Introducing Disobedience.
“You
may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall
surely die.” (Genesis
2:16–17).
Obviously disobedience did not exist
until Adam and Eve disobeyed this commandment of God. The snake succeeded in
tempting Eve to be disobedient by telling her she wouldn’t die from eating the
fruit, and he was correct in that, because she knew which fruit was poisonous and
which not and apparently the fruit she saw was not poisonous, as the verse
says: “and she saw that it was good to eat” Gen 3:6.
She possessed that kind of
knowledge. She didn’t have to be disobedient to learn that eating poisonous
fruit could kill her. But she obviously didn’t know that there was another kind
of death, namely death as a punishment for carrying out a morally evil act.
When God told Adam “for on the day
you eat of it you shall surely die” he didn’t understand that it referred to a
morally bad act. He thought it referred to the fruit being bad, meaning
poisonous, that’s why he would die if he ate it. But God meant that if he ate
from the fruit he would be disobeying God’s commandment, which is a morally
evil act and warrants punishment, perhaps even the punishment of death..
The snake’s crime is that he led Eve
into carrying out a moral crime, the crime of disobedience. This was a crime
which never existed. Eve brought it into existence by falling into the trap of
the snake.
This therefore is the sin of Adam
and Eve. They brought disobedience into the world. Now it was necessary to make
laws regarding the various punishments for various crimes, hence the creation
of Torah, the book in which God tells us what we may and what we may not do and
the various punishments for disobeying His word.
The words “for on the day you eat of
it you shall surely die” aren’t a threat, they are meant to teach Adam that
moral evils are punishable by death. Disobedience to the word of God is a
morally evil action, although not so severe to be punishable by death. That is
why they don’t die after eating the fruit. That’s why after Adam and Eve eat
the fruit God doesn’t carry out the death penalty and gives them lighter
punishments instead.
So Adam learns, the hard way, something
he didn’t know before, namely that a morally evil action, like disobedience,
can lead to death as surely as a physically bad action, like eating poison
fruit.
It’s not the fruit which carries the
death penalty. The snake isn’t lying when he says that Eve won’t die from
eating the fruit. He and Adam and Eve all possess knowledge that the fruit wasn’t
poisonous. It’s disobedience to the word of God which is liable to be punished
by death.
The punishment for disobedience isn’t
death but expulsion from the Garden of Eden because that is the place for
obedient people. It is the place of perfection where perfectly obedient people
have access to the tree of life.
But it’s difficult because now the
inclination to disobedience has become part of our nature and it’s become impossible
to be perfectly obedient. That is why God gave us the Torah, which is the tree
of life outside the Garden of Eden.
God gave us His Torah so that we can learn knowledge
of good and evil and by doing the good and rejecting the evil we have life. God
wanted Adam and Eve to have life and to have knowledge of moral goodness and
moral evil.
The two things, life and knowledge go together as is made
clear from this verse, hereunder and many others like it in the Torah.
“Ye shall
therefore keep my statutes, and my judgments: which if a man do, he shall live
in them: I am the LORD.” (Lev 18:5)
I don’t think that Adam and Eve saw
their act of eating the fruit as an act of disobedience. They were also
confused by the crafty snake who told them that God’s warning that they would
die didn’t apply to eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He was referring
to the physical qualities of the fruit, but he was aware that eating that fruit
as healthy as it was, constituted an act of disobedience of the word of God. He
tricked them into being disobedient.
It would be wrong to assume from our
verse above that God doesn’t want Adam and Eve to acquire knowledge. Had this
been His intention He would not have created a tree of knowledge and planted it
in the Garden of Eden. Neither, for that matter, would he have planted a tree
of life in the Garden. The fact that He planted these trees in the Garden is a
clear sign that He wants Adam and Eve to have life and to have knowledge of
Good and Evil; knowledge is a moral good not a moral evil.
The verse isn’t talking about
knowledge as such, on the contrary, God wants them to acquire knowledge and the
most important knowledge of all is to know that moral evil is punishable by
death.
So, therefore, in my opinion we must
consider God’s prohibition here anew, and we should consider this in the light
of Torah. Because God tells us in the Torah that the Torah is life and the
Torah is the way to acquiring knowledge of good and evil.
