And they did. As NaSultainne said, it resulted in spiritual death and, subequently, physical death.
But where does God say that they’d die twice? He didn’t say anything about spiritually dying first, they physically dying later. And he never did say anything to them about them getting knowledge of good and evil, until after they’d already eaten.
How the hell do you get all that out of “you will surely die?”
Maybe there needed to be a betrayer. But Judas, though he fulfilled the necessary role, still acted of his own will and betrayed Jesus. The idea that it needed to be done doesn’t excuse the one who chose to do it.
Huh? Jesus and the rest of his disciples were also stereotypical Jews. Where do you get that Judas is especially singled out as a Jew?
This is just ridiculous. The Jews, and the Hebrews before them, were persecuted for 2000 years before that. “The killing of Jesus” just became the convenient excuse for those who would have persecuted them anyway.
Persephone,
Their first death was spiritual: their spirits being separated from their face-to-face fellowship with God in the first place. Which is our present state. Their second death is physical: They grow old and die, their spirits being separated from their bodies.
I view gaining “the knowledge of good and evil” not as realizing “we weren’t supposed to do that”, but as Adam and Eve gaining the capability of realizing “this was wrong.” Losing their innocence. Not in the cheesy rhetorical way that people say Americans “lost our innocence” when [9-11|Vietnam|Pearl Harbor|Civil War|Any other of a dozen things] happened, but in a legal sense. A young child, a retarded person, a dog, a cat, etc can’t be held legally responsible for its actions, because it doesn’t understand right and wrong. They can do things that are wrong, but they aren’t crimes. Example: a dog can kill a person. But it’s not murder, it’s just an undesirable outcome, since a dog is an amoral being. It isn’t capable of morality, and therefore isn’t capable of murder, since murder is an immoral act. (Yes, a dog that kills people is destroyed, but it’s not a punishment or a sentence for murder, it’s to remove a dangerous element) Same as for a 2 year old child. A grown man is a completely different story.
If I undersand you correctly, you’re saying that eating the fruit of the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” actually had no effect in and of itself; rather, the tree simply was called such in reference to the fact that man learned the consequence of disobeying God from eating from it. If, therefore, God had instead told Adam and Eve not to cross the street, and they did, then that street would be called “The Street of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” The actual fruit itself was of no consequence, yes?
That makes sense. Is this how these passages have traditionally been interpreted? But then how does the whole nakedness thing fit in?
Well yes, I understand this. Never said I didn’t.
But JThunder wanted to know where God misrepresented the nature of the fruit, not how we humans interpret the story.
By NOT telling Adam and Eve that they would gain knowledge, and by NOT telling them “Oh yeah, by ‘death’ I mean a spritual one first, and a physical one later, kapisch?” God misrepresented the nature of the fruit. Call it “lying by omission,” if you will. He never said they’d live for a long time afterwards, have kids, and be the source of debate for a zillion years to come. He said that *they would die on the day they ate the fruit. *
The spiritual death now/phyiscal death later is a *human * interpretation of what happened. God never said that’s what was going to happen. And no, I’m not saying that the human interpretation is incorrect. What I AM saying is that God didn’t say it to Adam and Eve.
Genesis 2:17 “…but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…”
The same verse you already quoted indicates God specifically instructing them not to eat this tree, by name.
Persephone, don’t make the mistake of assuming that conversations in the Bible contain the full and complete texts, down to crossing every ‘t’ and dotting every ‘i’. No book covering the history of a people over a span of nearly 1,500 years would or could do that. When you find a passage that seems to be incomplete, you look for supplementary passages.
Genesis 3:22
And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
Isaiah 25:7
On this mountain He will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; He will swallow up death forever.
Romans 5:12
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned -
Romans 3:22-23
This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God
Romans 8:10
But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.
Colossians 3:9-10
Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.
