The Subtil Serpent v. The Deceitful God: Let's discuss Genesis

In this threadover in GQ, a question was raised about the nature of the snake in Genesis. Rather than continue to hijack that thread, I decided to open one here. It’d be good to peruse that thread before jumping in here, because I and others typed some pretty long posts highlighting the parts that interest/puzzle us.

My main questions are: why did God lie to Adam and Eve about the Tree of Knowledge (re: ‘touch this and die!’)? What is so threatening about knowing the difference between good and evil? Why create a tree that grants a power He’d rather keep from mankind (actually, He created 2), then place it so alluring and so tantalizingly within their reach? Why punish Adam and Eve instead of destroying them and starting over? Who is this snake, who knows so much, anyway? Isn’t the snake the hero and God the villain of this story?

If the purpose of this story was to explain why life is so hard, it seems the blame lies with God for being so deceitful and punitive. The whole tree thing seems like a set-up to me, a test mankind was guaranteed to fail: free will combined with ignorance of right and wrong is a sure recipe for a fabulous disaster. How could Adam and Eve do the right thing here if they didn’t even know what “wrong” was? Ignorance is not bliss if ignorance has consequences of this magnitude, so why did God create this situation?

If the point of the story is to emphasize why we must be obedient to God, it hardly inspires greater faith; rather, it makes God look insecure and untrustworthy, not to mention mean-spirited. For the life of me I cannot figure why this story would even be in Genesis, as it seems to do far more harm than good to God’s image. Also, Adam comes off as a weak-willed narc, and Eve an acquisitive fool who passes the buck to the serpent, who is the only character with any integrity in this story. Why would the snake even try to help these two ungrateful fools? Just proves that old adage that no good deed goes unpunished.

I’m sure there are even more questions posted on that other thread, and anyone who can lend me some insight into this would be great.

Thanks.

The book The Devil’s Apocrypha: There Are Two Sides to Every Story deals with that question.

Well, God didn’t say “touch it and die”. God said “eat it and die”. It seems like one of your complaints is that God is too merciful, ironically…would you have preferred the story if they had eaten it and they had died?

Metaphor…

Incorrect. Genesis 3:3 says “God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it , lest ye die.” That was clearly a lie, the kind of lie a bad parent tells a kid when he doesn’t want to tell the kid the real reason why he doesn’t want him to do something.

I have many complaints about God’s actions in this story, but none of my them is that God is too merciful. Far, far from it, in fact.

In my opinion this is yet another reason why beliefs in relgion are detrimental. Why leave so-called “absolute truths” open to interpretation? You end up with extremes, the fundamentalists on one side, stating that everything in the bible is the absolute truth (yet you don’t see them sacrificing an un-blemished male goat when it’s time to do so), and the theocracists who state that all the stories of the bible are allegory, or metaphor, meant to teach a moral. And as Rubystreak points out, what is the moral of this story? It isn’t an Aesop’s fable which ends with “And the moral of this story is…”, no such luck there.

You can apply this to EVERY story in the Bible, of course you’re not even looking at the bible unless you’re looking at the original Hebrew text and are able to read it accurately.

Stainless.

FYI: Ruby the link to the other thread gave me an error page…

My church teaches that to ‘die’ meant two things; physical death (and though it was put off for a while, they did indeed die after eating the fruit; in Eden, they were not subject to death) but primarily spiritual death, that is, separation from God. Which happened right away, happens to all mortals, and can only be solved through the Atonement.

However, I am LDS, and we have a radically different interpretation of the Eden story than others. We think Eve made a good choice with some (not full) knowledge of what was going on, and that the whole thing was necessary for particular reasons, though we don’t understand it. We also think there is a lot that isn’t explained and is rendered symbolically–my own thinking is that it is a very simplified and quite probably archetypal telling of events.

It is indeed a weird story. But I think that’s more due to our own lack of understanding and the age of the story than to God’s ‘cruelty.’

Rubystreak,

I’ll try to give what I understand to be a Jewish viewpoint on this story, based on classical Jewish sources.

