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?
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.
This is literally what ‘ignorant’ means.
I like to… adapt the story, where god is a dog owner, and adam and steve are golden retrievers. It’s not Adam and Steve’s fault that the human left the squeaky toy out for them to play with… any one older than a toddler is going to realize that, of course, they’re going to find it and play with it. they’re dogs. it’s a squeaky toy. it’s meant to be played with. Only an asshole kicks their dogs out because they got into the squeaky toys.
Now, couple that with a being that’s supposedly omniscient, all knowing. Of everything- past and future included. If this is all to believed, then it was all god’s intent that Adam and Eve eat the damned fruit.
Which means the asshole set them up, just so he could kick them out. And, ultimately, just so he could LARP as a white-knight savior.
That is how I have always read it too. God tells them not to do something but they don’t know it’s wrong to disobey him, so they do it anyway and then he gets mad even though he created them that way.
Not to mention he’s omniscient and knew they would do it anyway.
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.)
While I agree it is a setup, it is interesting to consider they did eventually die after being cast out of the garden. Nobody said they would die instantly, only that the eating of the apple would kill them. Which it kind of did eventually.
“If you eat the apple I will revoke your immortality” is roughly the same as saying “if you eat the apple you will die”.
Modern translations of “on the day you eat of it you will surely die” are likely taking an idiom and mistranslating it specifically in this sentence as the same idiom is used in other texts and even other parts of the Bible and not translated to mean “specifically on this day”
Given the Bible is largely built up of stolen mythology from other cultures of the same time, reading into some of those stories reveals a bit about the original meaning.
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 (a.k.a. “determine their destiny,”) and Ninhursanga curses him with these words:
“Until his dying day, I will never look upon him with life-giving eye.”
That doesn’t mean he died that day, but that he was stripped of his immortality that day
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.
God wanted them unaware they were naked. He got all pissy and threw a huge tantrum after Satan told them the truth, basically damning humanity for not going along with his voyeur garden.
Yeah basically.
Without knowledge of good and evil how can you avoid evil acts? You can’t.
You want a better plot hole?
Ask yourself one, really easy, simple question:
“Which came first? People? Or animals?”
Then read Genesis 1. Think you have the answer? Then read Genesis 2. ;)
My favourite is when god says “let there be light” a couple of days before he creates the sun and stars.
According to Dan McClellen, Genesis 2 is a retelling of Genesis 1 revised according to the sensibilities of a later century, according to scholarly consensus. Of course, also according to scholarly consensus (and revealed to students in seminary) the bible is not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant, even though many denominations assert these by fiat. (Otherwise they wouldn’t give ministries authority to tell their flock not to be gay.)
It’s not though. Genesis 1 is the Elohist creation myth, Genesis 2 is the Jahwist creation myth. They both just got jammed together.
This is why Genesis 1 has animals created first, and man and woman created at the same time, while Genesis 2 has man created first, then animals, then woman.
Two different mythologies.
it’s also important to note that Gen 1 was pretty much intended as propaganda. it was riffing off other mythologies; except trying to one up them. “OUR god is so STRONG that he created the world ALONE. In SIX DAYS. and he NAPPED on the SEVENTH!!!”
It gave justification for a few of the earlier genocides, because their god was stronger than the other peoples, so it’s all cool.
Which is interesting, because the very first line… Gods is plural. That carried over into Latin, then was singularized after that.
Which makes sense if you consider the commandments:
Exodus 20:2-3
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me."
It’s acknowledging the existence of other Gods, but I am YOUR God.
Monotheism (as opposed to monolatrism) is a much more recent thing than the scripture itself, an invention of the middle ages at earliest.
Oh. That’s another thing.
The exodus didn’t happen. Or, rather, the Israelites were always there. What most scholars think is that refugees came up from Egypt and their story was adopted as they assimilated into the broader culture .
Yup, yup. There’s no evidence the Jews were enslaved in Egypt and the Sunday school stories about slave labor for the pyramids is equally nonsense.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-egyptian-pyramids-not-slaves
https://historum.com/t/egypt-knew-no-moses-evidence-on-why-exodus-never-happened.194987/
these days my favorite sunday school lessons include cute, featherless dinosaurs.
i know. I know. but who doesn’t want to live in a world with cute featherless dinos?
Also, plants come before the sun in Genesis 1, which just sounds like bad planning on God’s part.
Terms like Elohist are not used anymore by scholars. The documentary hypothesis collapsed in the 70s…
It stems from how God is referenced in Hebrew in the two chapters. Genesis 1 is Elohim. Genesis 2 is Yahweh.
I know that, but the idea that behind these different names of God are different authors/schools is not accepted by mainstream historians nowadays.
In this particular case, it seems evident that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have different authors, but not the Elohist and the Jahvist, in that you can’t necessarily link this two passages to others in the Bible which would use the same names for God.
I tend to see in Genesis 1, with the emphasis on the fact that the man and the woman are created as the same time (verse 27) an answer to Genesis 2, which in that case would have been older. In the Bible, a lot of texts are answers to other texts. It totally breaks the idea of inerrancy, but it makes the Bible a very interesting polyphony.
I always thought that this myth was Yahweh testing whether their free will (which he had given them) was actually working or not. It was totally a set-up.
