How Long were Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden?
As I wrote in Cain and Abel Consistent with Old or Young Earth Scenario, there was sufficient time in Adam’s life for their to have been a woman for Cain to marry, and people for whom to build a city. I say this, not only because I believe there were already people alive, but because Adam was 130 years old when Seth was born, and Seth replaced Abel for Eve. This implies that there may have been as much as 130 years of pro-creation happening before Cain got married. If half of all people born were women, each woman could start giving birth around 15 years of age, each had a 30 year span during which to reproduce, and if each woman gave birth once a year, then there could be over nearly 100 billion people descended over 9 generations from Eve by the time Cain killed Abel.Â
Now honestly, I do not actually believe that there was this much procreation going on, because who would take care of all the children? At such rates, there would always be 10 times as many people under the age of 15 as there would be 15 years of age and over. How could they maintain such a ratio? Even the united states has only 300 million people in it. In fact the entire world still does not have have 82 billion people in it, and we are far more capable of sustained populations now than they were then! So, how can we come up with more reasonable numbers?
Well, biblically, we have seen that 12 children in a family is not unreasonable, and their ages ran the gamut. So, let us reduce the frequency of children a bit to 1 child every 3 years. How does that impact the numbers? About 5 million people 10 years before Seth was born, if no one had yet died.  A far cry from 82 billion, huh?
Now, I wonder how old girls were before getting married. I assumed 15 years old, but they may have been older… 17? 18? How much different would that make? Let’s go with 18 (because of significance of 18 in Judaism). Now, Seth is born as part of Generation 8 now, instead of Generation 9, and the total people around Cain’s marriage is about 1 million (that factor of 5 mentioned above). This is getting more reasonable. Even just adding 3 years per generation really made a difference, huh? Oh, but I forgot to subtract 3 years from their potential years of fertility. I had assumed 30 years, so bringing that down by 3 brings the estimate down to under 500 thousand, more than cutting it half!
As you can see the numbers can be extremely volatile, even with small changes. I added three years to the woman’s reproductive coming-of-age, and subtracted three years from her total reproductive years, and the total number of people alive when Cain got married went down by a factor of over 10, from 5 million to under 500 thousand.
However, all of this fails to take into account just one more variable… how long were Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden? The answer to this question is impacted by several things:
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How old was Adam when God took him from the world and put him in the garden?
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How long was Adam without a suitable helper?
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How long did Adam and Eve faithfully tend the garden before they sinned?
Subtract out these years from 130, and the total diminishes even more.
To address question 1, look back at Genesis 2:4-7. If the earth is old, and God brought the earth through the process that scientists see recorded in the earth, then it was 4.5 billion years ago when the earth had no plants, no animals, no people, had never rained, and mist rose up to water the earth. What a wonderful description of earth’s initial conditions in the scripture! Given that God had only the “dust of the ground” to work with, scripture appropriately says that God started with the dust. But, we know Adam was not alive 4.5 billion years ago, though he appears to have been alive around 6,000 years ago. This means that the entirety of Earth’s history, recorded in rocks and the fossil record, was God’s process for creating Adam from the dust of the earth. If we are to take both scripture and science seriously, that is what scripture is saying! It’s a rather big concept to get one’s head around, I know, but then why would it match so well if it wasn’t true? This means Adam came into being as part of the chain of life… it means he was born. It means that Adam was not 0 years old when God put him in the garden, but somewhat older… old enough to tend a garden at least, old enough to be considered a man.
Given my assumption that females most likely started marrying at age 18 above, let us assume the same for men… let us assume that Adam was 18 years of age when God gave him an aware of Himself, and placed him in the garden to tend it. That reduces the years until Seth by 18 years, and brings us back another generation, to about 100,000 people alive around Seth’s birth.
Next, how long was Adam without a suitable helper in the Garden? That one is more difficult, and will be even more of a guess than that above. However, without an ability to be accurate, all I can do is attempt to be reasonable.
According to Genesis 2:
 8 Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9 And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Notice the sequence here:
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God planted a garden
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God put Adam in it
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God made the trees grow
If we were to assume that the trees were young enough to be tended by a single person, and that Adam was in the garden alone until their care was too much for one person, then he might have lived there for about 7 years himself. Why 7? Because God often does things in 7s, and it would seem to allow enough time for fruit trees to mature, grow, start producing a lot of fruit, and Adam attempt to keep up for a season or two. At that point, God “saw” that Adam needed help.
What kind of help would Adam have needed? Well, he probably had to ensure that the trees were not overgrown with other plants. But even more so, he would have needed to pick their fruits, or at least pick up the rotten ones from the ground, not to mention disposing of their leaves in the Autumn. Supposing God brought all kinds of animals before him, it probably wouldn’t take long for Adam to demonstrate that it was going to take more than just brute strength to do his work. It would take a real partnership, something no animal was quite sufficient to do. So, God caused Adam to sleep, and made him Eve, a suitable helper for him. Why Eve? Why a woman? Because another testosterone-driven man would not have been very helpful; he needed the balance, to keep him at an even keel as they thought through the care of God’s garden together. Also, God may have seen Adam, and seen that he needed someone more nurturing than him, to demonstrate how to properly care at all.
At this point, it makes me wonder whether Adam and Eve procreated in the Garden. I do not know, but I suspect not. The way God talks to Eve in Genesis 4, it would seem that she knew what child birth was, because instead of saying her pain would increase through childbirth, He said the pain of childbirth would increase… subtle difference, eh? Well, not so fast. He actually said two things. First, that her sorrow and conception would be increased; second, that she would give birth in sorrow, or pain. Why say the childbirth would be painful if he just said it be more painful? Perhaps until now she had “conceived” only fruit in the garden, which required toil and some sorrow; giving birth physically would increase her conception and her sorrow. That would also explain God’s other statement that her desire would be for her husband; it indicates the emotional attachment she would now have to him that perhaps she had not had before. This attachment would actually ensure the physical intimacy through which childbearing would result. It therefore would seem to me that Eve bore no children in the garden, and that she lived in the garden long enough to feel sorrow from her toil. How long might that have lasted? I cannot say, but I would think that the garden never got too unwieldy for two people to care for it. I will guess that she lived there about 7 years years… no justification other than the fact that she was there long enough to sorrow in her toil, but not so long that she was completely overwhelmed… however I believe that her eventual disobedience might indicate that she was getting there, and 7 years is a common duration for a person to endure before boiling over.
Add these to Adam’s 18 years out of the garden and 7 years without Eve, and it results in about 21,000 people descended from Adam and Eve when Cain was getting married. That is actually a very reasonable number of people to be alive within Cain’s proximity, still enough to marry from, and still enough to build a city for, but not so much that you wonder how they raised food or how far they moved.
NOTE: I tried cutting pasting my spreadsheet figures above, but I need to make them graphics or html tables, and it’s early in the morning…