The Antediluvians were the inhabitants of the land of the Americas ― from Adam down to the flood of Noah’s day. This first civi­lization included three dispensation heads: Adam, Enoch, and Noah. Except for eight souls and the animals aboard the ark, however, the earth’s population was destroyed some sixteen or seventeen hundred years after the Fall.

Adam and Eve

Adam and Eve and their family were the first occupants of this Promised Land. Initially, the entire land mass was known as Eden, and it was pronounced “good” at its creation. Later, God planted a garden “eastward in Eden” for His two children, and He placed them in it (Genesis 2:8).

Had Adam and Eve kept the laws that pertained to their remaining in the garden, a place without noxious weeds or animals that inflict harm, they could have lived there forever. The transgression of Adam and Eve brought a great change not only to their physical bodies but also to the entire earth and every living thing upon it. The two of them were cast out of the garden into a very different environment where they were forced to obtain food, shelter, and clothing by their own efforts.

The good news, however, was that now the plan of salvation, the program we all sustained in the premortal life, became operational. The plan called for each of us to “leave home,” our premortal sphere, to obtain a physical body as a counterpart to the spirit body we obtained from our Heavenly Parents. With this new configuration of spirit and body, we became capable of marriage and procreation.

The need for a Redeemer, for forgiveness, for agency, now became a reality. An eventual resurrection and return to Heavenly Parents as mature, experienced, married, resurrected couples, became a possibility, and thus we could carry out the intent of our creation as God announced to Moses (Moses 1:39).

After the Fall, Adam and Eve lived in a promised land, but unlike the Garden of Eden, it was not a paradisiacal environment. It was God’s design that His offspring should carry out their probationary state in a location away from His residence where they could learn to exercise individual agency without celestial beings present, a place where they could learn, in time, to become Gods themselves. This environment was to be a place where individuals, families, and society could freely exercise moral agency and prepare for their own future state of resurrected immortality and family life.

In contrast, when people live under tyranny, whenever unrigh­teous rulers or political systems operate to denigrate or trample agency, where oppressive measures are instituted by individuals or governments to thwart freedom, the plan of salvation is stymied. Our Father established the earth as a place where we could experience good and evil firsthand. We were given the opportunity to choose what we would do with our lives. Mortality had to be a place where God’s children could learn the differences between right and wrong in an environment removed from their premortal home.

Such an environment could not be located in a garden spot inside the pristine but sterile environment of Eden, where innocence prevailed. It had to be a testing ground where the curriculum of godhood could function. It had to be a place where law, choice, justice, mercy, and agency could operate in an environment conducive to growth and maturity, where the reality of death and damnation, eternal life and exaltation, were real possibilities. There also had to be an atonement to compensate for wrong choices and allow for a change in behavior — ­repentance.

The decision to move out of the garden to a place where the laws of life and death operated, however, had to be the decision of Adam and Eve. They had the choice to remain in the garden or move out into a hostile environment where the effects of mortality would be fully upon them. Had Adam and Eve not been properly instructed about their options and agency, they might have blamed God for the dramatic changes that took place once they were forced to leave their pristine garden.

“It appears plain,” said President Wilford Woodruff, “that it is God’s purpose to suffer His Saints to be thoroughly tried and tested, so that they may prove their integrity and know the character of the foundation upon which they build” (in Clark, Messages of the First Presidency, 3:160). Adam and Eve put the plan of salvation into operation. The Savior made the Father’s plan fully functional as He fulfilled the plan’s provisions through His atonement, death, and resurrection, so that we too, as the children of Heavenly Parents, could become eligible for immortality and eternal lives (Moses 1:39).

The land we now call America was the location of the Garden of Eden and the site of the fall of our first parents. “Cursed shall be the ground for thy sake” the Lord told the first patriarch and his wife. “In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also, and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” was the divine penalty (Moses 4:23-24).

“Therefore I, the Lord God, will send him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. For as I, the Lord God, liveth, even so my words cannot return void, for as they go forth out of my mouth they must be fulfilled. So I drove out the man” (Moses 4:29–31).

Moses recorded that afterward Adam and Eve “called upon the name of the Lord, and they heard the voice of the Lord from the way toward the Garden of Eden, speaking unto them, and they saw him not; for they were shut out from his presence” (Moses 5:4).

When Adam and Eve began their family, they taught the gospel to their children. They learned from angelic ministrants that a Savior had been prepared for them even before the earth was organized. They now comprehended the Father’s plan, knowing that they were not to be cast off forever but could become candidates for salvation through repentance and obedience to God’s commandments.

As they learned of the plan and the provision of a Redeemer who would overcome the negative effects of their transgression and sins, they rejoiced. “Blessed be the name of God,” Adam said to his wife,” for because of my transgression my eyes are opened, and in this life I shall have joy” (Moses 5:10).

Eve responded enthusiastically: “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient” (Moses 5:11).

Being cast out of the garden was not, after all, a detriment to happiness and joy. It was not an eternal punishment or penalty, for their decisions were made there while they were in a state of innocence. But the declaration by God that they were to stay together as companions, as procreating partners, to begin a family was the foremost of the commandments. To that end, Adam joined his wife, and they were faithful.

Anxious to teach their children the “good news” after an angelic visitation and instruction concerning the plan of salvation, “Adam and Eve blessed the name of God, and they made all things known unto their sons and their daughters” (Moses 5:12). We must assume that “all things” means the plan of salvation and the knowledge that through obedience to God’s laws and ordinances there was a way to overcome the consequences of their decision in the Garden.

