Today, I am reading and commenting on Genesis 1-3.

Happy New Year

As I was reading today’s passage it occurred to me that most mythologies contain a “tree of life”.  In those other mythologies it often takes on much greater significance than it does in Judaism and Christianity.  The presence of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden places the central idea of those other religions inside the bounds of the creation story.  The tree of life, the world tree, was in the Garden of Eden.  Perhaps, the presence of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is meant to indicate that the “Tree” from those other religions had a bad side to it as well.  God told Adam that he was not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil or he would die.  At least one element of this prohibition is that if we cannot do evil if we do not know what it is.  I want to take a moment to highlight that the full name of this tree is important.  It is neither the “Tree of Knowledge” as some shorten it.  Nor is it the “Tree of Good and Evil”.  It is the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”.  So, the sin of Adam and Eve was not obtaining knowledge in general, nor did they obtain good and evil from the tree.  Rather, by eating of the tree they learned what was good and what was evil.  Only when we know what evil is are we able to do evil.  It is only when we perceive that we may benefit from harming others that we will choose to harm others.

The other thing which I wanted to write about today was the way Adam and Eve responded when God confronted them about what they had done.  When God asked Adam if he had eaten from the tree he was told not to eat from, Adam did not take responsibility for his actions.  Adam said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”  So, while he is directly blaming Eve, he is really blaming God.  When God turned to Eve, she also refused to take responsibility for her actions.  Eve blamed the serpent for deceiving her.  This was the first evil which they did.  Adam could have said, “Yes, I ate of the tree you commanded me not t o eat.  I made a mistake, please forgive me.”  He could have taken responsibility for what he had done.  I am not saying that things would have turned out differently if Adam and/or Eve had taken responsibility for what they had done, just that trying to shift the blame for their actions to someone else was the first thing which they did which they knew was wrong.  While it was wrong to violate God’s command not to eat of the tree, until they ate from the tree they did not know it was wrong.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.