With knowledge comes death?

The story so far;
Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, in full enjoyment of Life- eating, in fact, from the Tree of Life.
But there was another tree in the Garden, the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil”.
They had been told not to eat from that tree, but the time came when they took the plunge.
That is, they began making their own decisions about what was good and what was evil, instead of depending upon God’s will.
“Therefore”, said God, “I’m going to remove you from the Garden.
Which means that you’ll have no more access to the Tree of Life, which means you won’t be eating from the Tree of Life, which means you will die.
I told you that would happen”.
They had detached themselves from the will of God.
So they had detached themselves from Life.
The two go together.

That, briefly paraphrased, is the story of the opening chapters of Genesis.
Did they eat from the Tree of Life?
The tree of what knowledge?.

The stated connection between knowledge and death is often challenged in two different ways.
One possible objection is that Adam and Eve did not die, at least not in the way predicted.
The alternative objection is that death was already operating in the world before Adam and Eve could have made this choice.

They did not die

This version of the objection is based on the apparent inconsistency between the events which followed the expulsion from the Garden and the wording of God’s previous warning.
On the one hand, the warning is translated as “in the day that you eat of it, you will die”- Genesis ch2 v17
We are also told, on the other hand, that Adam lived to the age of nine hundred and thirty years- Genesis ch5 v5
His death comes eight hundred years after the birth of Seth, which follows on from the Cain’s murder of Abel;
So Adam’s death has to be more than eight hundred years after the expulsion from the Garden.
This seems to conflict with “in the day that you eat of it”.

But why would the writer (or the final redactor) of Genesis allow his narrative to include a contradiction?
It would not have been part of his purpose to present his God as a liar.
I think we have to accept that the author of Genesis himself could have seen no conflict between the two sets of statements.
If he saw any such conflict, he would have removed it by writing the warning in a different way.
Therefore the words of God’s warning, as the writer intended them to be understood, must have a meaning which is consistent with what happened afterwards.

I think the solution to the puzzle lies in finding the right understanding of “you will die”.
The Hebrew wording is very definite- “dying you die”, normally translated as “you will surely die”.
This makes it all the more unlikely that the writer would allow it to be contradicted by later events.
But is this predicting a single death, or a continuing series of deaths?
In other words, does it mean that Adam, the individual, will drop lifeless almost on the instant of expulsion from the Garden (which is not what happened)?
Or does it mean that the human race which Adam represents will begin to experience death from that moment onwards (which is exactly what happened)?
I’m not convinced that Hebrew offers a clear way of distinguishing between the two.
The second meaning is to be preferred because it gives the writer of Genesis the effect which he clearly intended.
His point is that humans die, and the whole purpose of the story is to explain why they die.
He has connected human death in general with the arrival of the knowledge of good and evil.

They were dying already

I was arguing in a previous thread that the “knowledge of good and evil” in this story is really about knowing them side by side, and defining the boundary line between them.
In other words, Adam and Eve “knew good and evil” when they began making their own decisions about which was which.
This offered a way of fitting the story into a more modern understanding of human origins as a gradual process of development.
I suggested that the difference between “knowing” and “not knowing” good and evil could be identified with the difference between acting upon conscious will and acting upon instinct.
In other words, “eating from the tree of knowledge” would represent the arrival of human consciousness.

But this seems to conflict with the story that “death” came at the same time.
For if this was a gradual process, then many generations of human ancestors, along with living things in general, were ending their lives in death long before humanity could have reached that point of “knowledge”.

In this case, the solution to the puzzle might be to shift our attention from death itself to the knowledge of death.
A small child is effectively immortal, in the sense that he has no consciousness of expecting death.
The same would have been true of our ancestors, as long as they were living only in the present.
Once they were able to remember the past, they would have been able to imagine the future.
They would be recognising patterns in their past experience, and then projecting them forward as expectations.
I would suggest that this expanded awareness of time was one of the marks of the arrival of human consciousness.

But one of the side-effects of this ability would be a growing awareness that our lives come to an end.
As they recognised the pattern that “people die”, they would arrive at the expectation that “I will die”.
And therefore the arrival of human consciousness would have been accompanied by knowledge of death.
As anthropologists recognise, when they seize upon any evidence they find that bodies have been deliberately buried.
That would be the sense in which the human race “died” when they took in “the knowledge of good and evil”.

