2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Ok, here's the commanding part.
First, this differs sharply from the first chapter, where man was given every tree without restriction. Here we have a clear "don't eat this one". Definite push for Rashomon.
But a reason is given. The "for" after the colon clearly means "because". You shouldn't eat it, because you will die if you do. And it's unambiguous: "surely" means definitely, absolutely, without doubt or wriggle room. And it's quick: on the same day.
Now, that sure sounds to me like it's poisonous. But it's not entirely clear. It could be a threat rather than a warning, more like, "Don't touch my stuff, or I'll kill you."
This is a restriction from eating from one of the special trees mentioned; it seems that the tree of life is still fair game.
Note that God is warning the one man that he sculpted from mud. No other people or animals have been mentioned in this chapter, so presumably no one else is around yet.
One more point, which seems almost too obvious to bother with, but I've heard people quibble over it. If someone says to you, "Don't eat the little red berries; if you do, you'll be dead within the hour", and you trust them and don't think that they're insanely possessive of their berries or deliberately trying to mislead you or spectacularly bad at communicating, the only way to interpret that is "Poison!" It's not a warning that you might get your face permanently stained red, thereby killing your good looks. It's not a suggestion that the speaker might be disappointed if you eat them. It's not abstract or vague. It's not, "It could interfere with your immune system, leaving you slightly more vulnerable to various illness and decreasing your life expectancy from 78 years to 74 years."
So, should someone get around to eating the fruit, we now expect that they'll get stomach cramps, fall over, convulse wildly, and kick it. Of course, there's always the possibility that God is wildly mistaken. "I think there was some sort of warning label on one of the seed packets I got for the garden. Maybe that tree over there? Ah, whatever."
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To this I add, one of my friends sent me a photograph and it show's the snake on the tree with the fruit, I am not really sure if it was an apple tree.
ReplyDeleteThe snake said that if they ate it they will become geneticists. He he he.
On a serious note, it seems to me God was being very selfish and very vague why he shouldn't eat the fruit. It human nature to be curious, if God had tell why he shouldn't I am pretty sure the rest of the bible wouldn't hae been developed and such modern day Judaism and Christianity would not of been formed.
So in a sense Adam eating the fruit kind of helped God.
My question why would God want him not to eat from the tree, was it a test, or was God hiding something. Maybe "the thirst for knowledge" as one philosopher puts it.
To this I wonder if God wanted us to be ignorant.
I'll talk about this more once the fruit gets eaten, but eating the fruit brings "the knowledge of good and evil." That is, it leads to a moral sense, knowing right from wrong. This implies that before eating the fruit Adam and Eve were fundamentally amoral by nature, like young children are. This is also the definition of legal insanity; you can't be judged the same way in court for your actions if you can't tell that they are wrong. So, eating or not eating was not a moral choice for Adam and Eve, since they were at that point incapable of making moral choices. And they were incapable because, presumably, that was how God had made them. And they were told not to eat because that was how God wanted them. So, they weren't really responsible for eating; actually, it was inevitable that someone would eventually randomly eat from the tree, since they lacked a moral sense not to, even if it was wrong to do so.
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