Genesis 2:5-3:24* tells the story of the Garden of Eden – our introduction to the consequences of free will. On a literal level, we can read this story as God making an arbitrary commandment – what we now call the “forbidden fruit” – which human nature (also made by God) finds impossible to resist. Is this a fair test of the value of human free will?
My first suggestion for grappling with this important text is to forget about looking at it literally. Remember what you (hopefully) learned in English class about symbols and recognize that we have several in this story.
For a starter, notice the names of the trees: the “Tree of Life” and the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” The only restriction God places on the two humans is on the partaking of ethical understanding, not life. Why does God forbid the pair this kind of information? Is the Lord trying to quash their curiosity? Or is it perhaps the Lord’s preference that humans not involve themselves in the awareness of evil and its destruction?
Note too that the narrator sheds the proper names of the man and the woman (we don’t even hear the woman’s name until Genesis 3:20) so that they become Everyman and Everywoman going through the episode with the Serpent, who is not here dubbed the Devil, but merely the most crafty of all God’s non-human creatures (Genesis 3:1).
The Serpent approaches the Woman with a word of doubt – “Did God really say …” (Genesis 3:1). Then this crafty one follows up with an indictment: God is lying! “You won’t die” (Genesis 3:4). God simply fears competition with you – that you’ll be like the Lord when you know about good and evil (Genesis 3:5).
At first glance, the Serpent seems to persuade the humans to abandon God’s command by baiting their natural curiosity – like the Greek myth’s programmed-to-fail Pandora and her off-limits box. But is it really the Serpent’s apparently “loaded” argument that is so irresistible to the humans or is it something else?
I find the Serpent’s invitation to suspect of God of misrepresentation most potent here. Go back and read what God has already done for the humans and decide for yourself if there are legitimate grounds for believing the Lord has anything but blessings in mind for the Man and Woman. Yet the prospect of becoming “like God” – to have divine power and know-how – separate, of course, from God’s stated aim of creating humans in God’s own image – constitutes a power grab that requires the “cover” of distrust to justify it.
Isn’t this what really propels the woman and the man to eat the fruit?
And where does it get them – and us?
* For quick and easy online searches of biblical passages I always go to biblegateway.com.
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