And if Adam is to be taken as a symbolic figure, as representing the human race, that also reinforces my first argument in defence of the consistency of the story.
It makes it easier to understand how the words that were spoken to Adam could be fulfilled by what happens to the human race at large.

Death comes at the same time because it's the first time you are aware of death as something that will happen to you and understand it as such. Not even little children fully understand death even though they can die, so they have no knowledge of it.

Can you exactly "die" if you aren't consciously aware that's what's happening to you?

Think like Schroedinger's cat. Is it alive or dead in the box, and is that state dependent on your direct observation or knowledge of it?

reply to post by DISRAELI


But why? Why all the semantic gymnastics just to make it fit a popular view? Why can't it be as straight forward as it seems and that the serpent was telling the truth?

Genesis 3:22 -

And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever

This tells me plainly that they had not eaten from the tree of life. Yahweh wanted immortal hamsters to run around and procreate. What the serpent did was make them into beings of wisdom and discernment which made the Eden god very frightened and therefore denied them immortality. But the bottom line is that they did not die that day and they gained wisdom.

Why twist the words any more than that?

This subject has been popular on ATS lately for some reason and it's always the same. Somebody will say "look, the serpent told the truth" and then the rebuttal is always "not if you twist it this way and look at this book and that book and then this one..."

I think I'm going to make an essay soon about my full interpretation on it because I would like to see it debated. Not to discount Christianity but to maybe make Christians rethink where their loyalty truly lay. I think people are mistakenly connecting Yahweh to Jesus.

With self-awareness comes the knowledge of death. Animals that are not self-aware have no concept of themselves dying, they may see death happening around them but they do not relate that phenomenon to themselves.

When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil they learned dualism: good and evil, male and female, up and down, old and young, and most importantly life and death.

After they ate the fruit from the tree, they covered themselves with fig leaves because they noticed they were naked. This is a metaphor for gaining self-awareness in my opinion, and when you gain self-awareness and see all these things dying around you you relate that inevitability to yourself and your being.

Neither the snake nor God lied to Adam and Eve, when God said that they would surely die, I think he meant it like they would realize that their death was inevitable, while the serpent meant it in a more literal way.

reply to post by ketsuko

Thank you for those comments.
On that cat, by the way, it seems to me, in my non-scientific way, that the scientists who propounded that paradox are forgetting that the cat himself is an "observer" of the experiment.

reply to post by 3NL1GHT3N3D1

Thank you for those comments.
We seem to be essentially in agreement, this time round.

reply to post by Cuervo

It's not about aiming at a "popular view" (any view which compromises with the theory of evolution is not going to be all that popular).
It's about trying to recapture and re-state the essence of the message which the first writer wanted to put across.
We both agree that the words recorded in the early chapters of Genesis are not a tape-recording, they were set down by a human writer.
Very well then; that writer would not have been intending to put the Creator God in a bad light, and so he would not have been intending any meaning which seems to have that tendancy.
Any attempt to interpret the narrative on a value-system not intended by the author ("The Creator God is not good") is invalid, because if you don't accept the author's value system, there's no reason why you should accept his narrative at all.

The world we see around us tells us that something is not right with the human race, and the kind of things that are wrong with the human race have been wrong all through its history.
The Genesis narrative aims to explain that in terms of a broken relationship between the human race and its creator.
If you reject that concept, you will need to look for a different explanation of what went wrong.
Any attempt to argue that the human race is all wise and wonderful and everything is hunky-dory simply will not wash, because the world we see around us tells us otherwise.

It is not a coincidence that this thread was planned to appear on the forum immediately before the last thread in the 1 Corinthians series;
The waiting and the Resurrection

One is about the arrival of death, the other is about the conquest of death.
They belong together as problem and solution.

DISRAELI
The story so far; Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, in full enjoyment of Life- eating, in fact, from the Tree of Life.
But there was another tree in the Garden, the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil”.They had been told not to eat from that tree, but the time came when they took the plunge.

Who exactly told them not to eat of the 'tree of knowledge' and why was the tree of life allowed to be eaten from?

