At that fateful moment, Adam and Eve are standing together at
the tree, and although only the woman and the serpent speak, Adam
was present, and it seems he accepted the fruit that his wife
handed him. He was fully complicitous, and indeed, Yahweh holds him
responsible. Yahweh reproaches Adam. Adam says: Well, Eve handed to
me. She gave it to me. Eve explains, the serpent tricked me. Yahweh
vents his fury on all three, and he does so in ascending order:
first the serpent for his trickery and then the woman, and finally
the man. The doctrine of original sin, which is the idea that
humans after Adam are born into a state of sin, by definition. The
actions of Adam and Eve bring death to the human race, they don’t
bring a state of utter and unredeemed sinfulness. In fact, humans
have moral choice in each and every age. Adam and Eve after eating
the fruit of the knowledge of good and bad, they also lose their
harmonious relationship with nature. There had been a peaceful
relationship between creatures and humans to that point. Humans are
banished now from the Garden. It used to yield its fruits to them
without any labor, but now humans have to toil for food and the
earth yields its fruits only stintingly. The humans will learn that
the concomitant of their freedom is responsibility. Their first act
of defiance is punished harshly. So they learn, that the moral
choices and actions of humans have consequences that have to be
borne by the perpetrator. Evil is a product of human behavior, not
a principal inherent in the cosmos; man’s disobedience is the cause
of the human predicament. So knowledge or wisdom or perhaps moral
freedom, seems to come at a very high price.
The disobedience happens in a rather backhanded way. It’s
interesting, Yahweh tells Adam before the creation of Eve that he’s
not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, lest you
die. Eve doesn’t hear this command directly, she hasn’t been
created. Then we meet the cunning serpent, and although many will
identify the serpent as Satan, an enticer, a tempter, some sort of
evil creature, the serpent doesn’t seem to be so. The serpent in
Eden is simply a talking animal.
Adam and Eve after eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of
good and bad are like Yahweh; they have become wise in that they
have learned they have moral choice. They have free will, they can
defy Yahweh and Yahweh’s plans for them in a way that animals and
natural phenomena cannot. But now that means there is a serious
danger here, Yahweh says, “Now that the man has become like one of
us, knowing good and bad, what if he should stretch out his hand
and take also from the tree of life and eat, and life forever!” So
the acceptance of mortality as an inescapable part of the human
condition, the quest for immortality, Yahweh could not afford to
allow them access to the tree of life, and Yahweh maintains the
upper hand in this, the fact that they eventually must die. Yahweh
has to punt the ball, he has to modify his plans by barring access
to the tree of life, humans are going to be a force to be reckoned
with. Because of the length of these reasoning’s, read more
at;
http://thatlifeyahwehhas.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=12
Thanks for any insights.