What on Earth were Adam and Eve Thinking?

The Genesis account of the Garden of Eden events is full of puzzling symbolism.  The “original” humans, Adam and Eve, had a lot to learn, and their curiosity about their environment is understandable.

At first blush, it seems that God’s instruction to stay away from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was meant simply to protect the fresh new humans from a fatal mistake.  Don’t all new packages that need assembly include obligatory safety warnings?

The symbolism though is made difficult for us because of some important details left out of the story.  In what parts of the Garden had Adam and Eve wandered before coming upon the unique Tree?  This particular plant was not the only plant in the Garden.  The couple had to have already “observed” uncategorized good and evil and must have wondered what to think of it. God surely knew that putting a “wet paint” sign on The Tree would invite their curiosity.  This would be “leading them into temptation.”  Something more than “obedience” is going on here.  God is not the Great Teaser.  

So why the restriction?  Genesis tells us that God put a lot of trees in the garden for scenery and for food.  No explanation is given why one was chosen to be fenced off.  Like all metaphors, the Tree symbol breaks down if pushed too far.  We can know this particular plant was a pseudo tree singled out for the convenience of symbolism, because it wasn’t like the rest of the trees.  We also know that snakes don’t talk. These are pictorial images set up to make an esoteric point, but a symbol must have consistency to convey meaning.  Without consistency, the message is blurred, maybe even distorted.

When you think about it (with our God-given brains), the label “Knowledge of Good and Evil” is self-contradictory and must have confused Adam and Eve as beginning learners.  A tree that nurtures both good and evil knowledge is a conundrum.  A generic plant cannot produce blooms of both poison and nutrition. If the symbolism holds any whiff of meaning, we should presume that the truth of the matter is that God wanted these earliest of children to “know” that life is all that is “good,” and that which is “evil” is as gaunt as death.  In story imagery God was saying a diet based on toxic fruit leads to starvation.  Most of today’s commentators interpret the story rather as a lesson in obedience and punishment, with layers of guilt, finger pointing and sexism. Let’s blow the lingering fog away and focus in on the key point of the story—“knowing” reality.

The untapped depth of meaning nestles here in the word “know.”  The symbolism works only if we drop the literalism and allow understanding to whisper to us the truth about “knowingness.”  Literalism casts a confounding curtain over profound knowledge. To see the story of Eden as a drama about rules and obedience is superficial and does not plumb the deep meaning of “life” and our relationship to our Creator.  Sin and punishment is not the point here.  What God sought to teach is a lesson about “knowing” reality, wherein is life. Life is “knowing” what is “good.” Anything else is not-life, is unreality, and thus is death by default. Evil serves only as an empty contrast. 

Adam and Eve had no sense of the distinction between good and evil.  Their understanding was shallow, but they were anxious to learn.  Eating from the Tree of Knowledge no doubt sounded like a good idea to them.  But monitoring the situation, God stepped forward to give stern direction.  Adam and Eve thought “tasting” knowledge would do the trick, but there was more at stake than taste recognition. To “know” evil by taste is to quaff unreality.  And what is unreality but absence of life.  The knowledge of good is the opposite of knowledge of evil.  

We inappropriately infer from the symbolism that God was telling the new humans that fully rounded knowledge is toxic—that to add knowledge of evil to knowledge of good spoils the stew.  So we think God was telling his new children to leave “knowing” of good and evil up to Him; that they should stay away from the Knowledge Tree entirely and not risk death.  Really now; how could this be?  How can good knowledge combine with evil knowledge to kill us?   This image mixture throws us off the scent.

To think the Tree symbolized the good and evil as two halves of a whole is a blunt misunderstanding. Life can’t be half dead, nor can death be half alive. To “know” good (real life) is to realize that evil is a big pretender. Knowing has a taste, but taste is not essence. Taste is mere recognition; it is not knowledge.  God’s warning was a red flag about the danger of half knowledge.  Sure enough, when Adam and Eve bit into the apple they tasted the wrong half, the sweat and tears part of real life’s opposite.  They thought they now knew reality, but it was pretend reality.  They hadn’t “learned” anything.  God was right; they swallowed life’s impostor.

Before eating of the Tree, Adam and Eve had been in a fog.  Biting the apple did not clear things up.  Bystanders can "recognize" both good and evil as these two things parade by, but to “know” both is a contradiction.  God did not say the knowledge of these polarized perceptions sits together in the Tree’s foliage (or waves at us from the same parade float).  Deep understanding is to imbibe the reality of one­ or the other.  To “know” goodness is to be energized with life; to “know” evil is to hitch on to death—hence God’s predictive warning. To “know” is to join in, which gives credibility to what you choose.  If evil is nothingness and non-life, then to give it countenance is to shut the door on life and all that is good. 

There was more at stake that day in Eden than whether or not Adam and Eve would disobey God and be judged as sinners for it.  It appears that the knowledge they bit into gave them a taste of eternal unreality, a taste they could not get out of their mouths. That is why God said they would die if they tried to taste (know) evil.  Jesus would tell us later that God wants us to “know” goodness (reality).  But we have to be “born” again, which means disposing of false life. We need to start over with the awareness that Adam and Eve impulsively forfeited.  And the wonder of it is that Jesus said we could have it for the asking. There is no need to climb a ladder and dislodge the fruit from its stem.

