Refrigerator logic, or a shower thought:
According to Genesis, God forbids Adam and Eve from eating fruit of the tree of wisdom, specifically of knowledge of good and evil.
Serpent talks to Eve, calling out God’s lie: God said they will die from eating the fruit (as in die quickly, as if the fruit were poisonous). They won’t die from the fruit, Serpent tells them. Instead, their eyes will open and they will understand good and evil.
And Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of wisdom, learning good and evil (right and wrong, or social mores). And then God evicts them from paradise for disobedience.
But if the eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil, this belies they did not know good and evil in the first place. They couldn’t know what forbidden means, or that eating from the tree was wrong. They were incapable of obedience.
Adam and Eve were too unintelligent (immature? unwise?) to understand, much like telling a toddler not to eat cookies from the cookie jar on the counter.
Putting the tree unguarded and easily accessible in the Garden of Eden was totally a setup
Am I reading this right?
I think that you are reading it right. And while I personally wouldn’t associate obedience with moral “good”, whoever wrote this myth clearly did.
In fact the whole myth feels like Yahweh creating a successful trap for the couple - the tree is in the garden, but they aren’t supposed to eat from it; the snake was in the garden, but they weren’t supposed to listen to it; and the serpent speaking the truth while Yahweh was being a liar (“you’ll die”… except they didn’t.)
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Dan McClellen actually released a video today regarding this specific matter. ( on YouTube )
Thank you for sharing this video - what he says about the paronomastic infinitive is interesting, and it explains an oddity of the same verse in the Vulgate:
Gen 2:17 de ligno autem scientiae boni et mali ne comedas in quocumque enim die comederis ex eo morte morieris
“Morte morieris” is literally “you’ll die of death”. The expression sounds as weird and redundant in Latin as it does in English - but it makes sense if Jerome of Stridon was trying to reproduce a Hebrew figure of speech.
(Interestingly enough, “die” [in the day] is also there. And that “ex eo” [“out of that”, i.e. as a consequence] also reinforces that Adam would die as a consequence of eating from the tree.)
Following that interpretation, what Yahweh said is a half-truth - because it implies that the fruit itself would cause their death, when it doesn’t. They would eventually die because Yahweh would revoke their immortality, but the fruit itself does what Serpent said that it would, granting them knowledge.
In the Sumerian story of the gardens of Dilmun, Enki and Ninhursanga, Enki eats of the eight forbidden plants so as to gain knowledge of them
Great catch - I completely forgot about this myth. I’ve seen a different, but still related version, might as well explore it here:
- Enki sleeps with Ninhursag, they have Ninšar.
- Then with Ninšar, they have Ninkurra.
As they do it Sweet Home Alabama plays in the background. - Then with Ninkurra, and they have Uttu.
- Then, as Enki sleeps with Uttu, Ninhursag removes Enki’s semen from Uttu’s body and throws on the ground, creating the eight plants that you mentioned.
- Isimud (Enki’s assistant) uproots those plants and give them to Enki, who eats them - so now he knows the heart and determines the destiny of each plant.
- Ninhursag gets pissed and then curses Enki, withdrawing her “life-giving eye” from him, so he falls sick.
Ninhursag governs over the mountains, while the other three goddesses govern human activities (Ninšar and meat cooking, Ninkurra and sculpting, Uttu and weaving). And the later was probably not considered as important as the others, due to the absence of the prefix Nin- “Lady, Mistress”.
As such, Ninhursag likely governed over wild plants too, like the ones that Enki ate; and, once Enki to control those plants, he was invading her realm. Or, alternatively, by knowing better those plants Enki had a reason to control the mountains, instead of sticking to the wetlands.
Either way, if the Hebrew myth of Adam and Eve was influenced by this one, suddenly it makes sense why Yahweh punishes Adam and Eve - Yahweh’s realm would be morality, and the couple invaded it.
I’m beginning to believe, but can’t prove that all these creation garden myths are talking about The Green Sahara, and it’s subsequent desertification. Again I can’t prove it, but the end of the green Sahara seems to line up with, and may have even caused, The Bronze Age Collapse. I’ll bet that those two back to back events convinced people that the world was legitimately ending.
