^16-17 But the Lord God gave the man this warning: “You may eat any fruit in the garden except fruit from the Tree of Conscience—for its fruit will open your eyes to make you aware of right and wrong, good and bad. If you eat its fruit, you will be doomed to die.”

⁶ The woman was convinced. How lovely and fresh looking it was! And it would make her so wise! So she ate some of the fruit and gave some to her husband, and he ate it too. ⁷ And as they ate it, suddenly they became aware of their nakedness, and were embarrassed. So they strung fig leaves together to cover themselves around the hips.

⁸ That evening they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden; and they hid themselves among the trees. ⁹ The Lord God called to Adam, “Why are you hiding?”^[a]

¹⁰ And Adam replied, “I heard you coming and didn’t want you to see me naked. So I hid.”

¹¹ “Who told you you were naked?” the Lord God asked. “Have you eaten fruit from the tree I warned you about?”

¹² “Yes,” Adam admitted, “but it was the woman you gave me who brought me some, and I ate it.”

¹³ Then the Lord God asked the woman, “How could you do such a thing?”

“The serpent tricked me,” she replied.

¹⁴ So the Lord God said to the serpent, “This is your punishment: You are singled out from among all the domestic and wild animals of the whole earth—to be cursed. You shall grovel in the dust as long as you live, crawling along on your belly. ¹⁵ From now on you and the woman will be enemies, as will your offspring and hers. You will strike his heel, but he will crush your head.”

¹⁶ Then God said to the woman, “You shall bear children in intense pain and suffering; yet even so, you shall welcome your husband’s affections, and he shall be your master.”

¹⁷ And to Adam, God said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate the fruit when I told you not to, I have placed a curse upon the soil. All your life you will struggle to extract a living from it. ¹⁸ It will grow thorns and thistles for you, and you shall eat its grasses. ¹⁹ All your life you will sweat to master it, until your dying day. Then you will return to the ground from which you came. For you were made from the ground, and to the ground you will return.”

²³ So the Lord God banished him forever from the Garden of Eden, and sent him out to farm the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ Thus God expelled him, and placed mighty angels at the east of the Garden of Eden, with a flaming sword to guard the entrance to the Tree of Life.

²¹ Death came into the world because of what one man (Adam) did, and it is because of what this other man (Christ) has done that now there is the resurrection from the dead. ²² Everyone dies because all of us are related to Adam, being members of his sinful race, and wherever there is sin, death results. But all who are related to Christ will rise again.

²³ Yes, all have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious ideal;

²³ Yes, all have sinned; all fall short of God’s glorious ideal;