It’s also not the Tree of Knowledge, it’s the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And that presents a problem:
If Adam and Eve did not yet understand what is and is not a good thing to do, they could not possibly have understood that it was not good to disobey God. Eve did not know the serpent was evil. And yet he punishes Adam and Eve for doing what they did not realize was wrong of them to do.
It doesn’t matter. They were being punished for something they didn’t know not to do.
Adam was told not to, but only afterwards did he know. These early part of Genesis are interesting in the way the world supposedly unfurled.
Go a step before that. Why’d God put the tree there in the first place?
God created sin, introduced it to humanity, and ensured evil would spread across the earth.
True. He even admits it in Isaiah:
Isaiah 45:7 - I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.
Can’t have light without dark. Can’t have good without evil. Otherwise you just have boring stagnation. God likes chaos and excitement, not boring safety.
Calamity or disaster is a better translation. Looking at God as a judge, it’s His right to render a verdict and enact punishment.
Pretty good article on this verse and what it’s actually saying. https://www.str.org/w/does-isaiah-45-7-teach-that-god-created-evil-
It always complete the picture to understand that the creation myth used in the Bible was not Jewish or Christian in origin. It was an appropriation of a pagan myth of the era. Like most Christianity, it is just a syncretism to make the cult palatable to the newly recruited. “Oh yes, that thing that you already believe in was totally our god”.
I think all major religious myths, like languages themselves, are derivative of previous myths on some level. Sure, there was a proto-mythology at some point, but it expanded, changed, etc. until it divided into multiple religions. And, of course, Judaism beget Christianity beget Islam, but all of them took other religious myths that were popular at the time and wove them into the tapestry.
Also God kinda lied to them or at least deceived them by saying they’ll die if they eat the fruit from memory.
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.
Sounds like a lie to me but I don’t know the original Hebrew so maybe it depends on your translation. To be fair it would be on the mild side of morally objectionable stuff God does in the bible.
And yet he punishes Adam and Eve for doing what they did not realize was wrong of them to do.
You say this like punishing people who don’t understand the rules isn’t a fundamental part of christianity.
Side note, and God created the tree of the knowledge of Good and evil. God created everything. Therefore, God created evil.
Further, God does evil.
After the flood, there is a line that says “and God repented of the evil he had done”
And to me, that just basically means that evil is circumstantial. Not that there is a pure drop of evil in the universe, but rather that a thing that is meant to be a good thing can be an evil thing based on its interpretation.
To whit: it wasn’t evil that Adam and Eve were naked. God made them that way. And yet because they became aware of it and changed a innocent thing into an evil thing, that is what the evil was.
Which makes a lot more sense when you know these stories are adaptations of earlier myths. The polytheistic religions they came out of had no problem thinking the gods do evil things sometimes because they feel like it. As things transitioned to monotheism, and “God is good and merciful” was taken as a given, you end up having to jump through hoops to explain why this passage explicitly says God did evil. Even if the explanation is on some level convincing, it’s going to be more convoluted than “these stories evolved from earlier polytheistic religions”.
“Eat the fucking fruit!”
It’s been depicted as various things in old art and literature. Apple is very common. But you also find figs, grapes, pomegranates, and occasionally pears. Probably some others I missed.
Apple is probably the most common interpretation because a lot of languages use it as kind of a vague fruit term, and the Bible has been retranslated and reinterpreted roughly one million times. The French call potatoes apples
The french call potatoes earth apples. Pomme de terre.
It is also an older german term for them, though I believe austria still uses it: Erdapfel.
Not to be confused with the Pferdeapfel.
Only a few know the truth, it was a tomato. I know because the way that it is.
