In Adam’s fall, we sinned all! So declares the New England Primer. Yet its woodcut for that couplet shows the serpent offering the forbidden fruit to Eve, not Adam. What are we to make of the Woman’s temptation and the maddeningly terse narrative describing it? Centuries of commentary have focused tightly on small details, hearing volumes in the Woman’s few words. But according to Old Testament scholar Jeffrey Niehaus, such interpretations are more imagination than analysis, and fail to do justice to the specific text and to the Bible’s common ways of reporting events.
In this episode of Christian Humanist Profiles, David Grubbs interviews Dr. Jeffrey Niehaus, senior professor of Old Testament at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and author of When Did Eve Sin? The Fall & Biblical Historiography (Lexham Press, 2020).