- Sin is universal. All men die, good or evil. 2) Men died before the law was given to Moses, hence death is due not only to the actual sin of man, but his moral nature. 3) God has redeemed man from the consequences of sin, through the propitiary sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
Then why did God forbid the fruit at all? Was he just forbidding something just so they would disobey him?
There is no way for this story to make logical sense. If they didn’t know right and wrong then they didn’t have free will. No free will = no sin.
Let’s just call a spade a spade. It’s a Mesopotamian myth about the agricultural revolution. People have to bust their asses on farms because they pissed off God. The fruit is just a MacGuffin, a plot device. The Cain and Abel story is an extension of this. Cain is the farmer, Abel is the herder (like the ancient Semites). God preferred the herder, so the farmer (the agricultural cities) killed the herder (or in some other versions of this motif, the hunter-gatherer).
Here’s a few thoughts about why the Jews modified the story the way they did. Genesis was written at a time when the sojourn in Egypt was a fairly fresh memory. One of the primary religious symbols of Egypt was the serpent. For the Jews, then, the serpent was a symbol of the hated Egyptians. Egypt was the world’s first empire, the most powerful example of agriculture’s dominance over the older ways of life.
Is it possible, then, that Genesis contains a subtle allegation that Egypt tempted the formerly “innocent” Hebrews into the corruption of agriculture, resulting, ultimately, in their own slavery and their exile from the grace of God?*
disclaimer The above hypothesis (i.e. that the “serpent” of the Garden = Egypt) was derived , in its entirety, from the ass of this poster, and is not a genuine scholary hypothesis as far as this poster knows.
**NaSultainne:[/B
Of course not. The Bible is, IMHO, the world’s longest, most beautifully written telephone game.
This was said after they ate, not before (as are all the rest of the passages you quoted). And it’s not clear that he’s even talking to Adam and Eve. But, that’s a different thread. 
Genesis does NOT state the spiritual death now/physical death later concept. It is nowhere to be found in Genesis, before Adam and Eve ate from the tree. And because it is not stated there, humans developed this idea.
Eating the fruit itself did in fact change the status of Adam and Eve. The verses indicate that their eyes were opened, they perceived their nakedness, they took steps to cover themselves, and proceeded to hide from God, showing evidence of guilt. These are all signs of a change in moral status. Their nakedness is, thusly, an awareness of their sinful nature before God.
Isaiah 61:10
I delight greatly in the LORD; my soul rejoices in my God. For he has clothed me with garments of salvation and arrayed me in a robe of righteousness.
Acts 4:12
Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.
Romans 10:4
Christ is the end of the law so that there may be righteouseness for everyone who believes.
Jesus Christ is the salvation and righteousness which clothes all believers.
Well, that seems to be the argument that the Mormon site above is making. They interpret the story the same way I always have, that the fruit directly provided Adam and Eve with knowledge which they did not previously have the capacity for. So, faced with the obvious contradiction in God’s actions, the site chooses to interpret the Fall as actually a* good* thing, something that God intended to happen. I have no idea if that’s true of Mormonism in general.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not trying to make the Genesis story itself make strict logical sense. I’m just trying to get a handle on what I have always regarded as a very central, insurmountable incongruity in Scripture, one that I wouldn’t have thought could be glossed over. Now, the interpretation that NaSultainne seems to be offering is that the fruit didn’t do jack squat, and Adam and Eve were in fact created with knowledge of good and evil, but had just never experienced the latter. Which is an interpretation of Genesis that I’ve never heard before.
Well, okay, perhaps that wasn’t what he was saying. Never mind what I just said, I guess we’re back to square one. So if they couldn’t recognize sin before eating the fruit, how can God condemn them? He made them that way! It’s like he made them colorblind and told them not to eat red things! It’s like he made them without a sense of balance and told them not to fall over! It’s like he made them allergic to everything and told them not to sneeze!
Isn’t that a hugely obvious problem? Has no one in Judaism, Christianity or Islam worried about this at all?
No, it’s clearly told to Adam prior to the serpent’s temptation. Read chapters 2 and 3 again, and you’ll see what I mean.
