between the individual human being and God, to God’s unquestioned sovereignty and right to command, and to our human responsibility with respect to temptation and personal obedience. And while I personally think it is likely that Adam communicated God’s command to Eve, as that seems like a logical possibility, what we must grapple with is the reason this part of the story is intentionally left out. 

And why is that? Because we are not to connect the man’s solo reception of the command to his relationship with the woman. We are not to read between the lines, adding assumptions and presumptions the biblical author surreptitiously avoided.

Significantly, none of the biblical authors link the man’s reception of the prohibition to his relationship with the woman. No biblical author surmises a leadership role for the man or the man’s authority over the woman from Gen. 2:16-17. Though we encounter much speculation about this in biblical commentary today, nowhere does the Bible itself utilize God’s words to the first man to bolster male priority or authority. 

Even when Paul keys in on Eve’s deception and transgression in 1 Tim. 2:13-14, he does not mention Adam’s solo reception of the command. You would think that if this detail demonstrated male authority, Paul would have utilized it in a setting where he wanted to put a stop to inappropriate behavior and attitudes on the part of some women (or perhaps just a certain woman).^[1] But he didn’t. People today might pull that out of their hat for such reasons, but Paul never did. 

In fact, the only time Paul mentions the man’s relationship to the command is in the context of the one sinful human in contrast to the one sinless human (Rom. 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15:20-22).^[2] And when he does, “Paul does not describe Adam as someone who abandoned his headship but rather as someone whose disobedience led to death.”^[3] The connection of the command specifically to Adam does not concern his relationship to the woman or even his maleness, but rather his relationship to obedience and, ultimately, sin, as a human being. 

How do we know the focus is on Adam’s humanity rather than his masculinity? Because Rom. 5:12-21, 1 Cor. 15:20-22, and the Genesis texts that uniquely link Adam to the command (2:16-17; 3:11; 3:17-19) point to the humanity of Jesus and Adam, not their maleness.^[4] In these verses both Christ and Adam are consistently referred to with the generic words for human being, not the terms denoting a male human. In Hebrew the word for human person is adam and in Greek it is anthropos. 

As an illustration, if 1 Cor. 15:21 were translated to make this apparent it would read…

For since death came through a human, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a human.

…rather than:

For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. (NIV – italics added)

In fact, the terms for a male human – ish and aner – do not surface in these verses at all (Gen. 2:16-17; 3:11; 3:17-19; Rom. 5:12-21; and 1 Cor. 15:20-22).

But you wouldn’t gather that from reading most English translations. Although the Greek text of Rom. 5:12-21 contains three instances of the singular anthropos, both the NIV and ESV count the word “man” nine times. No doubt the extra words are added to provide clarity. However, the repeated use of “man” in English makes it sound as though the point is that these two people – one sinful and one sinless – were men. Which of course they were, but that is not the emphasis in the original. The plural form anthropous also occurs three times in the Greek. In this case the NIV translates with “people,” but the ESV insists on “men.”  

This textual emphasis on the humanity rather than the masculinity of Adam and Jesus leads us to the reason Genesis includes how the man – not the woman – learned the command. It is not there to demonstrate the man’s superior position with respect to the woman nor, in fact, to say anything about his relationship to the woman. Instead, it is to set up the first human being as “a pattern of the one to come” (Rom. 5:14), possessing a representative function in relation to the sinless human, Christ. In his foresight, God determined a textual focus on one individual’s sin to contrast with another individual’s sinlessness – the God-human Jesus.^[5]

This emphasis does not imply that Adam possessed authority over the human race or that he was somehow the “leader” of the woman or humanity. The Bible, in fact, never refers to Adam in this way.

Neither does Scripture indicate that Adam’s sin was worse than Eve’s, though the first human’s sin does hold a typological significance and does elicit the judgment common to all humankind, death. 

One final comment. When Yahweh confronts Adam about listening to the voice of his wife, he is countering Adam’s intentional deflection of responsibility, not commenting on how the male-female relationship is supposed to work (Gen. 3:12, 17). Adam blamed Eve, so God necessarily pointed out that Adam didn’t have to do what Eve suggested; Adam could have listened to God instead. The point of God’s confrontation of Adam is that the God-human relationship must reign supreme, above any and all human-to-human ones. We should never listen to another person instead of to God.

When we spend a lot of effort connecting dots that were never intended to be connected, that aren’t connected in the text, we can end up with all sorts of unsubstantiated conclusions.

And this, in my mind, is one of them.

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^[1] Most discussions of 1 Tim. 2:11-15 do not adequately address the strange shift from plural to singular in the passage. See my article on the 1 Timothy text here. Marg Mowczko believes the focus is a specific woman. See her article here.

^[2] Michelle Lee-Barnewall, Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2016), 128-35, details how the text focuses on Adam’s charge to keep the command. Lee-Barnewall concludes that “Adam’s relationship to the command” is one of the “critical overarching perspectives on the passage” (144). The other is “the unity of Adam and Eve” (ibid.).

^[3] Lee-Barnewall, 134.

^[4] In the Genesis texts when the relationship between the man and woman is in view (2:23-24; 3:6; 3:16), Adam is called ish (man). The change in emphasis may explain the strange flip-flop between adam and ish in Gen. 2-3.

^[5] For a comprehensive discussion of the way the text links the command specifically to Adam see Lee-Barnewall, 128-35.