Who Were Adam and Eve? Where Every Story Starts

Every child who has been in Sunday school longer than a month knows the two names. Rather fewer know anything that happens in the story besides the fruit.

That is a shame, because the parts they are missing are the parts children like best.

Adam, and a job nobody expects

Genesis 2:7 says Adam was formed from the dust of the ground and given the breath of life. Made of dirt, and then made alive. Children never fail to enjoy the dirt.

Then comes the detail that gets skipped almost every time: the first task given to a human being is to look at every animal and give it a name. Not to build something or fight something. To pay attention to living creatures carefully enough to call them something.

Ask a room of children what they would have named a giraffe and you will get ten minutes of material and a genuine point at the end of it. Naming things properly means looking at them properly first. That is a real idea, and a six year old can hold it.

Eve, and what her name means

Genesis 3:20 gives Eve her name, and the name means life. She is called the mother of all living, which is a very large thing to be called.

She is made as a companion, because the first thing in the whole account that God says is not good is a person being alone. For a child who has ever felt left out, that sentence lands harder than most of what we tell them about themselves.

The hard part, and how much of it to tell

You cannot tell this story honestly and skip the fall, and small children do not need it dwelt on.

What seems to work: they were given one instruction, they broke it, they hid, and hiding did not work either. Every child has done exactly this on a smaller scale and knows precisely how it feels, which is the reason the story is worth telling rather than a reason to soften it.

What comes next is the part worth landing on. God comes looking for them anyway. And in Genesis 3:15, in the middle of the consequences, there is a line that Christians have read for a very long time as the first hint of the rescue that arrives much later in the book. The story does not end at the mistake. It has never ended at the mistake.

Why they make good first figures

If you are starting a shelf, start at the beginning. Not because it is tidy, but because every other story a child meets later will point back here.

Abraham is asked to trust a promise, and the promise is a repair of something that broke in this chapter. Sarah waits for a child, and the waiting matters because of a family line that starts with these two. Children who know Adam and Eve properly have somewhere to put everything that comes next.

Adam and Eve are both available as Paint-Your-Own kits, and both live in Genesis Origins, which is exactly two figures long, for the obvious reason. The figures are made for ages 3 and up, because they have small parts.

If you are a teacher planning the term, they pair well with the first activity in our five for the first week of Sunday school, where children say one story they already know. This is almost always the one they say.