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.
Yes, I realize he knew he did something wrong after he did the wrong thing. The point was he didn’t know it was wrong before and when he did it. Which makes the god of Genesis supremely fucked up.
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.
Why can’t you have light without dark? If you sped up all the molecules in the universe to the point that they were all radiating heat, you would have light without dark.
How would you know it’s light if there was no dark to contrast it ? Light only exist because dark surrounds it, and dark only exists because light surrounds it. One cannot exists without the other.
If I show you a black circle on a white paper you would point at the black and say “this is the thing that is drawn on the paper”. If I were to show you a white circle on a black paper, you would point at the white instead with the same statement. If I showed you an all white paper and told you there is a white circle on it, you would tell me I’m an idiot and that there is nothing there. Contrast is why something exists.
I understand you want to counter this statement with physics, and we could have a rich debate about what we know of the universe and how light and it’s absence exists in it. But I think you misunderstood what we are talking about.
This statement is about philosophy, light and dark are metaphorical here. We could just as well say “up cannot exists without down”, or “day cannot exists without night”. The next step to this philosophical thinking is to realise that since one cannot exists without the other, therefore they are the same thing.
A judge might have a “right” to punish people for things they didn’t know were wrong, but this is a judge who created those people without giving them the capacity to know right from wrong in the first place and then punishing them for doing the wrong thing anyway.
And of course a Christian apologetics website is going to give the kindest possible interpretation to that passage.
I’d also note that it’s part of the Jewish half of the Bible, so maybe finding out what Christians think about what it means is the wrong way to go about convincing people of your point. Maybe consult a Rabbi’s interpretation instead.
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.
I think they mean more like in say Europe where Christianity came in, took cultural events etc for other religions and claimed it as their own rather to make conversion easier.
This is colonial thinking. “Civilization just happens to be the natural evolution of what I am doing. Your ways are barbarian backwards savagery”. It is the same logic.
There’s nothing natural or linear in religious belief. Catholicism itself is fragmented into hundreds of sects, and so is every single religion ever to have existed. Adapted to the particular capricious vanities of the local clergy and the established local customs. Christians taking some Jewish elements was just a manipulation tactic. I’m also sure some Islam sects would behead you for suggesting that Islam is a derivative of Christianity. The theory of a proto religion is also wrong, we know for a fact that not all of modern religions started from the same proto-belief, but ancient religions are actually quite varied and distinct.
I didn’t make a claim even remotely like that. I was not talking about superiority in any way. I’m not a Muslim and what you’re saying I’m claiming would only make sense if I was a Muslim since that was the end of the “evolution” I was talking about.
Would you make the same claim about proto-languages, that modern languages are not derived from them?
Yes, any proto-whatever theory is colonialist in essence. It’s a very heated argument in anthropology, sociology and social psychology. The current consensus is that it is only valid for the indo-european migration, and a version exist for the proto-sino-tibetan migration. But, we understand that it can only be claimed to apply thus far, and with all sorts of modern ideological biases and caveats. Both language and religion are extremely complex social phenomena that have independently appeared all throughout history. And every time they have their very unique and distinct qualities. There’s no unified tree of languages that has enough evidence to be authoritative. And there’s no such linear derivation equivalent for religion. It is all just pop-sci feefees.
Wait… you’re saying that languages aren’t actually derived from older languages and anyone who thinks so is colonialist?
Because I would look into where the ‘ist’ suffix in ‘colonialist’ comes from. Believe it or not, it didn’t pop into existence along with the rest of the English language.
I’m sorry you don’t like it that Judaism was derived in great part by Babylonian mythos which, themselves, likely were derived from a previous mythos, but I’m not sure what that has to do with colonialism or any idea of superiority and I’m sorry you don’t like the simple fact that we can point to specific stories which eventually made their way into Judaism and then on to Christianity and Islam.
As for why that is linear? Because that’s how time works. The Babylonians came first, then the Jews, then the Christians, then the Muslims. And each one derived their religion from the previous one.
Ffs, this is why I never engage with you. You’re so thick skulled, nuance is always lost on you. It’s like “bad faith argument, the person”. Enjoy your strawman, you built it, you can keep it.
Insulting me won’t change the fact that each of those religions was derived from the previous one in a linear fashion.
In fact, you have been insulting me this entire time. You claimed that I was doing some sort of colonialist superiority thing. As I said, that only makes sense if you are talking about Muslim superiority and Islamic colonialism, something that hasn’t happened in a very long time. I’m not Muslim and I also don’t think there is anything superior about any of those other Middle Eastern religions that ended up spreading around the world.
I just don’t know why you think oral history and folklore being passed down from generation to generation doesn’t happen when it’s the only way we have left to learn about many indigenous peoples’ histories. Sometimes by getting them from multiple groups and figuring out what truths can be gleaned by the similarities.
You should check out the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. He points out the importance of the name of the tree and has really interesting anthropological theories regarding the origin of the Adam and Eve story.
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.
“Tree knowledge good evil eat day eat die (dying) die”
The Hebrew is, literally, die-die (muwth-muwth) with two different verb tenses (dying and die), which can be translated as “surely die” or “dying you shall die.” This indicates the beginning of dying, an ingressive sense, which finally culminates with death.
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”.
In Western Europe, the fruit was often depicted as an apple. This was possibly because of a misunderstanding of – or a pun on – two unrelated words mālum, a native Latin noun which means ‘evil’ (from the adjective malus), and mâlum, another Latin noun, borrowed from Greek μῆλον, which means ‘apple’. In the Vulgate, Genesis 2:17 describes the tree as “de ligno autem scientiae boni et mali”: “but of the tree [literally ‘wood’] of knowledge of good and evil” (mali here is the genitive of malum). There is nothing in the Bible indicating that the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge was an apple.[10]
My money’s on it being a pomegranate originally. Apples wouldn’t have existed in the fertile crescent over 2000 years ago. Pomegranates are also messy and look bloody when eating them, fitting the “carnal knowledge” side of the story. I’ve heard other people suggest they could have been dates, but pomegranates seem like a way better fit for the story.
Adam and Eve never once complained about how freaking annoying it is to eat a pomegranate because 90% of it is dried bark and every tiny seed has its own inedible seed so I doubt that’s what it was.
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
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.
I think there was a non-canonical gospel that said so. And yes, the early church seemed to be relatively liberal with women’s rights. A lot of that got clawed back with later additions and choices of what books to include in the biblical canon.
rutgers.edu
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