In Genesis 2, after God creates everything he begins to give all of his creation life. He began with blowing the breath of life into man to take care of the Garden of Eden. In the center of this garden he puts the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So as the tender of the garden, Man’s attention will naturally be drawn towards the center. The author of Genesis wanted to use the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil to symbolize the (everlasting) life it could take away from Adam if he ate of it. Eating the fruit on the true would open up Adam and Eve’s eyes to what evil was, rather than how blindly they could only see the good from Yahweh. Yahweh’s first command to Adam as the garden keeper was “You are free to eat of all the trees in the garden. But of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you are not to eat; for, the day you eat of that, you are doomed to die.”1 As you keep reading in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve do eat of the fruit after being tempted by the snake, and do not die. But the author didn’t mean that they would literally get sick and die- but that they would be subjected to the death of the flesh that Yahweh curses upon them further along in the chapter (Gn 3:14-19) The snake argues with Eve about whether they will actually die (Gn 3:4-5), which adds further significance to this symbol. Certainly Man won’t be able to live the same afterwards, because their eyes will be opened. From Yahweh’s point of view, that is essentially a death. He says, “…you return to the ground, as you were taken from it. For dust you are and to dust you shall return.” (Gn 3:19) So the eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil symbolizes the death of the flesh that God curses Man too. Eating the fruit gave Adam and Eve the ability to recognize the difference between what is good and evil, rather than only knowing what good was. That good is directly from God, but the evil came from the snake. Understanding what evil was, leads to temptation to do the evil things, which lead to our death. Eating of the fruit (of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) opened the doors to death of mankind through the curst from Yahweh.
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