The Genesis Narrative
According to the book of Genesis, God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that the clay became a living being. He was made in the image of God and placed in the Garden of Eden, given responsibility to work and care for it, with the single command not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil under penalty of death.
Adam and Eve disobeyed this command by eating the forbidden fruit. As a consequence the Genesis account relates that Adam was condemned to labour upon the earth for his food and to return to it at his death, and the couple was expelled from the garden so that they might not eat from the Tree of Life and live forever in their fallen state.
Genesis records that Adam lived 930 years and fathered sons, among them Cain, Abel, and Seth, as well as other unnamed sons and daughters. As the common ancestor of humanity he is the head of the genealogies that the Scriptures trace forward through the generations.
Theological Significance: Adam and Christ
From the earliest Christian centuries Adam was understood as a type prefiguring Christ. The Apostle Paul argued that, as sin and death entered the world through one man, so restoration was held out through Christ, by whom the righteous would be brought back to the Paradise from which Adam's transgression had banished humanity. This is the root of the patristic title of Christ as the 'New Adam.'
Orthodox theology understands the Fall differently from much of the Western tradition. Rather than treating Adam's descendants as inheriting personal guilt through an Original Sin, the Orthodox emphasis falls on the Fall as a catastrophic Ancestral Sin that rendered humanity susceptible to sin and to death.
By the Church's tradition, the redemption wrought by Christ reaches Adam himself. The hymnography and iconography of Pascha express the conviction that in His descent into Hades Christ raised the first-created; many icons of the Resurrection accordingly depict Christ taking Adam and Eve by the hand and drawing them up out of their tombs.
Liturgical Commemoration
The Orthodox Church commemorates Adam among the Holy Forefathers, the ancestors of Christ according to the flesh who lived both before the Law and under the Law. This commemoration falls on the Sunday between December 11 and 17, immediately preparing for the feast of the Nativity, with particular emphasis given to the Patriarch Abraham and the covenant promise that in his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed.
By honoring these forefathers in the days before the Nativity, the Church sets forth the continuity between the Old Testament promises and their fulfillment in the Incarnation, presenting the whole line from Adam onward as the lineage leading to the birth of Christ. Adam and Eve and the expulsion from Paradise are also recalled on Forgiveness Sunday, the final day before Great Lent, when the faithful are invited to contemplate the fallen condition of humanity.
