The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

Isabel and I were having a little discussion about the Fall of Man the other day...

Never a good start to a blog post...

We independently came up with a pet theory regarding the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. It's probably something Augustine or someone smarter than us came up with. Augustine, or maybe a heretic, in which case I readily denounce any claim to the following reading.

(If no one else has already, I should come up with a name for a proviso pre-emptively denouncing any innocently heretical conjectures posted on the blog.)

The thought that we both came up with was that the Tree of Knowledge might not have been some sort of magic tree at all.

continued below...

The "magic tree" version of the story seems to create a lot of angst for readers...especially younger, less mature ones. They tend to see God as being kind of like a jerk for denying the first man access to Knowledge, and then condemning man for acquiring that Knowledge. "How can the pursuit of Knowledge be wrong?" they ask. Which is essentially the same question that Milton's Satan asks, and such readers either miss the irony of that resonance or decide that it means Satan was right.

For such readers God can seem tyrannical, cruel, and unjust -- depriving man of the virtues of the Tree, and then condemning man for choosing a bad act. Such readers (as I have heard them) might go so far as to say that Adam and Eve couldn't understand what they were doing was wrong, because the Knowledge of Good and Bad was locked up in the Tree and they were prevented access to it.

This reading suggests that Good and Bad could not be determined unless one ate from the Tree. That it somehow had a monopoly on such knowledge. There are some problems with this view, however. For starters, God seems to know the difference, and He never ate from the tree. Indeed, He assumably made the tree. The serpent likewise seems to have an idea of good and bad without eating from the tree. So Knowledge exists external to the tree.

Next, it is clear that Eve is capable of using her reason. When the serpent tempts her, telling her she won't die, she looks at the tree and assesses its merits.

[The serpent said] "...God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad."

The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

The woman recognizes meritorious qualities of the tree. She can recognize its goodness. It produces food, appeals to her sense of aesthetics, and has a desirable characteristic. Philosophically speaking, the capacity to have desire means that on some level she has to comprehend the concept of good because desire always points towards a good, even if the means of attaining that good are wrong.

But keep in mind that she doesn't take the serpent at its word. Its not as if the serpent tells her to eat it, and she obeys robotically. The serpent has created a logic puzzle, like the doorguards in Labyrinth, when it suggests that God has told a lie. Suddenly, a new kind of reality has been introduced into Eden: the concept of contradiction...and the possibility of deceptive lying. Eve's response to contradiction is to conduct a scientific, empirical observation.

Upon that empirical observation, she decides that the serpent's version appears to be more accurate.

And isn't this precisely the dilemma that faces us today? The serpent says that God lies to keep man oppressed. Satan or even just the secular world tells us that God is a deception for the purpose keeping people oppressed. (Keep in mind that for the original audiences of Genesis, the serpent might not have represented the devil but an actual serpent...a subtle force of nature. So the serpent describing the tree could be like the world describing itself.)
Satan/the world offers us secular knowledge as a means of liberation.
When we look at the world and its fruits empirically, it can in fact seem to verify the secular account over the theological account. We can see the glamour and desirability of the world far more clearly than we can God's Truth.

In other words, our senses can perceive good -- but they are not sufficient for knowing reality completely. Left to our senses, we can be manipulated into breaking God's commandment. It is only through God's revelation that Adam and Eve would know not to eat from that Tree, just as there are Truths about God that can only be learned through revelation.

Eve's taking of the fruit is not simply belief of the serpent over God; it is faith in her own senses over faith in God's revelation. She knows there is a contradiction. She resolves that contradiction by accepting the world on its terms. She could have chosen otherwise.

But if the Tree somehow was the incarnation of Knowledge of Good and Evil, how could she perceive its goodness? And if she could perceive its goodness, why not its evil?

And here comes the payoff.

In depicting Genesis, it would be tempting to make the Tree of Knowledge seem special, unique among the trees. But what if it wasn't? What if God arbitrarily selected one tree out of all the trees and said, "Don't eat from that one." The second he says not to eat from that tree, then it becomes the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil by virtue not of a magic property but by the fact that eating from it will lead one to know these things on a deeper, experiential level.

That is, Adam and Eve clearly could develop ideas, thoughts, or concepts of good and evil, if only because they were given the words. And, as Eve proves, they have capacity for reason. They could have reasoned these concepts once God gave them the headstart of pointing them out verbally. And, of course, God might have at some point explained these concepts if Adam and Eve asked him.

But possessing data or definitions of good and evil isn't quite the same thing as knowing them (and someone please correct me if I am ignoring something obvious about the Hebrew linguistics). I can "know" a lot of facts about England and point it out on a map, but I can only "know" England if I visit her.

