What's Wrong with the Tree of Knowledge?
God tells the first human being, “You may eat freely of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat” (Genesis 2:17). Why did the Lord forbid this particular fruit? What was wrong with humans gaining knowledge through their own consumption? Why would God prohibit something as seemingly arbitrary as eating from a tree? The answers lie in the context of this primordial story. Since Adam’s inception, human knowledge had always come through divine provision, but when Adam and Eve listen to the snake and take from the tree, they transfer their trust from the Creator to the creation. Genesis cautions against the desire for personal exaltation rather than relationship with God.
Throughout the second chapter of Genesis, human beings always gain knowledge through direct contact with God. First, “the Lord God took the human and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it” (Gen 2:15). Through God-given agricultural “work” (עָבַד; avad), the human would learn to “keep” or preserve the garden (שָׁמַר; shamar). Next, God brought animals “to the human to see what he would call them. And whatever the human called every living creature, that was its name” (2:19). This episode reflects mutual learning between the Lord and Adam: God offers each animal and then waits “to see what [the human] would call it” (לִרְאוֹת מַה־יִּקְרָא־לוֹ; lirot mah-yiqra-lo)—and the knowledge of its name comes by means of divine-human interaction. Finally, God puts Adam into a deep sleep and creates the woman as his equal partner. When God brings her to the man, he has an epiphany: “At last! This one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (2:23). By the end of Genesis 2, the first humans have knowledge of physical exertion, agriculture, environmental preservation, animal life, gender equality, and male-female relationality—and all of this knowledge comes directly from God.
In Genesis 3, however, Adam and Eve pursue knowledge by other means, namely through the creation rather than the Creator. The snake was more cunning than “all of the animals of the field that the Lord God had made (עָשָׂה; asah)” (3:1), and this created serpent draws Eve’s attention to a tree that God “made to sprout” (יַּצְמַח; yatsmah) from the ground (2:9). When both Adam and Eve gain knowledge through their own ingestion, they circumvent their prior relationship with God. The proverbist encourages readers to find the “knowledge of God” (דַעַת אֱלֹהִים; daat elohim, Proverbs 2:5); instead, the primordial couple seeks out the “knowledge of good and evil” (הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע; ha’daat tov va’ra) that, in Hebrew, refers to the awareness of “order and chaos” [click here to learn more about this original Hebrew meaning]. Yet readers of Genesis 1 know that it was God who brought order out of chaos—now, Adam and Eve attempt to achieve this creative insight through the creation itself. Thus, the initial chapters of Genesis provide the first instance of what Paul would later describe as the perverse preference for the “creature rather than the Creator” (Rom 1:25). Even so, the Creator clothes Adam and Eve to express continued concern for the couple and the heavenly hope that humans would turn back to God as the fount of their knowledge.
You can learn more profound insights (CLICK HERE for more)
