You are missing a important part, Adam and Eve were always one, whether in 1 flesh or 2, they were always one with each other. Adam (as the single being) was divided into 2, Eve was not created independently of Adam.
So her taking the fruit meant he also took of the fruit. His physical partaking was sealed signed and delivered by her actions.
The ‘sin of Eve’ was adding to the word of God, she states that God said she ‘should not even touch’ the fruit, God never said that -all He said is don’t eat of it, so Satan (the serpent) didn’t have to lie outright, but told Eve the (partially omitted) truth that God never said that.
The sin of adding to the word of God is expressed in Revelation 22:18, stating all the plagues of this book will be added for that, and her children have suffered all those plagues.
I believe in the root languages and culture, serpent is not exactly equivalent to snake, but means more like “evil creature” or “demon.” No cite handy.
This is not born out in the text. At no time did Jehovallah ever declare to Adam and/or Eve that his words were inviolate – but that does not really matter, because they would not have understood “wrong”, they had no knowledge of it. Beyond that, the serpent does not dissemble or obfuscate, it clearly states that they will not die by eating the fruit.
“Sin” requires a knowledge of proscription, which is not given in the account, in concert with a deliberate intent to violate the proscription (in the case of “adding to the word of god”, this is not evident), as well as an understanding of what “wrong” means, which neither of them had at that time.
I cannot speak for what other Christians believe, but speaking for myself; it’s akin to how we explain things to children. If a child asks where children come from, I’m not going to go into the physiology of sex and birth. After all, that’s not even what a child is even interested in knowing. That is what I think this story is trying to do. If we believe that God is perfect, and yet we are not, I interpret the story as our attempt to understand that apparent problem, but to a people that are far less sophisticated than we are today.
You do realize that, in general, Christians believe that humans have both a physical body and a spirit/soul. If Adam and Eve are the first humans, actually or allegorical, it only makes sense that they too would have a the same aspects that make us human.
You do realize I’m speaking from a Christian perspective, yes? If you want a Jewish perspective, you’ll need someone who has a better understanding of their perspective to do that.
I never said there was a moral imperative, this is a straw man, so your tone is unwarranted. I was commenting on the matter of giving eternal life to a being that doesn’t have the wisdom to handle it.
For example, imagine a teenager who wants to get some sort of body modification, something as simple as a tattoo, or perhaps something more drastic, it really doesn’t matter for the sake of this point. His parents are likely to forbid him from doing that at 13 but may be more inclined to let him do it when he’s a bit older, and obviously have no legal authority once he’s 18. Chances are, a 13 year old who wants to do that is lacking the wisdom to understand that he may not actually want that in a few years or, depending on what it is, might hurt future job prospects. He lacks the knowledge and experience to make a wise choice. But as we get older and gain more wisdom and experience, we’re trusted to make more decisions for ourselves and we’re expected to deal with those consequences.
So, the point I’m trying to highlight here, is that this is a much more drastic. It would be like giving a young child the powers and responsibilities associated with being an adult. Though they may have the ability to make moral decisions, they don’t have the wisdom and experience to do it. In short, to some degree, we’re limited in how much we can mess up because we’re only allowed to live for so long.
And, to tie back in with my response to Voyager, it is also part of us trying to understand why an eternal and all-powerful God would create mortal impotent beings like us.
This is pretty basic psychology here, look at the stages of moral development. How do you think we come to learn morality? As children, we get punished when we do something wrong and we get rewarded when we do something right. As we get older and get more sophisticated reasoning, we start having more sophisicated motivations behind our moral reasoning. My morals are far more sophisticated than that, but certainly at younger ages, my morals were guided more by rules, social norms, or as simple as “because mommy/daddy said so”.
But the point is, regardless of what our moral motivations are, moral decisions are essentially nothing more than realizing that choices and actions have consequences and, thus, we should make the choices and do the actions that further whatever our moral motives are.
By this same logic, it is unreasonable to put modern moral standards on a society millenia ago. Not only do individuals have stages of moral development, but so does society. This is evidenced just by looking at even recent history. Once slavery was acceptable, now virtually everyone finds it morally repulsive. Racism used to be acceptable, it’s well on it’s way out. Even in the last couple decades or so, we’re seeing a massive societal shift in moral views on homosexuality.