The snake:

Jewish tradition sees the snake as an agent of Satan, who in turn is an agent of G-d (not a being who stands in opposition to G-d) with the job of tempting people to sin. (The issue of “Satan as independent actor” vs. “Satan as agent of G-d” has been covered in previous threads, but I’m too lazy to search for them.)

Various commentaries to Genesis 3:1 (Ibn Ezra, Ohr HaChayim, and others) explain that Satan found the snake most useful for this purpose because it was a sentient being, capable of “speaking” in a way that Adam and Eve would understand, and presenting its “arguments” skillfully (“the snake was more subtle than any of the animals…”).

So in short, the snake was chosen as the one most suitable for the role of a “devil’s advocate” - except that he ended up identifying too closely with his role. (It’s hardly the only case where someone has had the job of presenting a particular viewpoint while maintaining impartiality, and wound up becoming biased in favor of that viewpoint.)

The Tree of Knowledge:

One explanation I’ve seen - and I don’t recall the source - turns on the fact that the Hebrew word daat (knowledge) really means “intimate knowledge” (the same root is used in Genesis 4:1 about Adam “knowing” Eve). So according to this approach, the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” had the property of making good and evil inherent in the human psyche.

Put differently, when humans were created, their natural instinct was to obey G-d; it was possible for them to disobey Him and to do evil, but that was against their nature. Afterwards, by contrast, it’s more natural for a person’s instincts (some of them, at least) to clash with what G-d commands, and it takes a good deal of willpower to overcome this tendency. This was the situation G-d was trying to avoid by prohibiting them from eating from this tree.

But actually, the Midrash (Exodus Rabbah 32:1) notes that the prohibition on the tree was meant to last for only a few hours: Adam and Eve were created on Friday, and they would have been able to eat from the fruit of the tree on the Sabbath without any ill effects. [I don’t recall seeing any explanation for why this might have been so, although it might be that the added holiness of the day would have given them the strength to defeat this new evil inclination within themselves, much as a reinforced army can afford to lure the enemy into their ranks and defeat them there, rather than fighting the enemy on their own ground.] I also don’t know whether according to this explanation G-d actually informed them of this detail, or whether they were operating under the assumption that it would never be permitted.

In any case, though, this was indeed a test that Adam and Eve failed. Judaism posits that G-d created certain things in the world that are meant to be off-limits in certain ways - one purpose of this is to develop one’s self-control - and the Tree of Knowledge is the prototype of such things.

The prohibition and the warning:

The part about touching the tree wasn’t in the original instructions from G-d to Adam (see 2:17). The Midrash (Genesis Rabbah 19:3) states that Eve added this on her own, on the theory that it would be an extra safeguard around the original commandment (or, in a variant version, that Adam added this when transmitting the command to Eve); but that backfired, since when she did touch the tree (actually, the Midrash says that the snake pushed her against it) and nothing happened, that gave the snake an opening to deny the veracity of the prohibition against eating the fruit too.

Also, G-d’s instructions didn’t say that they would die on the spot after eating from the tree, but rather that they would die on that day, so the fact that neither of them dropped dead immediately doesn’t contradict that. I’ve seen a number of different explanations as to how this squares with the fact that both of them lived long afterwards; the most straightforward is that G-d was merciful and commuted their sentences due to their sincere repentance.

The realization of their nakedness:

The explanation I’ve heard ties in with the point that “knowing” good and evil means having them embedded in one’s nature. Before they ate from the TOK, their sexual drives were powerful tools whose normal use was for G-dly purposes, so the associated organs were no different than any other parts of the body; afterwards, that same sexual drive is (by instinct) attracted to forbidden purposes, so it’s necessary to tame it, part of which is accomplished by covering our bodies. (This is also why the Torah often equates holiness with sexual morality (as in Lev. 18 and 20): once such a powerful drive is under control, it’s easier to achieve G-dliness in other areas of human behavior.)