DISRAELI
That is, they began making their own decisions about what was good and what was evil, instead of depending upon God’s will.
“Therefore”, said God, “I’m going to remove you from the Garden. Which means that you’ll have no more access to the Tree of Life, which means you won’t be eating from the Tree of Life, which means you will die. I told you that would happen”.

Youve perhaps contradicted yourself, it was the 'tree of knowledge' which was forbidden; or do you know the difference? If the tree of life gave them awareness of impending death, why would they with that knowledge eat of it (I wouldnt); this becomes very interesting (potencial trickery).

DISRAELI
They had detached themselves from the will of God.
So they had detached themselves from Life. The two go together.

One metaphor for the 'tree of knowledge' and (the human fall from grace) is this. They had sex with their demi-god creators (DNA swapage). They were never earthbound before in the sense the Garden of Eden was anything other than a labratory off planet. The introduction of new combinations of DNA manilpulation (by their creators not allowed to procreate with the still apelike human form) is just a highly sanitized version of why humans came to live on earth as gross matter beings. We fell? no, we were engineered and fairy stories will not support this/cover it up. A tree of knowledge existing? and man eats of it and is instantly presto chango "Gnostic", then is punished for inadvertantly (SURPRISE) becoming so? Perhaps you are thinking this is the cause; another scenario entirely: slithering serpent Lucifer in the Garden gives by way of the 'apple' to Eve she tricks Adam and instantly FREEWILL manefests within the human and there then comes the 'fall'. Either way, more compelling and reasonable explainations of the 'fall' of man as ridiculous or at least as logical as genesis.

reply to post by vethumanbeing

Yes, that's how I began the thread.
I look forward to seeing whether you agree or disagree with me.

vethumanbeing
Who exactly told them not to eat of the 'tree of knowledge' and why was the tree of life allowed to be eaten from?

The story says that God told them not to eat of the "tree of knowledge".
You know that.
"The tree of life" represents Life. God wanted them to live, so he allowed them to eat from it.

Youve contradicted yourself, it was the 'tree of knowledge' which was forbidden.

No contradiction.
Yes, initially, the "tree of knowledge" was forbidden.
But the story also states that after they had eaten from that tree, God took steps to deny them access to the Tree of Life.
I was just paraphrasing the standard story. It's all there.

One metaphor for the 'tree of knowledge' and (the human fall from grace) is this.

You have decided to go for a different metaphor. I like mine better, because it is more likely to be in line with what the writer of the Genesis story intended us to understand about the relation between the human race and the Creator.

vethumanbeing
Youve perhaps contradicted yourself, it was the 'tree of knowledge' which was forbidden; or do you know the difference? If the tree of life gave them awareness of impending death, why would they with that knowledge eat of it (I wouldnt); this becomes very interesting (potencial trickery).

I need to add to my reply, because you edited in this version of your comments after I began replying to the first version.
You have confused yourself by careless reading of the first few lines of the OP, which I will quote again.

Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, in full enjoyment of Life- eating, in fact, from the Tree of Life.
But there was another tree in the Garden, the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil”.
They had been told not to eat from that tree, but the time came when they took the plunge.
That is, they began making their own decisions about what was good and what was evil, instead of depending upon God’s will.

As you can see from the first two lines, I am fully aware of the difference between the two trees.
The Tree of Life did not give them knowledge of impending death.
The point of my proposal was that knowledge of impending death came to them for the first time through the Tree of Knowledge.
This case was argued out in more detail in the earlier thread "The Tree of what knowledge?": I attached a link in the opening lines of the OP.

DISRAELI
I need to add to my reply, because you edited in this version of your comments after I began replying to the first version.
You have confused yourself by careless reading of the first few lines of the OP, which I will quote again.

Its not my fault you are jumping in on my edits (too quick on the draw), bad manners I guess on my part.

DISRAELI
Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, in full enjoyment of Life- eating, in fact, from the Tree of Life.
But there was another tree in the Garden, the tree of “the knowledge of good and evil”.They had been told not to eat from that tree, but the time came when they took the plunge.
That is, they began making their own decisions about what was good and what was evil, instead of depending upon God’s will.