It’s possible; the peak of the Green Sahara period was ~8000 BCE, while the Epic of Gilgamesh is from 2100 BCE. As the desertification of the Sahara and Levant went on, it’s possible that small pockets of greenery remained for longer, becoming the target of oral traditions, that eventually the Epic and other myths borrowed from.
I just find a bit unlikely because those myths typically have something to do with humans or human-like gods doing something and, as a consequence, either spoiling or leaving the garden:
- Hebrew - humans develop morality, so they’re kicked out
- Sumerian - humans distance themselves from nature, as they try to wrestle control over it (that’s how I interpret it at least - the man vs. nature theme is common in Sumerian myths).
- Ugarit tablets - god El has a tree of life, god Horon transforms it into a tree of death
Then in the Greek myth I don’t think that they give the garden of the Hesperides some end or similar. It’s simply there.
while I personally wouldn’t associate obedience with moral “good”, whoever wrote this myth clearly did.
The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.
— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (Discworld, #13)
Adam and Eve were too unintelligent (immature? unwise?) to understand, much like telling a toddler not to eat cookies from the cookie jar on the counter.
This is literally what ‘ignorant’ means.
I like to… adapt the story, where god is a dog owner, and adam and steve are golden retrievers. It’s not Adam and Steve’s fault that the human left the squeaky toy out for them to play with… any one older than a toddler is going to realize that, of course, they’re going to find it and play with it. they’re dogs. it’s a squeaky toy. it’s meant to be played with. Only an asshole kicks their dogs out because they got into the squeaky toys.
Now, couple that with a being that’s supposedly omniscient, all knowing. Of everything- past and future included. If this is all to believed, then it was all god’s intent that Adam and Eve eat the damned fruit.
Which means the asshole set them up, just so he could kick them out. And, ultimately, just so he could LARP as a white-knight savior.
Yeah basically.
Without knowledge of good and evil how can you avoid evil acts? You can’t.
That is how I have always read it too. God tells them not to do something but they don’t know it’s wrong to disobey him, so they do it anyway and then he gets mad even though he created them that way.
Not to mention he’s omniscient and knew they would do it anyway.
Maybe he just needed an excuse to kick them out
You want a better plot hole?
Ask yourself one, really easy, simple question:
“Which came first? People? Or animals?”
Then read Genesis 1. Think you have the answer? Then read Genesis 2. ;)
According to Dan McClellen, Genesis 2 is a retelling of Genesis 1 revised according to the sensibilities of a later century, according to scholarly consensus. Of course, also according to scholarly consensus (and revealed to students in seminary) the bible is not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant, even though many denominations assert these by fiat. (Otherwise they wouldn’t give ministries authority to tell their flock not to be gay.)
It’s not though. Genesis 1 is the Elohist creation myth, Genesis 2 is the Jahwist creation myth. They both just got jammed together.
This is why Genesis 1 has animals created first, and man and woman created at the same time, while Genesis 2 has man created first, then animals, then woman.
Two different mythologies.
it’s also important to note that Gen 1 was pretty much intended as propaganda. it was riffing off other mythologies; except trying to one up them. “OUR god is so STRONG that he created the world ALONE. In SIX DAYS. and he NAPPED on the SEVENTH!!!”
It gave justification for a few of the earlier genocides, because their god was stronger than the other peoples, so it’s all cool.
Which is interesting, because the very first line… Gods is plural. That carried over into Latin, then was singularized after that.
Which makes sense if you consider the commandments:
Exodus 20:2-3
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me."
It’s acknowledging the existence of other Gods, but I am YOUR God.
Oh. That’s another thing.
The exodus didn’t happen. Or, rather, the Israelites were always there. What most scholars think is that refugees came up from Egypt and their story was adopted as they assimilated into the broader culture .
