Biblion Bible Commentary
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Death Reigned from Adam
Romans 5:12-14
12 Therefore, as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death passed to all men because all sinned. · WEB
One man's act is traced into everyone's grave, and death's reign between Adam and Moses is the argument's evidence.
Therefore, as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin, so death passed to all men because all sinned.
The letter now widens its lens to the whole race, and the sentence tells the story of Genesis 3 in four movements: sin entered — an invader crossing a border, not a native — death entered through sin, death passed to all men, and the reason: because all sinned. The race's mortality is not an engineering fact; it is a verdict's spread, and the connection between the one man's act and the many's condition is the paragraph's whole concern.
Verses 13 and 14 argue the connection from history's strangest stretch: for until the law, sin was in the world; but sin is not charged when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those whose sins weren't like Adam's disobedience.
The argument is precise. Between Adam and Sinai there was no published statute, so sin — real as it was — was not being charged as transgression, itemized against a code Romans 4:15. Yet death reigned anyway, universally, over people who had broken no explicit commandment as Adam had. Infants died. If each person's death answered only to each person's charged transgressions, that stretch of history is inexplicable. Death's unbroken reign proves the race was implicated in something prior to its members' individual accounts — implicated in the one man at its head.
Death reigned — the phrase makes mortality a monarch, and it is the first of the paragraph's five reigns: death reigns twice Romans 5:17, sin reigns in death, grace will reign through righteousness Romans 5:21, and the justified will reign in life. The question the whole passage asks is not whether there is a king, but which one.
And the last clause springs the comparison the next verses will run: Adam is a foreshadowing of him who was to come Romans 5:14.
A type — the one-affecting-many shape of Adam's act prefigures another man whose single act will also reach everyone connected to him. Humanity's story, in this letter, has exactly two heads, and every person stands in one of two histories: Adam's, entered by birth, or Christ's, entered the way chapter 4 described Romans 4:24.
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