So, other than “Holy crap!” I don’t see what you could possibly find bizarre about a less morally sophisticated society, believing that there’s greater moral relevance to the apparent incongruities between what they believe to be the nature of God and what they observe as the nature of man. In that perspective–and to clarify, this is not my personal moral belief–it is reasonable to see that clearly if we’ve been “punished” by having shorter lives, painful child birth, having to work the land, etc. then that effect must have had a cause, and because it’s a negative consequence, it must have been caused by a bad thing.
After all, a lot of ancient societies had this sort of view of God or whatever gods they believed in. If there was a bad storm, an earthquake, or an epidemic, they must have done something wrong to anger God and he was punishing them. How is this really all that much different in absolute terms of cultural moral development?
Biblically, “serpent” means “snake like” but uses it as an attribute of an evil or malicious being rather than a literal description. It appears that the serpent in the garden was turned into a snake for its machinations.
[QUOTE=Gen 2:17]
but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
[/QUOTE]
Eve:
[QUOTE=Gen3:3]
but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden,** and you must not touch it**, or you will die.’”
[/QUOTE]
Bold mine, Eve seemed to add to the word of God here.
Also we know that Adam and presumable Eve did die, so the serpent did lie.
[QUOTE=Gen 5:5]
Altogether, Adam lived a total of 930 years, and then he died.
[/QUOTE]
I think Eve’s death can be justified as a upper limit of the flood
If this is the case why have the children of Eve suffered all the plagues written about in this book, and we already know sin is passed on from parent to child.
[QUOTE=Rev 22:18]
I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues which are written in this book
[/QUOTE]
So I see that it is not so much of disobedience, but opening a door they were warned not to. That door lead to all the sin and the effects of that sin we now suffer with.
Quite ironically by Eve placing additional restrictions that appear to safeguard herself from eating the fruit (she added ‘not to touch it either’) may have been the very hook Satan used (via the serpent) to cause her fall.
Does the need for Christ’s redemption stem directly from the Fall or not? In other words, if Adam and Eve did not eat the fruit, would redemption be required for them. (I suppose there would be no one else unless Adam got lucky. )
Given that we are mortal, and that we suffer, it is reasonable that there be a story explaining it. That has nothing to do with original sin though.
definitely implies that the serpent was a beast of the field, just the sliest one.
And
Upon his belly shall he go - in other words he lost his legs. No other transformation seems called for here.
I’m sure some Christian proposes your definition of serpent to account for the embarrassing fact that Satan appears nowhere in this story.
Neither actually nor allegorically were Adam and Eve the first humans. The first humans were created near the end of the first chapter of Genesis, side-by-side, out of nothing, in god’s likeness and image. Adam was created later, from the dust of the earth, in chapter two, and Eve shortly after that, surgically, from Adam’s side (translated as “rib”). Clearly, the first humans were spiritual beings, and clearly they were not Adam and Eve, whose creation took a wholly different tack. Obviously, the children of Adam and Eve interbred with the children of the unnamed first man and woman, and thence humans acquired a spiritual nature.
Sorry about the tone. But there was no apparent rightness or wrongness to eating from the tree of life. God counted itself lucky that they failed to do so, because that would have rendered them immortal, though I rather fail to see why that would have been a real problem – they would have had more time to explore and gain a better understanding of morality.
From a religious perspective, morality derives from the holy writ. It is the transcription of the word of Jehovallah, what more would one need?
You seemed to imply that practical morality (which can be studied at length on other threads) boils down to how we feel about the result. But sometimes we do morally right things even though the outcome is not to our liking. Ending slavery might be one example. Another might be the difficult choice between letting your tribe starve or leading your tribe to wipe out the tribe in the next valley and take their stuff. How we feel about an outcome is subjective, depending which “we” you are talking about.
Their lives eventually came to an end solely because they failed at some point to eat from the tree of life. Eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil only resulted in their mortality because they were booted out of the garden before they got around to eating from the tree of life.
Some good points, and to your last Q the plagues in the book of Revelation to come are the plagues of the Exodus. So it is written in the book of Exodus. So it just took things to spiral out from the original sin till the children of A&E got the rules and violated them.
Also wanted to restate the death of Eve, we don’t know that, only Adam we know. It is possible that Eve was taken directly to heaven as was Enoch. That is unless the grave of Adam and Eve is Biblical, I do know that A&E’s grave is in mythology, but I don’t recall if that is biblically supportable.
