In canon question, so no debates as to whether anything actually existed and/or happened, please, and no snark if at all possible.
According to The Bible, there were animals, there was fruit and veggies to munch on…and there was The Tree of the Knowlege of Good and Evil. What was the purpose in creating this tree and sticking it in Eden? The only one who was supposed to have this knowledge already had it, so…why?
To see if they would obey Him.
C. S. Lewis speculated that Adam and Eve were supposed to eat the Fruit of Knowledge… eventually. When they were ready for it. Which they weren’t, yet.
I don’t know if there is a canon reason given–i.e. something explained directly in the text. I’m pretty sure there isn’t one in Genesis, but there might be something in the New Testament (which was, of course, written much later by different people).
The usual theological reason I remember is that God imbued humans with free will, and thus they had to have a chance to disobey. And in the course of the disobedience, they become aware of the existence of evil (and thus good).
The mythological reason is that it represents the idea that humanity’s search for knowledge led to a loss of innocence.
I remember reading that and thinking, “How far could they really have progressed without having that knowledge in the first place?”.
I think that’s essentially the same point that @Alan_Smithee was making here:
That whole thread has some good stuff, but the specific post I linked to is particularly good and particularly relevant to this question.
My take on it was it was intended for Adam and Eve when they were ready i.e. mature enough.
I compare Adam and Eve to spiritual children of God (Luke 3:38x Adam son of God). And as such has to start as an infant spiritually. Our physical development as humans from infancy to adulthood serve as a metaphor for this spiritual development.
Like us through Christ, we also are adopted as legitimate children of God (Ga 4:4,5), and thus also have this period of spiritual infancy where we are not in a position to know right from wrong. We see this metaphor in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians in 1Cor 3:2) We start off craving spiritual milk, then when we are ready, we can partake of the meat.
When we are spiritual young however there is little difference between servant and heir (Ga 4:1), so I take this as the time we are under rules, like Adam and Eve were with that instruction, and like a child might be given absolute rules like don’t touch the stove. Don’t touch the stove is a temporary rule that the child will outgrow. This tree I believe was part of the inheritance that they would one day receive, to become as God, and able to make proper decisions of right vs wrong just as Jesus needed time to mature in this also (Is 7:15,16). We also see the comeback of the tree in revelation and its fruits used for good.
So why didn’t God create the tree only when Adam and Eve were ready for it? Seems like He was just asking for trouble by deliberately leaving it lying around like that. You don’t leave knives lying around where babies can access them because they will use them later.
I think it’s just part of His obvious delight in setting up pointless rules to test us to see if we’ll obey (Kashrut, kil’ayim, shatnez, etc).
But the stove has a purpose, and the stove is used for that purpose while the child matures. if it didn’t, we would wait until the child matures before sticking it in the kitchen, because to do otherwise would be senseless.
New parents always make mistakes. There were no grandparents around to ask for advice.
My general take is that the god of Genesis isn’t as all-powerful as modern conceptions make him. He was more like a greek god with plenty of magical abilities, but also rules he had to obey.
Maybe he couldn’t stop the ToL and the ToKoGE from growing in the garden, despite growing all of the other plants. Or maybe he needed those trees himself to renew his godhood. The reading certainly sounds like if Adam ate the fruit from both trees he would essentially become a god.
I like the simplest explanation. It was a test of God’s authority. He told them not to eat from it, and they willfully disobeyed Him. For that they were exiled from Eden forever. The moral being you better obey God’s rules or else.
Noah was a man who obeyed God’s rules, and everybody on planet that wasn’t part of Noah’s family mercilessly drowned. Even infants who never had a chance to be evil were destroyed. Once again, either obey His rules or suffer the consequences. Seems like a pretty clear message to me.
This is just a guess of course, but one reason why it may have been there would be to give a simple and clear explanation of cause and effect. You do this, and this is what happens. You do that, and that is what happens. This is where knowledge comes from. W/o knowledge they would have been sorta robotic, just obeying and not knowing why.
Like when we were children, grownups could have told us until doomsday that we shouldn’t stick our finger in the fire. But do it one time, aha! So THAT’S why.
My guess is that it was lifted from an earlier myth already circulating in the Ancient Near East and they assimilated it. Since the OT doesn’t give the explicit reason for the ToGaE, I’m guessing an original rationale was lost in translation.
That’s the interesting part to consider. IIRC the only rule was to not eat from that tree. So they were free to do anything else, since they hadn’t been given any other commandments yet.
It was put there to tell the story of the fall. Why would there need to be some other reason than that?
There seems to be two ways to interpret the question - what was God’s motivation in the story? and why is that set up chosen as humanity’s origin story?
To the first, meh, God is unknowable. More to the point the character God is very inconsistent. God doesn’t need to make sense.
To the second? Probably chosen for the lesson that all suffering stems from not being obedient to God’s rules, as passed along by those with power, point being to obey or suffer the wrath of the all knowing and all powerful. And you better not pout either!
But I’d prefer an interpretation that goes with God wanted humanity to have Free Will but Free Will comes with costs. Ignorance is bliss is the literal message. But we have chosen knowledge over bliss. He knew we would. We were never really meant to stay ignorant.
God really liked the expression “how do you like them apples”, but he never got to use it in heaven. He wanted to set up a funny situation where he could say it as he kicked them out of the garden.
Perhaps because it was created for/through a child. (John 1:3, Co 1:16) . One that the bible demonstrates didn’t know everything, including a time before He knew enough to chose the right and reject the wrong.
Yeah, I always thought it was a dick move by God to put the tree in the middle of the Garden and say to Adam and Eve “see this beautiful tree with the delicious-looking fruit that will open your mind and make you wise if you eat the fruit of it? DON’T TOUCH.”
In the Pierre Boulle short story “When the Serpent Failed” God had already done the Adam and Eve experiment on 2,999,999 other Earths. The serpent was actually in league with God, and on all previous Earths had successfully tempted Eve. It was all a set-up. They were supposed to give in to temptation and get kicked out of the Garden.
But on Earth 3,000,000 Eve says no, and God panics, because Adam and Eve had been told to go forth and multiply, and also been promised that they and their descendants would be immortal. So Earth 3 mill would eventually be overrun with a race of immortal beings that would invent spaceships and take over all the other habitable worlds. So God had to get creative. I don’t remember how God & co. eventually tricked Eve #3mil into eating the apple.