Fall of Man. The fall of man, the fall of Adam, or simply the Fall, is a term used in Christianity to describe the transition of the first man and woman from a state of innocent obedience to God to a state of guilty disobedience. The doctrine of the Fall comes from a biblical interpretation of Genesis, chapters 1-3. At first, Adam and Eve lived with God in the Garden of Eden, but the serpent tempted them into eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden. After doing so, they became ashamed of their nakedness and God expelled them from the Garden to prevent them from eating from the tree of life and becoming immortal. In mainstream Christianity, the doctrine of the Fall is closely related to that of original sin or ancestral sin. They believe that the Fall brought sin into the world, corrupting the entire natural world, including human nature, causing all humans to be born into original sin, a state from which they cannot attain eternal life without the grace of God. The Eastern Orthodox Church accepts the concept of the Fall but rejects the idea that the guilt of original sin is passed down through generations, based in part on the passage Ezekiel 18:20 that says a son is not guilty of the sins of his father. Calvinist Protestants believe that Jesus gave his life as a sacrifice for the elect, so they may be redeemed from their sin. Lapsarianism, understanding the logical order of God's decrees in relation to the Fall, is divided by some Calvinists into supralapsarian and infralapsarian. The narrative of the Garden of Eden and the fall of humankind constitute a mythological tradition shared by all the Abrahamic religions, with a presentation more or less symbolic of Judeo-Christian morals and religious beliefs, which had an overwhelming impact on human sexuality, gender roles, and sex differences both in the Western and Islamic civilizations. Unlike Christianity, the other major Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam, do not have a concept of original sin, and instead have developed varying other interpretations of the Eden narrative. Adam and Eve and Tree of the knowledge of good and evil The doctrine of the fall of man is extrapolated from the traditional Christian exegesis of Genesis 3. According to the biblical narrative, God created Adam and Eve, the first man and woman in the chronology of the Bible. God places them in the Garden of Eden and forbids them to eat fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent tempts Eve to eat fruit from the forbidden tree, which she shares with Adam, and they immediately become ashamed of their nakedness. Subsequently, God banishes Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, condemns Adam to work in order to get what he needs to live and condemns Eve to give birth in pain, and places cherubim to guard the entrance, so that Adam and Eve will never eat from the tree of life. The Book of Jubilees, an apocryphal Jewish work written during the Second Temple period, gives time frames for the events that led to the fall of man by stating that the serpent convinced Eve to eat the fruit on the 17th day, of the 2nd month, in the 8th year after Adam's creation. It also states that they were removed from the Garden on the new moon of the 4th month of that year. Main articles: Christian mythology and Jewish mythology Christian exegetes of Genesis 2:17 have applied the day-year principle to explain how Adam died within a day. Psalms 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8, and Jubilees 4:29-31 explain that, to God, one day is equivalent to a thousand years and thus Adam died within that same day. The Greek Septuagint, on the other hand, has day translated into the Greek word for a twenty-four-hour period. According to the Genesis narrative, during the antediluvian age, human longevity approached a millennium, such as the case of Adam who lived 930 years. Thus, to die has been interpreted as to become mortal. However, the grammar does not support this reading, nor does the narrative: Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden lest they eat of the second tree, the tree of life, and gain immortality.
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