Blamestorming and G-d’s judgment:

Jewish tradition in fact faults both Adam and Eve for their attempted evasion of responsibility (and after all, as the succeeding verses show, they received their punishment too); a person has free will, and that includes the capability of blaming others rather than take the rap for one’s actions. (Adam is further criticized for his ingratitude in turning the gift of a wife into an excuse for his misdeed - “the woman that you provided to be with me gave me from the tree…”)

Nevertheless, the snake bears responsibility as an accessory to the crime. Indeed, the Talmud (Sanhedrin 29a) derives from this episode that when a person is on trial for incitement to commit idolatry (as set out in Deut. 13:7ff), it’s not a defense to say that the incitee should have known better.

The punishment of the snake:

Since, as I mentioned earlier, Jewish tradition sees the snake as a sentient being that chose to act in a certain manner, it’s only fair that it should be punished in such a way that it would never again be able to be an agent of temptation to humans. Part of this involved making it into a low and degraded creature (“you shall go on your belly and eat dust”), and part involved creating a natural antagonism between humans and snakes (“I will set enmity between you and the woman, between your descendants and hers”).

In general - and this applies to the following points as well - Judaism views G-d’s judgments as corrective rather than punitive: the punishment not only fits the crime, it addresses the “root causes” of the crime and attempts to prevent them from being a factor in the future.

The punishments of Eve and Adam:

One factor common to both of them is that they involve a lot of hard work and pain (child-bearing and -rearing for Eve, “working with the sweat of one’s brow” for Adam). The point is that keeping busy with these gives a person less time for improper or immoral pursuits.

As well, since Adam got into trouble by following Eve’s advice and eating from the tree, the corrective is that she should listen to him, in certain aspects, in the future. (As the Talmud (Bava Metzia 59a) expresses it, a man should defer to his wife’s advice in worldly matters but take the lead on religious issues.)

The expulsion from the Garden:

Now that Adam and Eve have gained an innate desire for evil (see above), the world would be a lot worse off if they went on living forever and remained in control of events. By making them mortal (and expelling them from the Garden before they could make themselves immortal by eating from the Tree of Life), G-d provides a chance in each generation that better people will take over. (Indeed, the Talmud (Shabbat 119a) calls schoolchildren the “Messiahs” of each generation - the ones who can be the harbingers of a better future.)

Sorry about the bad link to GQ. Here it is:

Well, you said “Why punish Adam and Eve instead of destroying them and starting over?”. That would have been less merciful than what God actually did do. Put another way, lets say there was a place that had a law saying “Anyone who murders someone will be put to death.”, for example. Then, lets assume that someone murders someone else. So, the judge says to him, “According to the law, you should be put to death, but instead I’m sentencing you to prison.” That judge would be showing mercy on the murderer.

And, like RedNaxela said, there was no divine prohibition against touching the tree, only against eating its fruit.

NIV Gen 2:16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

This seems to bear out the interpretation of “you will eventually die if you eat the fruit” i.e. you will no longer be immortal.

Gen 3:2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 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.’ "

You see how she misquoted what God said? I always thought that that showed the importance of getting God’s word right. Her ignorance made the serpant’s job easier.

Assuming a literal take on it, he way he did do it means that billions of people later are still paying for their sin. The other way, they would have been the only ones to suffer. How is it merciful to punish all of humanity for all time over that?

There are punishments worse than death. A life of pain, travail, work, and woe, ending in eventual suffering and death, is worse than a swift destruction. I don’t think letting Adam and Eve live was the merciful decision. If, as RedNaxela said, eating the tree caused mankind to be forever tainted and inclined towards evil and disobedience, why let us live and continue to screw up across the millennia? We’re a science experiment gone horribly awry, according to this rendition, and it just seems excessively cruel to me, considering the test that the human race “failed” to earn this punishment was a rigged game.
RedNaxela, thank you for the very in-depth response. It answered several of my questions, but left me with others

How could God expect creatures that don’t know right from wrong to do the right thing? If Adam and Eve, before eating the fruit, do not know what good and evil are, how could they possibly make the right decision in this case? Why test beings that are not at all equipped to pass the test?

So the snake caused Adam and Eve to act against their natures? To me that seems like a spin put on the story after the fact, because A & E seemed more than willing to try something new. Curiosity, not obedience, seems to be the inherently human quality here. Along with narc’ing and buck-passing, that is.

