Adam and Eve: The First Crime Story

Given the title, it will surprise no one (I hope) that my new novel, The Eden Test, is inspired in part by the story of Adam and Eve. It’s a tale I know well from growing up attending Sunday school, and I think most people are familiar with the particulars: a man, a woman, a garden, a snake, a forbidden fruit, a temptation, a fall. It’s got all the elements of a great crime novel—except, of course, for the crime. For that, you have to read a little further into the Book of Genesis.

As I was revisiting this tale as research for my novel, It didn’t occur to me at first that Adam and Eve is, eventually, a crime story. What interested me was the love story: The notion of two people, alone in Paradise, left to their own devices while a possibly benevolent, possibly malevolent authority figure looks on. This scenario translated well as a blueprint for the story I wanted to tell, about Daisy and Craig, a young married couple, who take a one-week marriage-counseling retreat in the woods of upstate New York. Part of the goal of their retreat, the titular Eden Test, is to strip away all the trappings of their urban life and get them back to the essentials—starting with each other. 

Adam and Eve isn’t often told as a love story—it’s typically told as a cautionary tale of temptation and disobedience and humanity’s inherent flaws. But when you think about it, Adam and Eve invented romantic love. In fact, they loved each other so much that they conspired to break the rules, then cover it up, then went together into permanent exile. You could probably argue that Adam and Eve’s fig leaves, donned to hide their nakedness once they’d acquired the capacity for shame, was history’s first cover-up. Literally.

And that’s when an interesting wrinkle occurs in the story: They have a family. They’re not just history’s first couple, they’re history’s first parents. You’ve probably heard of their kids, or at least two of them: Cain and Abel. (Technically, if you believe the Adam and Eve story is literally true, then we’re all their kids, but that’s another issue.) They had a third son, Seth, who’s somewhat less well-known in popular mythology, mostly because he avoided the fates of his two brothers, which was to become a) a murderer and b) a murderee.

For those who need a refresher: After Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden, Eve gives birth to two sons, Cain and Abel. Fast-forward to adulthood, when Abel becomes a keeper of sheep and Cain a tiller of the soil. They bring their respective offerings to God—fruit from Cain, meat from Abel—and God likes Abel’s better. Cain gets angry. The Lord chastises him, instructing him that if he does right, all will be well, but also warning him that “sin is crouching at your door.”

Cain doesn’t do right. He opens the door.

The description of the crime itself in the Bible is alarmingly brief: “Cain said to his brother Abel, ‘Let’s go out to the field.’ While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.”

For someone who thinks a lot about criminal malfeasance—and has, in the past, thought a lot about Adam and Eve—it’s funny to me that I never really put all this together until I was working on my book. Not only is Cain history’s first murderer but he invented the idea of murder. No one had ever purposefully ended a human life before: Not Adam or Eve (that we know of, though, as established, they were experts at cover-ups); not God (at least not initially—that came later, with floods and plagues and such); not even Satan, that fallen angel of light, that slithering temptor. 

No, it took a flawed and fragile human to come up with the idea of murder, both its conception and its execution. And Cain’s motivation for murder would become a classic one, too, both in crime fiction and in life: jealousy.   

What I’d never considered about this story was the notion that, to do this, Cain had to imagine it first. There was no precedent for murder. He killed his brother with a rock—so he had to look at a rock and figure out that, if he hit a human skull with the rock, bad things would result. In fact, not only had no one been murdered yet, but no one had ever died. Adam and Eve were still living, as best we know. So, in imagining the notion that life could end and he could be the one to end it, Cain made one of the biggest and most consequential conceptual leaps in history. 

It’s an interesting thought experiment (if you’re a crime writer, at least): What if Cain hadn’t done this? What if murder had never been invented? Was this something humans were bound to learn from watching nature as animals pounced on each other? Was it baked into the plan from the start—kind of like Adam and Eve’s fall? (God is omniscient, after all, so he knew his creations would falter before he even created them.) Or is there a possible alternate human history in which, without Cain’s single rash act, no human ever purposefully causes the death of another?

As a crime writer, murder, at least fictionally, is always on the table. It’s the ultimate metaphorical spanner in the societal works—the mystery to be solved, the fate to be escaped, the tragic outcome when a character allows sin, ever crouching outside, to come through the door. In his way, Cain not only invented murder but he kind of invented crime fiction. He should be the lifetime-achievement honoree at the next Mystery Writers of America banquet. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that so many things—love, cover-ups, killing, noir—find their origins in the Garden of Eve.

It is called the creation story, after all.

About The Eden Test by Adam Sternbergh:

Daisy and Craig’s marriage is in serious trouble. That’s why Daisy has signed up for The Eden Test, a week-long getaway for couples in need of a fresh start. Yet even as she’s struggling to salvage her marriage, it seems Craig has plans to leave her for another woman. In fact, his bags are already packed―long before he arrives to meet Daisy in this remote cabin in the woods of upstate New York.

At first, their week away is marked by solitude, connection, and natural beauty―and only a few hostile locals. But what Craig doesn’t know is that Daisy, a slyly talented actress, has her own secrets, including a burner phone she’s been using for mysterious texts. Not to mention the Eden Test itself, which poses a searing new question to the couple every day, each more explosive than the last. Their marriage was never perfect, but now the lies and revelations are piling up, as the week becomes much more than they bargained for…How far are they willing to go?