What Language Did Adam And Eve Speak?

What Language Did Adam And Eve Speak? Truthfully speaking, the Bible does not tell us what language Adam and Eve spoke. Notice that the only hint we get is when Adam called his wife “woman” because she was taken “out of man” (Genesis 2:23). Note that the Hebrew word for “man” is ish and the Hebrew word for “woman” is ishah. Nevertheless, before concluding that Adam and Eve spoke Hebrew because of this wordplay, we should also note that there is a similar wordplay in English: man and woman are similar words. This gives room for the possibility that in Genesis Moses is simply giving a Hebrew equivalent of whatever language Adam and Eve spoke, just as English versions give an English equivalent. Notice that the Bible has been translated into so many languages and each translation has an equivalent of the Hebrew words.

Genesis 3:20 which gives another clue says, “The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all the living.” In the Hebrew language, the word “Eve” and the word for “living” have a similar sounds. There is no equivalent in English. The English word Eve sounds more like the end of something than the beginning. However, our word Eve is from the Latin Eva, which sounds somehow similar to the Hebrew word havvah, which sounds somehow similar to the Hebrew word for “live.” And today, this is the word that is used throughout the English translation of the Bible as an equivalent of the Hebrew word.

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What Language Did Adam And Eve Speak?

Truth be told, we really do not have any idea of the language that the first man, Adam, and the first woman, Eve spoke in their days. The evidence in Genesis can easily be explained as a Hebrew translation of whatever the original language was. Remember that the languages were confused at Babel, and the “original language” may have been lost there (Genesis 11). Even if the original language was some form of what we know today as Hebrew or some other Semitic language, languages change over time.

As proof that languages change over time, Fluent English speakers often have trouble with Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English, barely 400 years old, not to mention Chaucer’s Middle English, barely 150 years older than that. In addition, the Old English of Beowulf, written about 350 years before Chaucer, is hardly recognizable as English at all and must be translated to be understood by today’s English readers. It is most likely that whatever language Adam and Eve spoke during their days is completely lost to us today, even if it eventually morphed into what was called Hebrew at the time of Moses. Whatever the case, we know that the Bible does not clearly tell us the language that was spoken by Adam and Eve.