Main news for 7 January 2026

King James Version (en)

Genesis, Chapter 2, verse 15

¹⁵And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

NOTES

Without this biblical verse it is impossible to understand what God's design for the human being consists in, why God created us. One can build a huge number of more or less pious hypotheses, but all of them will be our judgments...

What is the human being? And what is the Garden of Eden? At first glance it may appear that the issue is a completely real, earthly geography. Yet every people has such a sacred geography. Every people has its own sacred land, its own mythological ancestral homeland, usually where that people's historical memory awoke, where its own history began for it. The Jews remember themselves from the time of Abraham, and that means Harran, Northern Mesopotamia, where the Garden of Eden is located. There was something else as well: the memory of the times the Greeks called the "golden age," when the human being lived in full harmony with the world, with other people, with the gods, and with himself as well. The Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis combines features of the mythological ancestral homeland of the Jewish people with a description of the world in the times of the "golden age"; in this way the sacred writer wants to tell us that those times are not merely myth, that at one time the human being really did live in full harmony with God, with the world, with himself, and with other people.

What, then, was the perfect human being like? In the Poem of Creation it is said of him that he, alone of all the living beings created by God in our world, was created in the image and likeness of God. All the animals are created, each according to its "kind," or, as we would say today, according to its prototype. Only the human being has no prototype: every human being is created according to the image of God, and God Himself becomes the human being's "prototype." How is such a thing possible? From the point of view of his nature, the human being does not differ from other living beings; he is created by God from the "dust of the earth," and the whole universe, as people thought in the times when the account of the creation of the human being was written, consists of the tiniest specks of dust. There is nothing unique in human nature as such. The human being's uniqueness lies elsewhere: in that "breath of life" through which he becomes a "living soul." In the Bible, "soul" is not a static structure, but a process, the stream of life in which both the spiritual and the natural component are present: here are lofty spiritual movements, and simple physiology too, such as breathing or blood circulation.

A modern philosopher would probably call this stream existence. Such is the human soul in the biblical sense of the word. And the stream of human life exists in the quality in which it exists thanks to that very "breath of life," God's breath, God's presence at the very center of our own personhood, which makes that personhood's very existence possible. If there were no divine "breath of life," there would be no human being as the image of God; there would simply be another species of primates. That is why there is no human being without continuous communion with God: after all, breathing is not a one-time act, but a process that must continue without interruption. The human being was conceived and created by God for continuous communion with God, outside of which, spiritually speaking, he simply cannot remain himself. And yet God leaves the human being freedom: he can live as God proposes to him, or choose his own version of existence, under his full responsibility for all the consequences of his choice.

Today we read that the Lord gave the human being the right to give names to every living creature. And about the first prohibition...

FAQ

I believe in God and try my best to follow His word. But there is a question that gives me no peace: why was there a tree in the Garden of Eden in the first place that became the cause of man's fall? Even though man was warned, this in itself was already a trap for man. Why was this tree there at all, if God knew it was dangerous for man?

It is obvious that an unambiguous, uniquely correct answer to such a question likely cannot be given. Nevertheless… Undoubtedly, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil planted in the garden of Eden, the eating of whose fruit is forbidden, becomes a subject of testing for man. But it is worth looking at this narrative in its context...

It is obvious that an unambiguous, uniquely correct answer to such a question likely cannot be given. Nevertheless…

Undoubtedly, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil planted in the garden of Eden, the eating of whose fruit is forbidden, becomes a subject of testing for man. But it is worth looking at this narrative in its context. The second biblical account of the creation of man (and the narrative of the fall continues exactly this one) speaks of the meaning of human existence, intentionally digressing from the chronology of events. Therefore, we can think that the sacred writer is speaking about man in general, about each of us. And, consequently, to each (and not only to the first) man the commandment is given not to eat of the fruit of this tree. The key word for understanding this narrative is freedom. It is about man being given a real choice: to trust that God is right (and not eat from this tree) or not to trust, and, accordingly, to break the commandment.

If this tree were not there… The subjunctive mood is probably inappropriate here: the biblical narrative does not speak of what could or could not have been, but simply depicts the fact of the establishment of man's spiritual freedom by the means inherent to it. There is the will of the Creator concerning how man should live so that our life may be filled with eternal fullness and meaning. This design implies that we accept the moral world order (the "scale" of good and evil) as God established it, without trying to redefine it (to "master" or "know" it in the language of the sacred writer). The design implies that we choose this freely, out of love for God, and not as programmed automatons. This personal freedom is an incredible (incomprehensible even to the sacred writer) gift of the Creator to man, constituting the essence of our likeness to God. If there is no freedom, then we are no different from the apes, from which, it seems, the Creator "manufactured" our body.