If he truly did not wish for man to eat the fruit too soon, and wanted the best for his creations, why make the tree so alluring? By making it so tempting and accessible, God is guilty of entrapment, and of innocence and ignorant beings, no less. This is a mug’s game. I’d have liked to think God was above such tactics.

How is it, then, that the snake tells the truth, while God either out-and-out lies, or obfuscates the truth, depending on what version of the story you hear?

But if God was testing Adam and Eve, then wasn’t the snake doing God’s work when he tempted them? God does have a habit of killing the messenger, I’ve noticed. What did the snake actually do wrong here? Telling A & E that God was keeping them in the dark deliberately is what he did, am I right? Perhaps the snake’s real crime was telling the truth and exposing God for a liar? I’ve always wondered about this.

My favorite quote on the subject:

“If you sit down and think about [God] sensibly, you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying ‘THIS IS IT!’?”
–Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimen, Good Omens

So they were not separated from God before the incident. Then, how does a being one with god sin? I assume that those in heaven are one with god - can they sin?

Another question is how much knowledge of good and evil was built in to them? We do not punish babies to young to understand right and wrong for disobedience, after all. If I put a baby down on the floor, and she crawls to a electrical outlet,. I might shout no to stop her, pick up and move her, and, best of all, put in protection in the socket. God did none of these things.

The whole story actually works well viewed sexually. The phallic snake convinces Eve to touch the fruit (another sexual symbol) and she then teaches Adam, and they eat of it, which can be interpreted as a sexual act. The direct result is childbirth, and the associated pain, and that Adam has to work to maintain Eve, who cannot support herself due to the needs of the children resulting from this act. The snake, phallus, once a part of the environment, now becomes debased.

I suspect I’m not the first person to think of this …

Well, with modern farming techniques and anesthetic, we’ve managed to find a way around it. :slight_smile: But, point taken. I’d imagine its possible to rationalize it, though.

Orthodox Christian view on the fall (typed from memory):

The tree of knowledge of good and evil wasn’t meant to be forever denied to Adam and Eve, but access would be given when they were ready for it. God’s statement that if they touched or ate it they would die is true; if they had refrained from doing so, they would never die. Death was not a punishment, but a natural consequence of their disobedience and breaking communion with God (this is also the cause of their realization of their nakedness: they were no longer clothed with the grace of God).

Tradition teaches that Satan appears in the form of a snake because that was the animal closest to man before the fall. Because of the snake’s role in the fall, the close fellowship that existed between it and man was broken, and since then, no other animal has had the same closeness to man that the snake had.

The long list of bad stuff God says will happen to man and snake (working for food, pain in childbirth, emnity between snake and man, snake crawling on its belly, etc.) are not punishments decreed by God, but His simply informing them of the specifics of their new, corrupted state of existence. Some of the fathers teach that God allowing death to occur was even a mercy (no more access to the tree of life), since without death, man’s current state of corruption, death, and sin would last forever; but when man dies, his body decays and his soul enters into imperfect communion with God, during which it can commit no sin (sin being any action contrary to what man was created to be). Thanks to Christ’s incarnation and resurrection, death’s hold on man has been destroyed, and at the end of time the resurrection will occur, and man will enter into the state he was originally intended to be in: full communion with God.

The Church teaches that Genesis is an accurate account of the fall; this does not mean it needs to be taken absolutely literally. The church fathers clearly teach that the Garden was not a place on this earth, but existed on a higher plane of existence; thus, there need be no contradiction between Genesis and the modern discoveries of science.

Why would Adams haveing to work debase the phallic snake?

It could also be interpreted as the begining of wisdom, and the loss of innocence.

But she only had the two boys Cain and Abel, and Cain did away with Abel pretty quickly, she could probably supported herself. Besides, Adam was to busy nameing things anyway. Considering how many things he named he must have been a fast talker. I always wondered where the other women came from and why with all the incest there are not more hemophiliacs and such.

Sarcasm aside, I am trying to suggest that maybe the story is meant alligorically and not literally.

