Did Adam and Eve eat meat?

Adam and Eve could have eaten meat, however such a diet never once occurred to them. Firstly they would have needed to kill one of the animals, an action for which they had no desire to carry out. The slaughter of any creature that God had made for them was absolutely unthinkable. Secondly, the opportunity to cook an animal, which had naturally died, never presented itself because there was no death in the Garden of Eden. It is made abundantly clear in the Bible that the wages of sin is death, so without sin there was no pending death for Adam, Eve or any living creature. The original text for the word ‘living’ by the way is used in a different manner when describing living plants; again it is made quite clear that plant life could be eaten without involving the death of a creature. Plants are not creatures.

The evolutionary view of the origins of humans accepts that in the very beginning the last ape-human to first human transitions only held to vegetarianism. They never ate meat. The same is true for the first humans revealed in the Bible. Adam and Eve did not eat meat. It has also been established by contemporary biology that human beings are in fact naturally vegetarian. The earliest known diets of humans are suspected to have been fruit, nuts, vegetables and leaves. So not only did Adam and Eve have no need to eat meat, we don’t need to eat it either, how about that then! I really don’t fancy a vegetable barbeque though.

Adam did eventually go on to kill and sacrifice animals in an offering to God but this was after the eviction from the Garden. And even then, he never ate them. Whilst living in the Garden no animals were killed, this can be reasoned from Scriptural revelation that clearly states everything was perfect, so it would have been perfect for the animals too. Finally, Adam and Eve would have had no craving to even eat fish. I must reiterate again that there was no death in the Garden of Eden. No animals ate other animals; no fish ate other fish either. It seems to us, in the modern world, quite amazing that there could have been a land where there were no meat-eating animals around. Nevertheless, these are the facts presented to us as to what life was like within the Garden of Eden. The answer to the question as to whether Adam and Eve ate meat is a resounding no. This situation rippled out to all animal life of the time.

Adam and Eve had plenty of food though, so much in fact that they always had a full menu to choose from. There may even have been plants available in the Garden that produced meaty type fare. Yet we must remember that the appetites of Adam and Eve were unlikely to have been as ravenous as they are for people in today’s world. Nevertheless, as I was not there at the time, I have no idea whether Adam and Eve fancied fish and chips or a hamburger.