In Trees and Thorns, James Jordan infers that the fall of man happened on the Sabbath day.
This is suggested by the fact that the second creation account (concerning the forming of man and the creation of the garden) is structured according to a shadow of the seven-day sequence used in the first creation account. The outline is as follows:
The land is formless and void, and Adam is created as a light;
God makes the garden as a firmament-like barrier in the east of Eden;
God makes trees to grow in the garden;
Adam is established as a ruler in the garden (like the sun and moon in the firmament);
God commands Adam concerning the tree and announces a curse, just as he first commanded swarms of living creatures and sea monsters and announced the first blessing;1
God brings the animals to Adam, and then his wife;
Adam and his wife are united—but they fail to enter God’s rest. (Jordan, Trees and Thorns, 7-9, 78, 132-133.)
Seeing that the second creation account climaxes with the Sabbath highlights certain features of Genesis 3 that might otherwise be missed: it is a worship service gone horribly wrong.
The garden in Eden is a prototype of the tabernacle, and later the temple, as G. K. Beale and others have noted. Adam is a prototypical priest, charged to keep and guard the garden, just as the Levites would later be charged concerning the tabernacle (for example, Numbers 3:7-8). Similarly, this first Sabbath day is a prototype of the set times for formal worship which are stipulated later in the Old Covenant. This time for worship would have been in some way governed by the sun and moon, which were given as rulers “for seasons”—that is, for appointed times for festivals and assemblies.
What happens at this first Sabbath worship service? The serpent enters the sanctuary space and presents the woman with false teaching. The woman was deceived into taking the sacred food without God’s invitation. Adam the priest failed to teach and to enforce God’s law at the critical moment, before sinning himself in a high-handed way. And then, right on cue, the Lord God comes to see—that is, to judge—his people: this is the Day of the Lord. He calls them to his presence (“Where are you?”). He hears their (lame) confessions of sin and he pronounces judgments. In the course of these judgments, God proclaims the gospel, promising that the woman would one day be vindicated against the serpent through her childbearing. Adam and Eve are driven out of the sanctuary, not with a benediction from God, but with the words of curses ringing in their ears. They are barred by cherubim and the flaming sword from returning to the sanctuary to eat from the tree of life.
These elements of this first frustrated Sabbath will appear again in Scripture, albeit in redeemed and perfected ways. God will again call his people to his sanctuary, he will hear their confessions and forgive them, he will preach the gospel to them, and he will invite his people to eat with him—and he will appoint a man as his representative to keep and guard the sanctuary. We can see then that one of the major concerns of the biblical narrative is for God to bring man into his rest.
The concept of Sabbath rest is intertwined with the concepts of worship and of the Day of the Lord (that is, the Lord’s Day) from the very beginning of Scripture.
This is admittedly the least satisfying link between the two sequences, and yet the sequence as a whole seems to work