It’s my understanding that Jews don’t believe in the hereditary consequences of original sin that Christians do. This was one of the things that was revealed in Christian revelation. In a way, you could say we didn’t realize we’d lost anything (the holiness and justice we were created with) until we got it back through Christ.
There was really different opinions back then. In one idea (found in the book of Sirach), death is something that God had decreed for all flesh (41:4); sin is the responsibility of the individual. Ben Sira had nothing but praise for Adam. In Sirach, Adam and Eve didn’t gain knowledge of good and evil by eating the fruit; it was something God had given them when they were created (17:1-12).
Wisdom of Solomon (1st century BC-1st century AD) takes a different tactic: “through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his party experience it.” (2:24) Wisdom also doesn’t blame Adam; he was first man who wisdom saved and a role model. If anything, death entered the world because of his son Cain: “But when an unrighteous man departed from her in his anger, he perished because in rage he slew his brother. When the earth was flooded because of him, wisdom again saved it, steering the righteous man by a paltry piece of wood.” (10:2-4)
Here’s the thing. Many scholars think that St. Paul was familiar with the book of Wisdom,
because he seems to engage with it in the epistle to the Romans. (For example in 1:18-32.) Very often, Paul actually seems to
disagree with the ideas found in Wisdom and subvert them. Paul’s view of Adam in Romans 5 is likely his expression of disagreement with Wisdom’s portrait of Adam as a man of wisdom.
In the Book of Jubilees, the effect of Adam and Eve’s eating from the tree is not so much sin; it’s that they lost the ability to communicate with animals (whereas before they ate the forbidden fruit, humans and animals were of “one speech and one language”).
For Josephus (Antiquities 1.40-51), the serpent tempted Adam because he was jealous of Adam’s good standing with God. What Adam and Eve gained from the fruit was knowledge, which was a good thing. The problem with it is that they attained this knowledge without God, which was a bad thing. The lesson of the story for Josephus is first, wisdom attained without God leads to disaster. The second is, never ever listen to a woman:“God allotted him punishment, because he weakly submitted to the counsel of his wife.” What Adam and Eve lost was not immortality, but the good life in the Greek sense. (Josephus shares one thing in common with Jubilees: it’s the idea that humans and animals in Eden could talk with each other - which apparently explains why the serpent can talk to Adam and Eve. In Josephus’ version, God punished
the serpent by depriving it of speech.)
In some texts, the origin of sin and death is not traced to Adam and Eve at all, but to the time when the “sons of God” (interpreted as angels) mated with the “daughters of men,” begetting the Nephilim in Genesis 6. This is a more common interpretation, which crops up often in a number of Jewish literature from the period, most notably in
the Book of the Watchers section of 1 Enoch (chapters 1-36; cf. also Jubilees 4:22; 5:1-10; 7:21;
Testament of Reuben 5;
Testament of Naphtali 3:5;
Damascus Document 2:18-21).
In the Dead Sea Scrolls, you have all of these views represented (Adam as role model; sin and death being caused by the “sons of God” descending to earth to mate with human women; death being part of God’s design for man), and one more. In
The Community Rule (which as the name implies is the rule of the Qumran sect), God is presented as creating two spirits in the beginning for humans: one of truth and light and the other of injustice and darkness. Humans have qualities or virtues from both spirits because God gave both spirits to them. Here sin is attributed not to Adam, nor Eve nor Cain nor the “sons of God,” but to God’s creation of two opposing spirits.
