The Ordo Representacionis Ade, or Jeu d'Adam, has long been understood as a play about language. With the two distinct registers of its first section, the Latin liturgy of Septuagesima and the lively Anglo-French dialogue between God – called Figura – and his subjects, Adam, Eve and the serpent (Diabolus), the play dramatizes not only the Fall but the nature of representation itself. In an influential reading by Eugene Vance, Latin is ‘the universal timeless medium of grammatica itself and therefore closest to truth; Romance was a mere historical accident, a degraded image of its Latin prototype … the artistic vehicle of man's worldly desires’. The playwright makes full use of this bilingualism in the Devil's temptations; in the form of the serpent, he cannily deploys the contemporary French idiom of feudal relations in an attempt to incite Adam to rebellion and that of the courtly love lyric to seduce Eve.

In this essay, I will argue that the Jeu d'Adam's engagement with contemporary ideas about language and representation actually involves a trilingualism: beyond its concern with Latin as opposed to its temporal, vernacular ‘double’, it contends with the originary and suppressed language of its own biblical sources, Hebrew. It is not surprising, of course, that a play about the Fall and Redemption of mankind and the intelligibility of biblical prophecy should replicate Christian concerns with the Hebrew language that go back to the patristic era.