Genesis 3:6

When the woman saw. After doubt and unbelief in God’s word had been awakened in the woman, the tree seemed vastly different to her. Three times mention is made of how charming it was; it appealed to her taste, to her eye, and to her longing for increased wisdom. Looking at the tree in this way, with a desire to partake of its fruit, was a concession to Satan’s inducements. She was already guilty in her mind of transgressing the divine command, “Thou shalt not covet” (Ex. 20:17). The act of taking the fruit and eating it was but the natural result of entering thus upon the path of transgression.

She took of the fruit. Having coveted that to which she had no right, the woman proceeded to transgress one commandment after another. She next stole God’s property, violating the eighth commandment (Ex. 20:15). By eating the forbidden fruit and giving it to her husband she also transgressed the sixth commandment (Ex. 20:13). She then broke the first commandment (Ex. 20:3), because she placed Satan before God in her esteem, and obeyed him rather than her Creator.

Gave also unto her husband. Observing that she did not die immediately, a fact which seemed to confirm the seducer’s definite assertion, “Ye shall not die,” Eve experienced a deceptive sense of elation. She wanted her husband to share the feeling with her. This is the first time the Sacred Record calls Adam “her husband.” But instead of being a “help meet” for him she became the agent of his destruction. The statement that “she gave also to her husband with her,” does not imply that he had been with her all the time, standing mute at the scene of temptation. Instead, she gave him of the fruit upon rejoining him that he might eat it “with her” and thus share its presumed benefits.

He did eat. Before he ate, a conversation between Adam and his wife must have taken place. Should he follow his wife in her path of sin and disobedience or give her up, trusting that God would somehow restore his shattered happiness? The fact that she had not died as the result of eating the fruit, and that no apparent harm had come her to her, did not deceive Adam. “Adam was not deceived, but the woman” (1 Tim. 2:14). But his wife’s power of persuasion, coupled with his own love for her, induced him to share the consequences of her fall, whatever they might be. Fateful decision! Instead of waiting until he should have the opportunity of discussing the whole tragic matter with God, he took his fate into his own hands. Adam’s fall is the more tragic because he did not doubt God, nor was he deceived like Eve; he acted in the certain expectation that God’s terrible threat would come true.

Deplorable as was Eve’s transgression and fraught as it was with potential woe for the human family, her choice did not necessarily involve the race in the penalty for her transgression. It was the deliberate choice of Adam, in the full understanding of an express command of God — rather than hers — that made sin and death the inevitable lot of mankind. Eve was deceived; Adam was not (see Rom. 5:12, 14; 1 Cor. 15:21; 1 Tim. 2:14; 2 Cor. 11:3). Had Adam remained loyal to God in spite of Eve’s disloyalty, divine wisdom would yet have solved the dilemma for him and averted disaster for the race (PP 56).