Sneaky snake
1Of all the animals the LORD God made, the snake [1] was the sneakiest. It asked the woman, “Did God really order you not to eat fruit from any tree in the garden?” 2“That’s not what God said,” the woman answered. “We can eat fruit from any tree in the garden. 3There’s only one exception. God told us not to eat fruit from the tree in the center of the garden. He said if we even touch it, we’ll die.”4“Die? Not a chance,” the snake argued. 5“God just doesn’t want you to be like him. He knows if you eat that fruit, you’ll be smart enough to know right from wrong—just like he is.” 6The woman took a good, hard look at the tree. She liked what she saw. The fruit looked tasty. And she figured it would be a smart idea to take a bite, since it would make her smarter. She bit. She gave some to her husband. He bit, too.
7The fruit opened their eyes; they saw themselves differently. But instead of finding themselves instantly shrewd, they found themselves instantly nude. Embarrassed, they grabbed some large fig leaves and stitched them into clothes.
God takes an evening walk in the garden
8In the cool breeze of the evening, the LORD God took a walk in the garden. When the man and woman heard him approaching, they hid behind some trees. 9The LORD God called out to the man, “Where are you?” 10“I heard you coming,” the man said. “I was afraid of you because I’m naked. So I hid.”11“Who said you were naked?” The LORD God asked. “Did you eat from the tree I told you not to eat from?” 12“Yes, I ate from that tree,” the man answered. “But only because the woman—the one you gave me as a partner—gave me the fruit.” 13The LORD God said to the woman, “What on earth have you done?” The woman answered, “The snake tricked me into eating the fruit.”
14The LORD God said to the snake, “Because of what you have done, I’m putting a curse on you—worse than any curse on any animal in all of creation: Crawl on the ground. Eat dirt for the rest of your life. 15You and the woman will hate each other. Your children and her children will hate each other, too. Her son will stomp [2] your head into the ground, and you’ll nip at his heels.” 16God told the woman, “I’m going to see to it that when you give birth to children, it’s going to hurt. But that’s not going to stop you from wanting to get intimate with your husband, and from wanting to please him. He will control you.”
Adam's hard work ahead
17The LORD God said to Adam, “Because you listened to your wife instead of me—eating from the tree I told you not to eat from—here’s what I’m going to do. I’m putting a curse on the ground because of what you did. You’re going to have to work hard to grow food. 18You will eat grain, but you’ll have to hoe your way through thorns and thistles to get to it.19Hard work and plenty of sweat is the price you’ll have to pay for the food you eat—for the rest of your life. When your life is over, you’ll return to the ground because that’s where you came from. Dust is what you were and dust is what you’ll be. 20Adam named his wife Eve [3] because she became the mother of everyone. 21The LORD God made clothes out of animal skins [4] for Adam and his wife.
22The LORD God said, “Humans know right from wrong, just as we do. We need to make sure they don’t eat fruit from the tree of life. If they do, they will live forever.” 23So the LORD God banished them from the Garden of Eden. God made them from the ground. Now they would have to work the ground to stay alive. 24The LORD God drove them out of the Garden of Eden. East of the garden entrance he stationed angel guards called cherubim [5] armed with a fiery, spinning sword. They kept people out of the garden and away from the tree of life.