The biblical narrative thus says that God, having created man, placed him in extreme closeness to Himself, so that even power over good and evil, over what is considered good and bad, what ought and ought not to be, is accessible to us. "You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings…" ( 8:6), as Scripture says. The acceptance of God's statutes regarding good and evil for man essentially turns out to be the acceptance of God Himself as the Source and Lord of life. In this regard, commentators usually note that the fulfillment of the commandment "you shall not eat of it…" requires faith, that is, trust that God is good and desires our good. Therefore, the planting of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil puts us in a situation where we need to believe or not believe. Without this it would be very easy for us, but we would not be like God, that is, we would not be free persons if the possibility of not believing were not real.

Finally, many commentators draw attention to the fact that the command "not to eat of the tree…" is the first (and at that moment the only and all-encompassing) commandment of the Creator to man. This is His Word to us, calling for a dialogue. Speaking about how we answer this call, the sacred writer simply states a sad fact…

I will add to all this one more important aspect. Strictly speaking, the situation described in the 2nd chapter of the book of Genesis implies not so much the choice to "eat or not to eat," but the choice between the tree of power over the world order, and the Tree of Life. According to the generally accepted interpretation of the majority of the Church Fathers and authoritative church thinkers, the Tree of Life is a symbol of the Son of God Himself. However, it is also often seen as a symbol of the Tree of the Cross, on which God, out of love, gives us His life without reserve.

Why did God create the "tree of knowledge" in the garden? After all, He forbade man to "eat from it"?

Your question is one of the most frequently asked by people reading the Bible. We will answer with a quote from the magazine "Holy Joy", which published a series of articles on the book of Genesis where this question was examined...

But there is also another tree in the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The meaning of this image is not easy to understand. Let us recall what we discussed last time about a characteristic linguistic device—two antonyms connected by the conjunction "and". This does not mean "this and that", but "everything contained between the two poles". The poles in this case are good and evil, that which is right and that which is wrong, that which corresponds to the Creator's design and that which does not correspond to it. Then, if "heaven and earth" in the first chapter of Genesis means "everything", the universe from the perspective of how (of what) it is constructed, then "good and evil" is "everything", the universe from the perspective of how (based on what principles) it is ordered. And the source of these principles is the Creator Himself. So, perhaps we need to know these principles, to learn them? Not exactly. For us, the word "knowledge" means acquiring information, "satisfying curiosity". In the Bible, this word has a completely different meaning. For the biblical authors, there is no abstract knowledge; knowledge is strength, power, and the word "knowledge" means "taking possession" (cf. Gen 4:1), taking power. Thus, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolizes a very profound reality—the existence of meaning, an underlying spiritual foundation, and principles in the universe, and that these principles are established by God. It is precisely the conformity of the universe to these principles that gives it vitality; therefore, these two trees—of life and of the knowledge of good and evil—stand together in the midst of Paradise. What, then, does God's commandment not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil mean (vv. 16-17)? It is not a prohibition against learning these principles; it is a commandment not to lay claim to authority over these principles, not to claim that I, a human being, will determine these principles, that I myself will decide what is good and what is evil. Because then I would violate the foundations of the universe established by God, undermining its vitality, which brings about death. One can eat fruit either from the tree of life or from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

God created both man and woman on the sixth day of creation. Why, then, was the man lonely, and only then did God create his wife from his rib? And what difference between a woman and a wife is implied?

There is no difference between a "woman" and a "wife"; that is not the issue. What differs are the two accounts of the creation of the world and of man, which comprise the 1st and 2nd chapters of the Book of Genesis, respectively...

The oral tradition, originating from Moses, existed in profound antiquity in several variants; they were recorded quite late, around the 9th to 7th centuries B.C. One variant of the creation account was recorded in the Northern (Israelite) Kingdom, the other in the Southern (Judean) Kingdom. It is possible that there also existed separate sub-versions, likewise reflected in the written tradition. During the compilation of the final redaction of the text, which was completed in the period of the Second Temple (late 6th century B.C.), both variants of the account were included in the text, because they differ significantly and mutually complement each other.

The first account speaks more to the sequence of events during the creation of the world; its main idea is progressive creation, where increasingly complex created things appear not simultaneously, but one after another. The first account concludes with the words of 2:3 (the division of the text into chapters and verses was done in the Middle Ages and is not always felicitous). The second account, conversely, speaks predominantly of the meaning and "inner" logic of the creation of the world, abstracting itself from the sequential chronology of events.

This is particularly evident in 2:5. The first account speaks of the creation of man, stating that he was created in the image and likeness of God on the sixth day of creation, that humanity as a phenomenon encompasses both male and female, and that man was appointed to have dominion over creation. The second account conveys that the creation of man gives meaning to the entirety of creation, that man consists of spirit and flesh, that he is endowed with freedom and responsibility before God, and that human beings (male and female) are created in need of one another and mutually complement each other.

The word "rib" in the modern Russian translation sounds traditional, but is highly unfortunate. In the original text and in translations into ancient languages, the woman was created from the "side" or "flank" of the man; into modern language, it would be better translated not as "rib", but, say, as "aspect". As you can see, there is no contradiction here, but rather a mutual complementarity of two accounts presented from different perspectives.

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