#tree of the knowledge of good and evil

[daylerogers]

When You're Up A Tree

The cousin community is always an enjoyable experience. When they were here recently, we did a few field trips to entertain them and the adults, which didn’t require money or a long car ride. Just a willingness to be outside and explore. Tree climbing has been a favored activity since I was a kid. My grandmother had a particularly grand tree for climbing at her home in Bowie, Texas, and it was a…

[givingchrist]

The Tree of Life and Abnormally Long Life in the Old Testament

How long do you expect to live in this life? Most would say 80 or 90 years. The average in the United States is 78. That seems young-ish to me. I have no aspirations to live to be 100. Perhaps that is because I visit many people who have significantly cognitively declined by then and I don’t wish to join that group. The actual current maximum lifespan is 120 years, which sounds like a real…

[apenitentialprayer]

This is a really fascinating reading of the text. And my first thought is that I think Irenaeus of Lyons talks about Adam and Eve as children in the Garden. And now I'm going to have to go back and see what he says.

My friend @apenitentialprayer (who you should be following if you're interested in Catholicism) asked me to expand on my belief that Genesis 3 is an etiological myth for puberty. The following understanding is emphatically not my own, but it comes from my rabbi and I'm not sure whether he published it so I don't have a citation.

Anyway, the basic argument is that we should read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" (הדעת טוב ורע) ha-da'at tov v'ra (Genesis 2:17) in parallel with "[he] learns to reject the bad and choose good" (לדעתו מאוס ברע ובחור בטוב) l'dato ma'os bara u'vahol batov (Isaiah 7:15). In Isaiah, learning the difference between good and bad (more literally knowing the difference; da'at in Gen 2:17 has the same root as dato in Is 7:15 (dato is a conjugation of yada)) is a metaphor for maturing. If we read the phrase "knowledge of good and bad" in Genesis 2 in the same way, then we can reasonably infer that the consequence of eating the fruit of the Tree is maturation as such rather than the acquisition of forbidden knowledge.

So, what happens when we do that? Human beings in the Garden of Eden have two things in common with God: immortality and the image in which they are made. When they eat from the Tree they gain "knowledge of good and bad" which we've inferred means aging and (specifically) going through puberty. After puberty humans acquire a third divine characteristic: the ability to create life.

The curses that follow for the man and woman then describe the inevitable consequences that they will face by going from childhood and adulthood. The woman will carry babies and have pain in giving birth. She will desire (תשוקה) t'shukah (the verb is used for non-sexual desire in Gen 4:7 and for sexual desire in Song 7:11) her husband. The man will have to labor to bring for the food previously provided by his Parent (i.e. God). And of course both will die (which does happen to children, but is not an inevitable part of childhood the way it is for adulthood).

(Note that the interpretation that the Serpent is Satan comes from later Christian eisegesis is not actually a part of the myth as presented in Genesis 3.)

[edelblumie]

Fan-comic #3 (it's just the one page) for @stnaf-vn (#1 | #2 | OMEN)

Features an oc (oc info)

Well, I hope it works out well for BOTH these crazy kids. Probably won’t though... MOST of those branches look barren…

SH’s cute, emotionally inarticulate loner boy has grown up into a suave, psychologically manipulative loner man. And they can’t keep up with his mind game bs…

…

…but never underestimate SH…

…

y’know what, song rec: Paper Boats by Darren Korb

[just-xtian-thoughts]

"The knowledge of good and evil" has come to mean for me that the implications are that our use of tools led us to thinking abstractly about everying, which turned into a desire to consider everything as just a utility, something to be retooled for our personal benefit, inconsiderate of all else.

The reason Adam & Eve covering themselves out of shame was because suddenly, they realised that they too could be seen as a "utility" to someone else. Being naked now meant being vulnerable; more easily exploited, and easy to break. It's telling, that the very next chapter shows Cain utilizing a rock for murder.

Not that I'm against human ingenuity or engineering (unless it's stuff like weaponry or Ai), since it doesn't seem like God was ever against us having it. It's perhaps the only way in which we resemble him in any way. But I do wonder sometimes, about how our brains and hormones would've been wired with the extra space there'd be from not having to be thinking about the potential harm(s) that any and every man-made object, be it physical, social, societal, or whatever, could cause...

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Right from the beginning the bible teaches that God has never had any trust or 'faith' in humanity. If he did, he would have created humans with knowledge and trusted us to make good decisions. Instead he put knowledge out of our reach and made it a crime to seek it. Why have faith in something that has obviously never had faith in you?"

Why do you worship a god who openly despises its own creations?

[dolxiba]

sydpc is so samson and delilah coded. btw

[discworldwitches]

the way the basic idea is free will doesn’t exist but like genesis sort of deals w that right away

[apenitentialprayer]

The use of an apple to represent the forbidden fruit may actually be a Latin pun. The Latin words for both "evil" and "apple" are spelled malum. So the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a ligno mali (tree of evil / tree of apples). Other possible identifications include figs (Adam and Eve made their first clothes out of fig leaves), grapes (grapes are associated with wine, and thus drunkenness), and wheat (which has some really interesting implications when connected with the Agricultural Evolution). All three of these identifications can be found in Rabbinic tradition, but as far as I know only the first two have Christian parallels - this might be because "wheat" may also be another pun, but this time in Hebrew. But I do think the pomegranate identification is pretty cool, precisely because of the evocation of the symbolism that you mentioned! This might be of interest to you; the Franciscan friar Robert Lentz created an icon of Eve holding a pomegranate.

The fruit of knowledge

The fruit that Adam and Eve ate is almost always depicted as an apple, but why? It just feels.. eh. Like, ok, an apple. Whatever. You know what SHOULD be? Pomegranate. Pomegranate definitely has a history of being used to depict the underworld in some way (see Greek Mythology), and seeing as how eating the fruit means that humans now face death.. ya, it fits. Also, the fact that pomegranate is so hard to open can create this metaphorical picture of it was intentionally made that way by God to keep humans from eating it.

[eats-the-stars]

everybody who went to a private catholic school name the craziest personal belief an instructor lectured the class on.

i'll go first: mentally disabled people are free of original sin, just like animals, so they get a free pass to heaven

[goatbeard-goatbeard]

I’ve seen the plans

companion post // previous piece (Uriel)

can’t stop thinking about the absolutely bone-chilling implications of a pre-Fall angel seeing the plans for humans. fallen angels are involved in those plans! a lot!

[elletromil]

Do you think the real reason Crowley tempted Eve into eating the forbidden apple was because he wanted more beings around who didn't blindly believed that everything God said was the end all be all?

That maybe he wanted to find out if the reason he fell was truly because he was evil?

[apenitentialprayer]

Dan Koeppel (Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, pages 6-7)

In the Western story of Eden, Adam and Eve are said to react to their nakedness by covering themselves with “fig leaves.” Fig greenery might cover the essentials, barely.

Banana leaves are actually used to make clothing (as well as rope, bedding, and umbrellas) in many parts of the world, even today. In this case, the word for the Edenic fruit isn’t mistranslated, just misunderstood: Bananas have been called figs throughout history. Alexander the Great, after sampling the fruit in India, described it as such, as did Spanish explorers in the New World.

The clincher comes from ancient Hebrew. In that language, the language of the Torah, notes Levin, a word for the forbidden fruit translates directly: it is called the “fig of Eve.”

[wandering-free-and-queer]

I need to stop and take a step back from this project lol