Rubystreak, thanks for the kind words. Let me try to clarify a little:

I think this is overstating things a little. Even with our present instinctual drives towards evil (or rather, towards self-centered behavior), it’s not a total loss: there’s a lot of good that we can accomplish in the world. (And when we do so, it’s - in a way - all the more precious to G-d, given that we have to overcome these obstacles, much as you would admire a person who overcomes a physical or mental handicap to accomplish something significant.)

They did “know” (in the academic sense) what good and evil, right and wrong, were; they weren’t children or robots. (And as you say, it would be extremely unfair to expect them to obey if they didn’t have that kind of understanding.) The point of the explanation I cited earlier was that they didn’t “know” good and evil in the sense of having experienced them and having them embedded in their personalities.

So they were sentient beings even before they ate from the tree, and they had full free will to obey or disobey G-d, and to understand the consequences. The difference is that beforehand their innate instinct was to obey (and hence it took an external actor, the snake, to convince them otherwise), whereas afterwards their innate instinct, like ours, would be to go for the “forbidden fruit,” and it takes external restraints (a moral system, the policeman on the corner, the guy guarding his property with a shotgun, etc.) to get us to do the right thing.

Because the point was that the test should be extremely difficult; high stakes (the question of which direction human nature would take) require great effort. Nevertheless, it was still within their capability to pass it; as the Talmud (Avodah Zarah 3b) puts it, G-d doesn’t make unfair demands on His creatures.

Well, yeah, but even curiosity has its limits. I may be curious what it’s like to be under a train, but I’m not about to go lie down on the tracks to find out: my instinct for self-preservation wins out. (Those of whom this is not true are generally heard from when they win a Darwin Award. :D)

The original human instinct, then, was to realize that quality of life directly correlates with nearness to G-d (cf. “You who cleave to the Lord your G-d are all alive today” - Deut. 4:4, and “for He is your life” - ibid. 30:20), and that spiritual danger is just as hazardous to life as physical danger. So it took an external actor, the snake, to convince them to disregard the danger (much as people often end up doing idiotic things on a dare from a friend, or to fit in with the crowd, where they might never have done such a thing on their own). Following Adam and Eve’s sin, human nature changed: we no longer instinctively see disobedience to G-d as dangerous. So our natural curiosity is generally kept in check by our natural instinct to keep away from physical hazards (a growling lion or a 100-foot drop), but there’s no corresponding natural instinct to keep away from spiritual hazards (selfish behavior or unkosher food).

Is he telling the whole truth, though? He told them that eating from this tree would give them “knowledge of good and evil,” but he misrepresented that as something positive (“you will be like G-d”) rather than telling them what it would really entail; and he flat-out lied when he told them that they wouldn’t suffer any consequences (“you will certainly not die”). If I suggest to you to buy a certain piece of beachfront property in Florida for $5, but I fail to inform you that by doing so you’ll become liable for a $1 million lien on the property, would that be honest dealing?

By contrast, where do we see that G-d lied or obfuscated the truth in this episode? He didn’t mention anything about touching the tree (as I noted earlier, that was something that either Adam or Eve added on their own initiative), and He commuted their punishment instead of carrying it out immediately (“on that day”). [Furthermore, as athelas pointed out, an alternative and equally valid understanding is that G-d was telling them that the consequence of eating the fruit would be that they would become mortal, not that they would die right away - in which case there’s no contradiction at all.]

Yes, but there are a few things to consider:

[ol][li]Intent matters. Was the snake acting strictly as G-d’s agent, or was he trying to tempt them for his own selfish purposes? G-d grants us free choice, but He expects us to use it responsibly, and it’s no excuse to say “well, G-d planned it to happen that way,” even when that’s perfectly true.[/li][li]Did he exceed his mandate? A “devil’s advocate” should do his job as well as he can, arguing for the opposing side with all of the rhetorical skills he can muster, but we expect him to stick to the facts. Granted that the snake’s misrepresentation about “knowledge of good and evil” was a lie of omission rather than commission, there still remains the fact that he used at least one outright lie (“you will not die”) in his presentation.[/ol][/li]There’s a lot more that should be written on this, but it’s late and I have to go. (I may be able to rejoin this thread sometime on Sunday, but more likely I won’t be back till Monday; please excuse my lack of responses until then.)