But as most of us learn when we gather our children together, the devil is not happy with our attempts to teach our children principles of righteousness: “And Satan came among them, saying: … Believe it not.” And as many parents since have experienced, the children of Adam and Eve “believed it not, and they loved Satan more than God. And men began from that time forth to be carnal, sensual, and devilish” (Moses 5:13).

The land where Adam and Eve and their family lived after they were cast out of the garden has been identified by prophets. President Brigham Young taught: “How our faith would stretch out and grasp the heavenly land where our father Adam dwelt in his paradisiacal state! That land is on this continent. Here is where Adam lived. Do you not think the Lord has had his eye upon it?” (Journal of Discourses, 8:67).

Wonderful events took place in that first dispensation, and sad ones occurred, too. Cain’s murder of Abel must have been a terrible ordeal for Adam and Eve. But a righteous posterity also came from these parents. Toward the end of their long life together, Adam and Eve gathered their righteous descendants around them. Jehovah appeared at ­Adam-­ondi-Ahman to acknowledge the contribution of this first couple:

Enoch

The people who lived between the dispensation of Adam and Eve and the dispensation of Enoch were, in general, unfaithful to the principles and covenants given our first parents. We get a glimpse of just how wicked the people became during that thousand-year period when Jehovah called on Enoch to declare repentance to the people of his day: “For these many generations, ever since the day that I created them, have they gone astray, and have denied me, and have sought their own counsels in the dark; and in their own abominations have they devised murder, and have not kept the commandments, which I gave unto their father, Adam” (Moses 6:28).

Though Enoch himself “came out” from a “land of righteousness” (Moses 6:17, 41), his ministry was not one of simply encouraging people to maintain right living that had continued down from the time of Adam. There was a need for repentance. The Lord gave Enoch his “door approach:” “Go to this people, and say unto ­them — ­Repent, lest I come out and smite them with a curse, and they die” (Moses 7:10).

Enoch did cry repentance. And in one of the few bright spots in the history of this world, a number of people began to change their ways. In time, Enoch established a Zion people, a people sanctified in the flesh, a people who were eventually translated and taken from off the face of the earth.

Noah

The removal of Enoch and his city from the earth left Noah with a difficult congregation. The scriptural account says: “The Lord ordained Noah after his own order, and commanded him that he should go forth and declare his Gospel unto the children of men, even as it was given unto Enoch. And it came to pass that Noah called upon the children of men that they should repent; but they hearkened not unto his words” (Moses 8:19-20; italics added).

In rejecting the words of Noah, the people of his day offered this logic: “Behold, we are the sons of God; have we not taken unto ourselves the daughters of men? And are we not eating and drinking, and marrying and giving in marriage? And our wives bear unto us children, and the same are mighty men, which are like unto men of old, men of great renown” (Moses 8:21).

The people did not consider themselves evil. They were blinded to their own wickedness. Doesn’t that sound familiar? They argued that life was going on as it always had; they were marrying and having children, and society, to them, was not worsening.

Both Noah and the Lord knew better. “God saw that the wickedness of men had become great in the earth; and every man was lifted up in the imagination of the thoughts of his heart, being only evil continually” (Moses 8:22; italics added).

When “every man” is “evil continually,” and when the wickedness of the people has developed to such a terrible state of unrighteousness, their destruction is sure. People may believe that they are relatively righteous, that they are no worse than their neighbors. They may rationalize that they are as good as the next person. But when the Lord declares their wickedness to be odious and their days numbered unless they repent, the people have procrastinated the day of repentance beyond the day of deliverance.

The iniquity of Noah’s generation and their unwillingness to repent brought an end to this first civilization. Those who survived the great deluge included eight souls: Noah, his wife, and Shem, Ham, and Japheth (their three sons) and their wives (Moses 8:27; Genesis 7:18).

Elder Mark E. Petersen, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, commented on the survivors: “When Noah and these three sons, and the wives of all four, entered the ark, nothing is said about any children going in with them. Evidently none of their posterity was worthy of being saved from the flood” (Noah and the Flood, 23).

Noah used no anchor when the ark lifted off, and the vessel landed a great distance from its construction site. The huge land mass of earth, as it was created in the beginning, was still in one piece because it had not yet been divided into continents. That would not come until a century and a half later, in the days of Peleg (Genesis 10:25; D&C 133:24).6 The subsequent settlement by Noah and his family after the Flood was in a very different land, far from American soil.

What a sad ending for this first group of inhabitants. To move from righteousness to annihilation is a terrible continuum. The people of this first civilization, greatly blessed initially, saw their descendants choose wickedness to such an extent that they lost the right to live upon the land. The ultimate penalty of death was administered to all but Noah’s family. It was the worst calamity ever suffered by a people on this planet, as the lives of all human beings and animals were snuffed out, except for those within the safety of the ark.

Thus ended the first dispensation effort to bring the gospel and the priesthood to the children of God. One bright spot was the translation of Enoch’s people, in which the righteous were spared in a dramatic separation from the wicked. The Saints were removed to a terrestrial state where they could serve God in other ways.

Joseph Smith explained, “Now this Enoch God reserved unto Himself, that he should not die at that time, and appointed unto him a ministry unto terrestrial bodies” (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 170). After the Flood, the promised land of America was again sanctified for the next inhabitants, the Jaredites (Ether 13:2).