What I took you to say when you stated they ate of the 'tree of life' they 'acquired the knowledge' they would eventually die (as mortal creatures). How can this be its not the 'tree of knowledge' (the THAT other one that gave them LIFE and a sense of immortality or mortality?). Gods will went out the window when Lucifer gave them FREEWILL, Gods Will is run roughshod over, muted, transgressed.

DISRAELI
As you can see from the first two lines, I am fully aware of the difference between the two trees. The Tree of Life did not give them knowledge of impending death.The point of my proposal was that knowledge of impending death came to them for the first time through the Tree of Knowledge.

So once the digestion of the 'Tree of Knowledge' occures the "tree of life" becomes moot (disapears as any sort of saving grace); as in not available to be planted, eaten of or fruit stored in 50 degree temperatures below ground.

DISRAELI
vethumanbeing

DISRAILI
You have decided to go for a different metaphor. I like mine better, because it is more likely to be in line with what the writer of the Genesis story intended us to understand about the relation between the human race and the Creator.

OF COURSE YOU LIKE YOURS BETTER, (and neglected to quote my actual metaphors for human creation). Yours is standard PAP; why? "because it is more likely to be in line with what the UNKNOWN WRITER (MOSES, NO) intended us to understand (AS HUMAN MANIPULATION BY OTHERS) about the relation (ship) between the human race and the Creator". Il quote you even within your own post reply. Yours isnt a metaphor at all its just a dance step toe to toe with the "NORMAL" inside the box NOT THINKING FOR YOURSELF diatribe with the 'unknown' writers/slight of hand con-artists.

vethumanbeing
What I took you to say when you stated they ate of the 'tree of life' they 'acquired the knowledge' they would eventually die (as mortal creatures). How can this be its not the 'tree of knowledge' (the THAT other one that gave them LIFE and a sense of immortality or mortality?).

I've already pointed out that this was a misreading of what I said.
My point all along has been that this "knowledge of death" came from the "tree of knowledge".

So once the digestion of the 'Tree of Knowledge' occures the "tree of life" becomes moot (disapears as any sort of saving grace); as in not available to be planted, eaten of or fruit stored in 50 degree temperatures below ground.

I actually understand the Tree of Life more metaphorically, just as I understand the Tree of Knowledge metaphorically.
In my thread "Did they eat from the Tree of Life", I suggested that for the author it represents a kind of Life coming direct from God, as superior to the kind of life we have now as a device ruuning off the mains is better placed than a device running off batteries.
If "death" is to be identified with "knowledge of death", then being able to eat from the Tree of Life could be identified with having a sense of immortality (and at the end of Revelation the Tree of Life comes back in that sense).

DISRAELI
vethumanbeing

veteranhumanbeing
What I took you to say when you stated they ate of the 'tree of life' they 'acquired the knowledge' they would eventually die (as mortal creatures). How can this be its not the 'tree of knowledge' (the THAT other one that gave them LIFE and a sense of immortality or mortality?).

DISRAELI
I've already pointed out that this was a misreading of what I said. My point all along has been that this "knowledge of death" came from the "tree of knowledge".

IN ANOTHER THREAD; you are confusing the two ideas as one, why start two (same idea) threads at the same time did you forget you had an identical posit (subcontext) thread started already?

vethumanbeing
So once the digestion of the 'Tree of Knowledge' occures the "tree of life" becomes moot (disapears as any sort of saving grace); as in not available to be planted, eaten of or fruit stored in 50 degree temperatures below ground.

DISRAELI
I actually understand the Tree of Life more metaphorically, just as I understand the Tree of Knowledge metaphorically.
In my thread "Did they eat from the Tree of Life", I suggested that for the author it represents a kind of Life coming direct from God, as superior to the kind of life we have now as a device ruuning off the mains is better placed than a device
running off batteries.

That other thread AGAIN! I havent read; yet you continue to reference. What author of which book? Genesis? Moses. As if he was/were actually there (he'd be millions of years old to again manifest as the primary Judaic/Christian Leader crawling out of the rushes of the none existent red sea). Life coming from God Aspect or Intelligent Design happenstance, and which one actuated it- a demi-God? or The Sun in the form of radiation/animation; superior to us as a powerhouse of nuclear energy, not exactly a battery.

