Adam wasn't there when Eve ate the fruit

Genesis 3:6 is explicit: Eve "took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate." The Hebrew phrase "with her" (immah) places Adam at the scene, not off somewhere else and recruited afterward.

The popular image of an absent Adam returning later to find Eve already fallen isn't in the account. If anything, the text's plain reading makes Adam's culpability sharper, not softer: he is a silent witness to the entire exchange with the serpent, and Paul later leans on exactly this point, distinguishing Eve as deceived from Adam as not deceived (1 Timothy 2:14), a distinction that only makes sense if Adam was present and knowingly complicit rather than absent and misled.