Can I support this claim?

Consider what we learn when Eve eats the fruit.

Nothing.

So she took some of its fruit and ate it;

Nothing happens.

        and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Traditionally, Eve is usually depicted as eating the fruit and then giving it to Adam.

I suppose it is possible that they ate it at the same time. This translation doesn't quite make it clear.

But if we take the traditional path of chronology, then what we have is the possibility of Adam empirically observing the effects of the fruit on Eve.

She eats it. She doesn't die.

The serpent seems to have told the truth.

So, using Eve as a tastetester, Adam takes a bite.

But Adam, perhaps, wasn't observant enough.

Nothing happened to Eve before Adam ate (if she did eat it before him).

Adam eats the fruit.

Only after Adam eats it do we learn of something happening:

        Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked

Their eyes are opened. This certainly could support the magic tree theory. New data has been downloaded into their brains, Matrix style, and they know things they didn't know before.

Or maybe not.

Maybe nothing happened.

And that's precisely how Adam's eyes were opened. Adam eats the fruit expected some kind of mystical apotheosis, but that doesn't occur. It is, in the end, just fruit.

When he fails to observe a miraculous change of being...when he fails to become a super-being, he realizes that he's just a naked little worm. He hoped for something more, and now what he has seems less by comparison.

He also realizes that he's been duped. He realizes that the serpent wasn't telling the whole story...which means the serpent produced the erroneous half of the contradiction...which means God was right.

And, holy smokes, if God was right, Adam is in some serious trouble -- Adam is in a bad spot. Adam now knows the difference between good and evil in a way you could only know by experiencing.

The Tree of Knowledge, in this case, is not simply a magic tree that uploads data files into your primitive monkey brain. The Tree of Knowledge is a pedagogical tool. It teaches you to arrive at knowledge experientially.

God, then, needn't have created a Tree of Knowledge with magic properties. Rather, through His foreknowledge of Adam's Fall, God would have known that Adam would realize the concepts of good and evil by eating from any tree that had been forbidden.

The knowledge is not a quality of the fruit, then, but a result of the action of eating the fruit.

I will concede that perhaps the greatest problem with this reading is that God eventually ejects Adam and Eve because He doesn't want them eating from the Tree of Life and living forever.

I'm not quite sure how the Tree of Life suggests anything but a "magic tree" at this point, although the Tree of Life being a magic tree doesn't necessarily mean that the Tree of Knowledge must also be a magic tree.

I'll also concede that my interpretation requires some reading between the lines and might rely too heavily on Eve eating before Adam. That being said, every good fable invites creative interpretation beyond the obvious moral. It's what makes fables enduring.

The key point I'm trying to develop here is that Adam and Eve appear to have had sufficient capacity to reason out concepts of good and evil without having to eat magic fruit; that you can reason a thing without "knowing" that thing; and that the action of disobedience creates a natural punishment that absolves God's judgment of accusations that it is arbitrary and capricious.

ADDENDUM:

As if this post wasn't long enough...

I've heard other people say that God must have lied since Adam and Eve don't die the day they eat the fruit, whereas everything the serpent says seems to come true (they don't die that day; God doesn't want Adam and Eve becoming like Him by eating the fruit; and they do become like God in their knowledge of good and bad).

My response:

Technically speaking, only Adam was told not to eat the fruit. God issues the command before Eve or even the animals were created (and the animals are created before Eve).
Thus, one might assume that if, immediately upon hearing God's command, Adam simply walked over to the tree and said, "Oh, you mean this tree? I'm not supposed to eat from this one?", and then ate from it, he would die.

He would die as a result of directly and intentionally violating God's command on his own. That's free will, sufficient forethought, and grave matter all right there.

However, when Adam does finally eat from the tree, he is in a very different, far more complicated world. There is another person...and a talking snake!.

Talking snakes were not part of the moral playing field when God initially issued the command. Certainly not talking snakes that could contradict God.

Adam does not doubt God on his own. Adam is taught to doubt by another being. Adam does not initially turn away from God; another entity positions himself between God and Adam to momentarily eclipse God from view.

So, if it seems like God has changed the rules by not striking Adam dead the second he eats the forbidden fruit, it could easily be explained through mitigating factors in a moral theology.

Adam is still punished with death, but perhaps the punishment is delayed to reflect the conditions with which he broke God's law. This isn't to suggest some kind of loose situation ethics. Justice still prevails, but that justice is tempered with mercy. Man's sin could have been much worse if he sinned without any external misguidance. His sin is lessened, so his punishment is lessened.