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?

  • @[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.