Refrigerator logic, or a shower thought:

According to Genesis, God forbids Adam and Eve from eating fruit of the tree of wisdom, specifically of knowledge of good and evil.

Serpent talks to Eve, calling out God’s lie: God said they will die from eating the fruit (as in die quickly, as if the fruit were poisonous). They won’t die from the fruit, Serpent tells them. Instead, their eyes will open and they will understand good and evil.

And Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of wisdom, learning good and evil (right and wrong, or social mores). And then God evicts them from paradise for disobedience.

But if the eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil, this belies they did not know good and evil in the first place. They couldn’t know what forbidden means, or that eating from the tree was wrong. They were incapable of obedience.

Adam and Eve were too unintelligent (immature? unwise?) to understand, much like telling a toddler not to eat cookies from the cookie jar on the counter.

Putting the tree unguarded and easily accessible in the Garden of Eden was totally a setup

Am I reading this right?

  • LvxferreEnglish
    26•3 months ago

    I think that you are reading it right. And while I personally wouldn’t associate obedience with moral “good”, whoever wrote this myth clearly did.

    In fact the whole myth feels like Yahweh creating a successful trap for the couple - the tree is in the garden, but they aren’t supposed to eat from it; the snake was in the garden, but they weren’t supposed to listen to it; and the serpent speaking the truth while Yahweh was being a liar (“you’ll die”… except they didn’t.)

        • LvxferreEnglish
          1•3 months ago

          Thank you for sharing this video - what he says about the paronomastic infinitive is interesting, and it explains an oddity of the same verse in the Vulgate:

          Gen 2:17 de ligno autem scientiae boni et mali ne comedas in quocumque enim die comederis ex eo morte morieris

          “Morte morieris” is literally “you’ll die of death”. The expression sounds as weird and redundant in Latin as it does in English - but it makes sense if Jerome of Stridon was trying to reproduce a Hebrew figure of speech.

          (Interestingly enough, “die” [in the day] is also there. And that “ex eo” [“out of that”, i.e. as a consequence] also reinforces that Adam would die as a consequence of eating from the tree.)

      • LvxferreEnglish
        1•3 months ago

        Following that interpretation, what Yahweh said is a half-truth - because it implies that the fruit itself would cause their death, when it doesn’t. They would eventually die because Yahweh would revoke their immortality, but the fruit itself does what Serpent said that it would, granting them knowledge.

        In the Sumerian story of the gardens of Dilmun, Enki and Ninhursanga, Enki eats of the eight forbidden plants so as to gain knowledge of them

        Great catch - I completely forgot about this myth. I’ve seen a different, but still related version, might as well explore it here:

        • Enki sleeps with Ninhursag, they have Ninšar.
        • Then with Ninšar, they have Ninkurra. As they do it Sweet Home Alabama plays in the background.
        • Then with Ninkurra, and they have Uttu.
        • Then, as Enki sleeps with Uttu, Ninhursag removes Enki’s semen from Uttu’s body and throws on the ground, creating the eight plants that you mentioned.
        • Isimud (Enki’s assistant) uproots those plants and give them to Enki, who eats them - so now he knows the heart and determines the destiny of each plant.
        • Ninhursag gets pissed and then curses Enki, withdrawing her “life-giving eye” from him, so he falls sick.

        Ninhursag governs over the mountains, while the other three goddesses govern human activities (Ninšar and meat cooking, Ninkurra and sculpting, Uttu and weaving). And the later was probably not considered as important as the others, due to the absence of the prefix Nin- “Lady, Mistress”.

        As such, Ninhursag likely governed over wild plants too, like the ones that Enki ate; and, once Enki to control those plants, he was invading her realm. Or, alternatively, by knowing better those plants Enki had a reason to control the mountains, instead of sticking to the wetlands.

        Either way, if the Hebrew myth of Adam and Eve was influenced by this one, suddenly it makes sense why Yahweh punishes Adam and Eve - Yahweh’s realm would be morality, and the couple invaded it.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•3 months ago

          I’m beginning to believe, but can’t prove that all these creation garden myths are talking about The Green Sahara, and it’s subsequent desertification. Again I can’t prove it, but the end of the green Sahara seems to line up with, and may have even caused, The Bronze Age Collapse. I’ll bet that those two back to back events convinced people that the world was legitimately ending.

          • LvxferreEnglish
            2•3 months ago

            It’s possible; the peak of the Green Sahara period was ~8000 BCE, while the Epic of Gilgamesh is from 2100 BCE. As the desertification of the Sahara and Levant went on, it’s possible that small pockets of greenery remained for longer, becoming the target of oral traditions, that eventually the Epic and other myths borrowed from.

            I just find a bit unlikely because those myths typically have something to do with humans or human-like gods doing something and, as a consequence, either spoiling or leaving the garden:

            • Hebrew - humans develop morality, so they’re kicked out
            • Sumerian - humans distance themselves from nature, as they try to wrestle control over it (that’s how I interpret it at least - the man vs. nature theme is common in Sumerian myths).
            • Ugarit tablets - god El has a tree of life, god Horon transforms it into a tree of death

            Then in the Greek myth I don’t think that they give the garden of the Hesperides some end or similar. It’s simply there.

    • @leftzeroEnglish
      3•3 months ago

      while I personally wouldn’t associate obedience with moral “good”, whoever wrote this myth clearly did.

      The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.
      — Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (Discworld, #13)