Life of Adam and Eve: What Happened After Eden?
An ancient sequel to Eden in which Satan explains that he fell because he refused to bow to Adam.
The Life of Adam and Eve picks up after the expulsion from Paradise. It survives as the Latin Vita Adae et Evae, the Greek Apocalypse of Moses and other versions, and most scholars date its core to the first to third centuries CE.
The Life of Adam and Eve picks up after the expulsion from Paradise. It survives in several versions, the Latin Vita Adae et Evae and a Greek form known as the Apocalypse of Moses, plus Armenian, Georgian and Slavonic editions. Most scholars date the core to between the first and third centuries CE, and debate whether it began as a Jewish or Christian work.
Hungry and repentant, Adam and Eve decide to do penance by standing in rivers, Eve in the Tigris for thirty-seven days and Adam in the Jordan for forty. Satan comes to Eve disguised as an angel of light and tricks her into leaving the water early. When Adam demands to know why Satan hates them, the devil explains.
When Adam was created, Michael told all the angels to worship the image of God. Satan refused: "I will not worship an inferior and younger being than I. I am his senior in the Creation, before he was made was I already made." Other angels under him refused as well, and God cast them down to earth. This is almost the same scene the Quran tells about Iblis refusing to bow to Adam. Near her death, Eve tells her children to make tablets of stone and of clay recording the lives of their parents, because God will judge the world once by water and once by fire.
Eve orders two sets of records, on clay and on stone, so that one will survive a flood and the other a fire, an ancient idea of disaster-proof archives.
Scholars see the refusal-to-bow story as a shared tradition of late antiquity reflected in Christian and Islamic texts, not proof that one borrowed directly from a single original.
