Adam and Eve are, in the biblical account, the first family — the root from which every other genealogy in scripture eventually grows. Genesis names Adam, formed from the dust, and Eve, formed from Adam, as the parents of humanity. Their named children are three sons: Cain, the firstborn; Abel, the second; and Seth, born after tragedy. From these five figures the entire human family tree is said to descend.
For a family of five, the structure carries enormous weight, because its central event is the first murder. Cain, a farmer, kills his brother Abel, a shepherd, out of jealousy over God's favor, and is exiled to wander east of Eden. That single act removes one branch and darkens another: Abel dies childless, Cain's line is marked and set apart. Seth is then born as a kind of replacement, and it is through Seth — not the elder Cain — that the favored lineage continues, an early instance of the biblical pattern in which inheritance skips the firstborn.
This genogram follows the Genesis text directly. It is deliberately spare — Adam, Eve, and their three named sons — even though Genesis adds that Adam lived to a great age and had other sons and daughters, leaving the first marriages of the next generation famously unexplained. What the tree captures instead is the theological engine of the whole Bible: a single origin point, a fall, a fratricide, and a surviving line through Seth that runs unbroken to Noah, to Abraham, and onward to every family that scripture will later chart.
Open & edit this family tree →