For the story to have truth, the symbolism must make sense.  Adam and Eve’s punishment for defying God’s warning was not judgment for sinning; it was the simple consequence of following bad advice.  Here is where Satan introduced himself and said hello.   Enter stage right—a talking snake.  In symbolic guise Satan brushed aside God’s warning with a “sleight of hand.”  The serpent claimed that real “knowing” could be had by harmless tasting. Yes, a nibble of this shrub would provide a distinct taste, but taste is not knowledge.  The bad result of Adam and Eve’s impetuous acceptance of Satan’s counsel was not literal death.   It was simply the natural payoff one can expect from any scam—unending floundering in a haze of unreality. 

If you were wondering why Adam and Eve did not die on the spot as God had threatened, it is because God was talking about death to reality, not physical death.  This is the problem with schoolbook “literalism.”  Looking for the deep meaning of the Genesis story in the images of trees and apples and words like “sin” and “punishment” leaves actual parts of the account unexplained.  Adam and Eve did not literally, physically die as punishment for sinning.  They lived on to toil for a living and progenerate unreality. 

 “Sinning” supplies its own self-punishment.  Remember Cain and how God let him off the hook too?  Today’s style of capital punishment is to kill murderers as if we are God’s executioners.  God just put Cain under protective custody. The Old Testament is a wearying narrative of God’s people making the same mistake that Adam and Eve pioneered.  “Judgment” is not a juridical mechanism; it is a rendering of to-be-expected consequences.  In deeper reality, God is a God of mercy; and the Divine message to us sprinkled amidst the slide-rule literalism of the Old Testament is that open-eyed reality is not translatable in leaden symbols.  Mercifully, Jesus later arrived (in recorded history) as the Great Realist with God’s Word about “knowing” forgiveness as the antidote for addiction to the taste of bad apples. 

Adam and Eve’s lunch break gained them nothing.  What they found out by taking “learning” upon themselves was that self-guided searching results only in frustration and confusion, as God had warned them.  All their descendants—you and I together—experience the taste of false understanding the same way.  That’s what makes myth so true.  Whether Adam and Eve were the original first humans or just a story, doesn’t matter.  We all are divine images created to know the life of goodness. 

In essence God’s command about Garden protocol was instruction on what happens if one “falls” for a scam.  Whether they learned the lesson personally we don’t know.  But the Old Testament is a narration of God’s people making the same mistake ad nauseum.  

The Good News lost in the static of storytelling is that tasting the bad fruit does not separate us from our image as Divine prototypes. The best part of the whole story is the genius of the Author’s plot.  The shame is how we continue Adam and Eve’s reaction of pointing at each other the finger of blame for the mess up. It is hard to understand that guilt is not in Reality’s dictionary. This particular Tree was in God’s Created Garden, and God expected Adam and Eve to encounter it.  It was almost like a set-up, but we can expect that these “first” humans were divinely wired from the start to handle evil’s appearance on the scene.  If not, God is either sinister or bungled the start-up.  If you want knowledge about symbolism’s truth, drink “water,” don’t eat bad apples. The water of life is all around in the symbolic Garden of creation and it is free.  The food of good, healthy life doesn’t come from stale, expensive, apple shaped bottles of water hanging on trees.

[I realize this blog is getting too long, but don’t quit yet—just two more paragraphs.  The ending is upbeat and puts it all together.  I did not want to cut it.]

With full exposure to the meaning of good and evil we can see in the “story” how God’s plan developed.  What the Creator had in mind for the Garden was a pair of Beings who, like Godself, could recognize goodness instinctively without a rule book at hand—Beings  who could assemble life without instructions (in three languages).    Instinct is not senseless; it can smell bad apples at a distance.  God wanted Adam and Eve to “learn” good instincts.  If God had sent a couple of angels to new Eden for rest and relaxation, I expect the Tree would have been no temptation for them because angels apparently don’t have ideas of their own.   Curiosity and the golden gift of “free will” is not part of their makeup.  In God’s presence angels are “under orders,” like a grown up child who never leaves home. How satisfying is that to a parent?  God ap-parently does not find the kind of “communion” with angels that can be experienced in common with divinely created human “children.”

In all reasonable likelihood, God’s gift of a learning opportunity for the two “first humans” was not about learning the rules, but about how to stay alive, i.e., how to “know” life.  God did not say we are better off without knowledge. The message of Eden is that knowledge is not channeled through the tongue. To “taste” evil is to learn nothing about “real” life.   The Tree’s fruit has a nasty bite and teaches nothing about the goodness of reality. The Tree was not about the discoveries of good and bad taste, but about “knowing” reality and how to live.  Sinning (tasting bad apples) does not teach us anything about God, it leads only to the experience of literal insanity.

We can’t claim ignorance of the Good News any longer.  The symbolism of the Garden and the Tree of Knowledge should be understandable by now.  

 Doug Good