Here's the thing. God says that every tree's good to eat but this one, because hey, it's poison. Literally. That is what the scripture says.

Genesis 2:15-16 : 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
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.

And Adam and Eve were pretty cool with that until the serpent explained it a bit better, saying what the tree would actually do. Plus the flattery of being like gods and all. But God was right. Somewhat. He exaggerated a bit, because they wouldn't die THAT DAY, but they would certainly die. And have a pretty hard life up until they did so.

The fruit was a catalyst for change. They were like children. Kids don't know anything about living or raising other kids (at least under usual circumstances), and they certainly usually don't know how to make kids. They don't know much besides frolicking naked. For a while anyway.

I see it more as being allegorical about puberty and growing up at this point than actually strictly literal, so do take what I say with a handful of salt. Also, I am highly influenced by LDS religious theorems when it comes to Christian ideas, and they have some pretty odd thoughts on some things. Case in point, they believe the Fall was a necessary act, and that no one else would have existed it they hadn't eaten the fruit, because only after that could they even bear children. They also don't believe it's a sin passed down to everyone, merely that we all suffer from the effect of it.

I forget which version it is, but there's at least one translation where Adam and Eve were told to have children before the tree incident.  I hear the interpretation that the tree of knowledge contained knowledge of sex, but that doesn't quite fit.  Since Eve also gains the pain of childbirth, which seemed to indicate that childbirth could occur before, but would have been painless. 

My interpretation is that the tree of knowledge imparts shame and a deeper understanding, which is why sin becomes possible at all.  If you commit a sin, but don't know it's a sin, you can't be held accountable, and God, in sense, was sparing them from that accountability.  They ruined it.  He didn't make their lives harder; they did.  He didn't cast them from the Garden of Eden; they became aware that they weren't in Paradise in the first place.

Last edited by KaleMarsh (07-27-2012 09:09:08 AM)

Morality was a very different concept in the Torah vs. what we think about morality today. The ultimate morality in the Torah is obedience to the will of god. All other concerns are ultimately secondary, as Abraham proved when he attempted to murder his son based on god's instructions. Further, the "good and evil" from the text is a somewhat poetic construct from the Hebrew "tov va-ra", literally "good and bad." It is likely that the author intended this as a blanket term that referred to all knowledge, and it is widely held in secondary sources (Talmud, Midrash) that Adam literally knew everything. Eve is less discussed due to the patriarchal nature of these sources, but it could be inferred that she knew everything as well.

Of course, the religions of today are quite a bit different from the religions that this story originated in, so most people understand the story of Adam & Eve quite a bit differently now. Since the version we know about is already 2000 years old, it stands to reason that the original text is a little inaccessible. For that matter, we don't even know for sure that's what the original text says, the language is that old.

If you want to have a scholarly discussion about the story, you need to be specific about which translation you're using, and which religious traditions you're taking into consideration, as they're quite a bit different depending on who you ask.

I think the dominant theme throughout Genesis is that every form of human empowerment beyond that of social designation is evil. Every time that humanity gets a leg up, whether it's through interbreeding with the gods, or building the Tower of Babel, God brings a flood or wipes everyone's memories. The only type of person who's left untouched by God is the docile patriarch. It's a doctrine that preaches weakness.

Last edited by Overlord Morgus (07-27-2012 12:24:09 PM)

gorgeousshutin wrote:

Being that versions of the english Bible we have access to towards are all heavily edited and/or outright deviating from the original ancient writings (where all the angels' names except for 3 could simply got erased by the early church, even), it is almost impossible to read anything in today's Bible and claim that as the actual, literal Bible - what we get now is like a fanfic of a fanfic of the original writing.

This just isn't true. Angels as individual beings were simply not a big deal in early Israelite religion (early Israelite religion seems to view angels as extensions of the divine), where the majority of the Biblical texts, especially in the "Old Testament" come from. It wasn't until the Exile when Persian culture began to have a massive influence in the Ancient Near East that a more detailed angelology developed. The early church had nothing to do with editing "Old Testament" texts, these were already sacred scripture that they had received from Judaism, and we have manuscript evidence and a decent idea of the development of some of the major manuscript families and variants. The state of the text for the majority of the Old Testament is actually rather good (this was shown by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls last century, the majority of which were from the pre-Christian/Church era), and the text of the New Testament is even better established (with literally thousands of manuscripts from four major manuscript families worth of evidence).

There is no perfect English translation of the Bible because every act of translation is by nature an act of interpretation, especially in regards to the "Old Testament" where a Semitic language is being translated into an Indo-European one (the issue is much less difficult in the case of the New Testament since it was written in Greek, which is also an Indo-European language and one whose vocabulary and syntax have had a massive impact on English). With that being said, there are still very good translations available. The King James Version was very good for its day and age, but the simple fact is that 400 years have passed since it was done, and we have learned massive amounts of information about the Hebrew language and the cultural setting of the Ancient Near East in those four centuries. Among modern day translations, the three that stand out the most in my opinion are the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV- my preferred translation when I have to use one), the English Standard Version (ESV- very literal, but with a stronger conservative theological bias), and the New International Version (NIV- a slightly looser translation, but which does a good job of expressing the text idiomatically).

tl;dr
The text of the Bible is actually fairly reliable (i.e. very few corruptions, and most major variants have been identified and are noted). Whether that makes its theological interpretations of historical events true or not is an entirely different question.

Edited for spelling and clarification of a point.

Last edited by thothptah (07-27-2012 02:19:18 PM)

Overlord Morgus wrote:

I think the dominant theme throughout Genesis is that every form of human empowerment beyond that of social designation is evil. Every time that humanity gets a leg up, whether it's through interbreeding with the gods, or building the Tower of Babel, God brings a flood or wipes everyone's memories. The only type of person who's left untouched by God is the docile patriarch. It's a doctrine that preaches weakness.

......Yeah, not gonna lie, gotta agree with you there. Even the people God chooses to be his prophet want nothing to do with it. Seriously, look at basically any prophet or leader in the Old Testament. They all make excuses and run from it as much as they can. Today we may interpret it as being humble, but I think it's very fair to see them as being terrified.

Although, in my personal opinion, the ancient Judaic way of looking at God just seems more...honest. Because by allowing that God can also be a horrible monster by human understanding and that we better just try our best to make him happy or else he'll fry us to bits, it makes more sense. The idea that a loving and all-powerful God could allow Satan to exist makes no sense. Either he isn't powerful enough to take him down, or he continues to let Satan do whatever he wants because he's a jerk. The Zoroastrianism that influenced Christianity at least makes the God of Evil and the God of Good relatively equally matched(I can't remember or spell their names right now, durrr). But God creating Satan and being all-powerful but just not doing anything? Errrrgh, dumb.

One one hand, because it makes ore objective sense, I might not have become an athiest/Buddhist/whatever the hell I am if it stayed that way. But such an idea sort of leads to religious extremism since, I mean, if your neighbor worships Enlil and you genuinely believe that this behavior will bring some unspeakable calamity upon your community, you pretty much would have the moral imperative to convert him or kill him. Besides the fact that this idea would make the more "God loves you" ideas of Jesus to be laughable, and for all the awfulness that has been brought about in his name, at least the guy was genuinely trying to get everyone to get along.

By the way, there is a group of people who do worship the Old Ones from the Cthulhu Mythos--learned a teeny bit on this Lovecraft documentary that's on Crackle right now. I have no information about them beyond that, but at least I understand them logically a bit more after that.