An explanation how 2 innocent children (Adam and Eve) could have been placed in this situation without fault of God, nor Adam or Eve or the Serpent.
For this the Serpent is defined as Satan (as given in the Book of Revelation), actually they are 2 beings that have become one with each other. Satan the main fault, but the serpent intrinsically connected to the ideals of Satan. (just like a brainwashes follower of a cult). So ultimately it is Satan who is at fault.
It draws upon what happens in modern life and has always happened here, and that what is ‘bound in the heavens is bound on earth’ aka what goes on here also goes on there.
This earth has been given to Satan to rule for a time, in scripture a quote from Jesus:
[QUOTE=John 16:11]
and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.
[/QUOTE]
Satan controls this world (for a time). I feel the reason for that control is given in the curse of Eve, particularly Gen 3:16b "Your desire will be for your husband,
** and he will rule over you.**”
This rule would also need to be bound in the heavens (Matt 16:19).
Satan would rule over the earth if Satan was the husband to ‘Mother Earth’
By this Satan is married to Mother Earth, and it is not a good marriage, there are many marriages shown as not good in the Bible, and God even orders a entire tribe of Israel to divorce all their wives - so marriage is not really considered always good, there are many that should not happen.
Modern life bears this out, there are many such bad marriages. In this case Satan is a evil abusive being, married to Mother Earth who is in submission to Satan. Through Satan’s rulership he sets up the current state where animals eat each other, and there is pain and misery on earth. This is Satan abusing the children he has with Mother Earth.
Scripturally God does produce children, Jesus is the primary example, and God does not follow the rules of marriage. We also see that the ‘sons’ of God creating children with the daughters of men. My further conjecture is that a archangel (son of God) fell in love and had sex with mother earth, producing Adam and Eve who are children of God and of Mother Earth).
Child custody issues begin. Satan is not happy with this turn of events. God’s children receive protection and see only paradise, not the corruption that Satan did to this world. Satan tempts and deceives them to see the world he created, to open their eyes to things like animals eating each other. And more importantly, makes Adam and Eve afraid of God (they were hiding from God).
So while Adam and Eve are children of God, their step Father Satan hates them and does whatever he can from placing a divide in the children’s minds to seperate them from their identity of children of God.
God’s plan is through this relationship of Love between the (unnamed) son of God and Mother Earth is a child who will save Mother Earth and dispose of Satan’s hold over her, and restore this world to paradise.
Satan’s fate is written about in several places, but also, again what is bound on earth is bound in heaven, Satan’s fate is in the curse of Adam, namely Satan will die (return to the dust).
My issue? How about the fact that none of what you say happened is actually in the Bible. No archangel having sex with “Mother Earth”, no mention of Adam and Eve being brother and sister, and no mention of Satan being their step-father. You are not only reading between the lines-the lines you are reading between exist only in your imagination.
Who is this child, who is this mother, How did she become pregnant? in Rev 12?
They are brother and sister by definition, the same father, God. Though I don’t recall stating that outright (even though the NT commonly states we are all brothers and sisters of each other), just stated that they were 2 very young children that were frightened by Satan and the place Satan has created for them that they hid from God.
Satan is said to have children here on earth as well as God
Is it also that Satan ‘rules’ over the earth (price of the world), Satan claims in the temptation of Jesus that all the kingdoms of the world were given to him.
In the curse of Eve we see that the woman is ruled over by her husband, and this is as the World is ruled over by Satan. Is there a living spiritual entity ‘Mother Earth’, I refer you back to my first quote and questions about who is that woman if not Mother Earth, who is (as Eve was also cursed with)experiencing great pain in childbirth.
But my claim is it is consistent with ‘God is Love’, ‘God is good’ and scriptures can not be broken. I have not seen any way to justify ‘God is Love’ with conventional interpertations. So while this may be reading between the lines, it does not contradict God is Love.
And that last one I feel is a very large stumbling block for those people who wish not to acknowledge a God, they want a hateful spiteful God for if that is the God presented to them they have the logical excuse to disregard God. But if you show them a loving God, well they would rather not know that because then they have to look at the possibility that God exists and is worthy to be called their parent - which many people are not comfortable doing.