Again, read the above noted chapters.
Persephone, you’re arguing that if something is not in black and white in the Bible, it doesn’t exist. You’re entitled to your opinion. Think about it, however, the next time you have a conversation with someone close to you, and notice in particular any verbal shorthand employed by either of you. Yet you choose to refuse to even consider the possibility that the Bible might employ the same technique. You are suggesting an unreasonable method of literature interpretation, which would state that everything must be explicit, rather than implicit, without regard for subsequent scriptural definition. If this is the case, I’ll leave you to your understanding. One last verse, however;
Proverbs 25:2
It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.
I don’t know about LDS, but this idea originated with Augustine. Polycarps Latin reference on page one of this thread was a quotation from Augustine which translates to “Adam’s lucky fall.”
This is the idea which I was criticizing indirectly through you. (It was my intention, in quoting you, to expand upon your own questions not to critique them) NaSultainne’s hypothesis doesn’t make any logical sense and it also contradicts Genesis, which plainly states that Adam and eve did not know good and evil before they ate the fruit.
If it’s not in the text, it’s not in the text. We can all make up whatever happy crappy “subtext” we want to fit our preconceived worldviews, but that’s not exegesis it’s eisegesis. Be careful of the method you choose.
Well evidently my interpretation of NaSultainne’s hypothesis was way off. Now I have no idea what was being said. I thought I was making sense, though, so thanks for agreeing with me, anyway.
Hey, and since you brought the subject up, how exactly does your rejoinder to Polycarp translate? I seem to recall that nescio is Latin for “ignorance” (a word that was often bandied about in my presence during my half-semester of Latin), so do I even want to know?
“Peccatum”… That’s a kind of fish, right?
FYI, I’m not a Mormon, and know essentially nothing about them, so I wouldn’t even care to speculate on their biblical perspective. If that’s what you’re looking for, just ignore my response and hopefully an SDMB Mormon will drop by for further discussion.
Okay, now, put yourself in Adam’s place for this event, okay? He’s a full grown man, given power and dominion over all of creation, told to care and work the Garden of Eden. This isn’t some dolt, some completely unthinking ape-man. He has the ability to reason (Gen 2:19-20, 3:8), to feel and to make personal choices (Gen 3:8). His sin was disobedience. Because Genesis doesn’t tell us otherwise, we can presume that Adam had the concepts of good, evil and death. God doesn’t spend time discussing the terms with Adam in the Bible of course, so we can’t know for sure, but it’s a reasonable assumption that God created an intelligent being with reasoning powers sufficient to evaluate the directives issued by God and choose to obey or not. It would be far-fetched to presume otherwise. So, what Adam thought, we may never fully know; perhaps he bought the serpent’s lie, perhaps he didn’t really think God would follow through on his warning, who knows? It’s all immaterial. He willingly disobeyed God. He wasn’t deceived, as Eve was. His sin was greater. But, that’s not the end of the story, is it? Remember, before God has even banished Adam and Eve, he has already given some tantalizing hints that he intends to redeem the fallen man and return him to fellowship with God. Far from seeming to be some horrific injustice, I think it’s a profound opportunity for all of mankind to work the sinful nature inherited from Adam out of their system, only then realizing that man is never truly complete apart from God. If you read the entire Bible, what you find is man’s ongoing quest to control his innate nature, and establish dominance over his environs. Man succeeds, for a time, but it doesn’t last. No kingdom created by man will last.
Nescio means lterally “I don’t know.” I actually screwed up the rejoinder, What I meant say was “Nescio quid tam felix de isto erat” which means “I don’t know what was so lucky about it.”
I accidentally put the “peccatum” (which means “fall, error, mistake”) in there instead of the “felix” (happy, lucky, fortunate) so what I said (accidentallY) was “I don’t know what so fall about it,” a nonsensical sentence. I caught my mistake (as always) as soon as I hit “submit,” but, alas we have no edit functions.
Ah! I thought you were making fun of my fish.