NOTES for Gen 3:1-24

The biblical story of the fall has always raised many questions for readers. What does the tree of the knowledge of good and evil mean, and what does it symbolize? Why is knowing good and evil bad? Where did the serpent in the garden of Eden come from? And what, in the end, happened to human beings during the fall? A great deal depends on the answer to the first question. Why was knowing good and evil dangerous for the human being? Why does eating the fruit from this particular tree lead to death, as God warns the human being?

Some people have thought, and still think now, that this concerns what is sometimes called "childlike innocence," whatever that may mean. Sometimes people speak directly of sexual "innocence," and sometimes of spiritual and moral innocence. The first is clear enough: God commanded the human being to be fruitful and multiply even before the fall, and He hardly meant any ways other than the traditional and well-known one. The second is more complicated, but even here it is not hard to see that, even if one considers children "innocent" in the sense of good and evil (which is far from obvious in itself), such ignorance completely excludes any spiritual or moral responsibility: the human being then becomes an amoral creature, to whom it is meaningless to prescribe anything as a commandment or as a moral, or even behavioral, prohibition.

The point is clearly something else. In antiquity, "good and evil" often meant the whole created world, which was then often described by using one or another pair of all-embracing, cosmic-scale opposites, such as, for example, "heaven and earth" in the biblical Poem of Creation. "Good and evil" was also one such pair. Knowledge in the Bible is always something practical, not abstract and contemplative; it involves entering into what is known and mastering it, not simply detached analysis. To know the world, one had to plunge headlong into it, including into all the evil present in it. And evil was already in the world, for the angels had fallen before humanity, and the serpent in the garden of Eden, symbolizing the power of darkness, confirms this.

The serpent appears because in antiquity the serpent was a symbol of various kinds of magical practices, which from the biblical point of view were in any case evil and a challenge to God. This desire to plunge headlong into the world's evil, to try it and then decide for oneself whether it really is evil or not, is what leads the human being astray. It is quite possible that at first the human being did not intend to quarrel with God or challenge Him. He simply wanted to try to create his own world, where everything would be determined by him, including the question of what, for him, for the human being, is good and what is evil.

But the human being plainly did not have the strength to create such a world. As soon as his "eyes were opened," he saw his nakedness, his own inadequacy in light of the task he had set himself. To admit such inadequacy before God is frightening, not because He will punish, but because one will have not only to fall in one's own eyes, but also to give up such a wonderful project (or rather, fantasy project).

And then, unwilling to acknowledge the obvious, the human being begins to shift blame onto those around him, onto circumstances, in short, onto everything and everyone except himself. Yet for God, "the wife whom You gave me" and the tempting serpent are no excuse. Refusing to acknowledge responsibility puts a wall between God and the human being, a wall that from then on will define the whole life of humanity, now fallen humanity.