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
      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.)