Yup, yup. There’s no evidence the Jews were enslaved in Egypt and the Sunday school stories about slave labor for the pyramids is equally nonsense.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-egyptian-pyramids-not-slaves
https://historum.com/t/egypt-knew-no-moses-evidence-on-why-exodus-never-happened.194987/
these days my favorite sunday school lessons include cute, featherless dinosaurs.
i know. I know. but who doesn’t want to live in a world with cute featherless dinos?
Monotheism (as opposed to monolatrism) is a much more recent thing than the scripture itself, an invention of the middle ages at earliest.
Also, plants come before the sun in Genesis 1, which just sounds like bad planning on God’s part.
Terms like Elohist are not used anymore by scholars. The documentary hypothesis collapsed in the 70s…
It stems from how God is referenced in Hebrew in the two chapters. Genesis 1 is Elohim. Genesis 2 is Yahweh.
I know that, but the idea that behind these different names of God are different authors/schools is not accepted by mainstream historians nowadays.
In this particular case, it seems evident that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have different authors, but not the Elohist and the Jahvist, in that you can’t necessarily link this two passages to others in the Bible which would use the same names for God.
I tend to see in Genesis 1, with the emphasis on the fact that the man and the woman are created as the same time (verse 27) an answer to Genesis 2, which in that case would have been older. In the Bible, a lot of texts are answers to other texts. It totally breaks the idea of inerrancy, but it makes the Bible a very interesting polyphony.
My favourite is when god says “let there be light” a couple of days before he creates the sun and stars.
I’m pretty sure stars then were pinpricks in the firmament in the sky, so a huge lightbox.
While we have archeological data suggesting that the Hellenics and the Egyptians had strong models of the planets (they were both big into astrology, so there was a drive to develop enough math to predict where the planets would be next week or next year), there’s also a difference between what the intelligentsia knew about nature and what the laity believed. Socrates’ death sentence was for impiety, that is, challenging the temples. (See also Galileo)
But Egyptian history is deep, and I don’t know how Egyptian cosmology intersects with Hebrew cosmology on the timeline. Nor Hellenic cosmology, for that matter. Also, depending on the time, esoteric knowledge might be disseminated or kept secret. Astrologists were far less likely to be burned for witchcraft if the high lords couldn’t easily replace them. Sometimes the sun was a big orb that guided the motions of the planets, and sometimes it was a chariot driven by Helios or Apollo across the heavenly firmament resting on the shoulders of Atlas (or Hercules, for a day).
Curiously, circa 14th and 15th centuries, as the Islamic Golden Age was dusking, there was a surge of religious prosecutions and astronomers and algebraists were accused and executed for sorcery in Araby and Persia. (This golden age is why a lot of our night-sky stars have Arabic names, like Aldebaran, Deneb, Betelgeuse, Mizar, and Rigel – List on Wikipedia ).
It tells us while our best cosmological model might have improved with time, the common notions of the size and shape of the universe fluctuated with social movements, sometimes looking more like Carl Sagan’s model, and sometimes looking like a toddler’s imagining of the night sky.
Those are the Generation 3 stars. You know the big ones that made everything else. He got around to making Sol about 8 billion years later.
I always thought that this myth was Yahweh testing whether their free will (which he had given them) was actually working or not. It was totally a set-up.
God wanted them unaware they were naked. He got all pissy and threw a huge tantrum after Satan told them the truth, basically damning humanity for not going along with his voyeur garden.
You shouldn’t be wasting neuron power on something that didn’t happen.
The thing is, I waste neuron power on things that didn’t happen all the time. The long term decline of House Frey after the Red Wedding given that all the other houses ceased to trust them. I ponder Merry and Pippen captured and carried by the Uruks. I think about Opheus petitioning Hades for the return of Eurydice, and the rape of Medusa by Poseidon. Prometheus taking pity on his clay apes and teaching them fire, knowing that they would eventually reach for the stars and create life from raw materials, displacing the Olympians. And then their response, offering the newer, sleeker, curvier model, Pandora, comes with free jar of mysteries!
Just because the Eden story is mythical doesn’t mean it has no use, and ultimately it will, like most of our mythology, succumb to the death of the author, its meaning changing from any long, lost original intent (or what we imagine their intent to be) to what it means to us.