DISRAELI
If "death" is to be identified with "knowledge of death", then being able to eat from the Tree of Life could be identified with having a sense of immortality (and at the end of Revelation the Tree of Life comes back in that sense).

The knowledge of death comes with "SELF CONSCIOUSNESS" or the idea one IS ALIVE (hey there ITS ME waving 'hi' to what Im sure is ME as I recognize myself in the mirror) and in so being will die or at least am 99% certain my body will, (as I watch how nature decomposes as example) not so sure about my conscious being because that is indeterminate as to whether spirit/soul aspect even exists (THINK SO) (early on weeks only with the human experiment and whether/when or IF it will realize its soul is eternal). We couldnt figure this one out by ourselves and needed manipulating forces to tell us one of 2 things: all is Not true, or ALL is True as we are BEING SCRIPTED TO BELIEVE; no one is taking any bait, or showing themselves to be "the supreme creator" of ourselves/themselves. WE ARE IT AND WE MUST AT SOME POINT REALISE THIS, we are its aspect as individual humans trying to express GOD as we "catch as catch" can see GLIMPSES of it within ourselves. Its so obvious to me.

reply to post by DISRAELI



If you look at the whole story in the literal sense, then there ends up being too many things, which just don’t add up IMO…

Here are just a few of the problems, with a literal interpretation…

Firstly, Adam is put into the Garden to work in verse 2:15 “to work it and take care of it”, Which is pretty similar, to his punishment from God in verse 3:17

Also, one would have to assume that Adam and Eve already had working reproductive parts/organs; which would mean that pain in childbirth, would already be a natural thing. But yet again, this is one of Gods punishments for Eve, eating from the tree of knowledge.

The biggest problem though, comes from the following…

God states in verse 2:17 that “if they eat of the tree of knowledge they will die”

And yet we know from verses… Genesis 3:22

Genesis 3:22 -
And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever

…that Adam and Eve had not yet eaten from the tree of life, or so it would seem (see further below). Which means they were mortal beings, who would have experienced physical death, whether they ate from the tree of knowledge or not…

Which is a big dilemma, because God either lied, or he meant it in the sense they would only become aware of death, and their own mortality etc…And seeing as we can’t have God lying, we would have to go with God meaning it, in the later sense. But there’s a problem with this later view also…

Why would God want to punish Adam and Eve, for finding out that he/she are mortal beings…? It just doesn’t make any sense…And neither do the punishments themselves, based on what I outlined further up…

And there’s something else, even more crucial, which tends to get missed by most people reading it.

We know that God tells Adam Eve, that if they eat of the Tree of knowledge, they will surely die etc…And yet they apparently don’t know (or shouldn’t know) what death is yet…And the same goes for Eve’s conversation with the serpent. Eve explains to the serpent that they will die, if they eat from it etc… and then the serpent tells her “you will not surely die” and then she makes her decision, based on that interaction. In other words, they’re (Adam and Eve) having conversations, about concepts, that they shouldn’t know anything about.

This leads to another problem/dilemma, because if they did already know what the concept of death was, then the idea that God meant it, in the sense that the knowledge of death would become known, would have to be ruled out. Which leads us back to square one above…


I’m pretty sure that the whole story, is a deeply coded kabalistic book, which was never meant to be taken literally. And IMO the best way to view the story, is allegorically, and by trying to get an overall sense, of what it’s trying to portray.


If however, we look at the whole story as being about a spiritual death, then things start to make a bit more sense. And there arrives a possible solution to the dilemmas I presented above. One solution, is that Adam and Eve were already partaking and eating from the “Tree of life” while residing in the Garden of Eden. And it’s there banishment from it, which leads to the problems/death etc…but of course, that really only solves one of the dilemmas I outlined above (i.e. God not lying about the death aspect), and we’d still have to find a solution, as to why God punished them for it…And on top of that, the punishments don’t really make any sense IMO…


Here’s my unique take on it, from a more general overall view type perspective…

The trees aren’t literal trees, but are instead pointers for the things they represent. So the “tree of knowledge” is about going after a type of knowledge. The serpent represents our own egos and lower aspects, following after our own knowledge i.e. living in our own selfish ways...etc and turning away from the knowledge of God.

The knowledge of God, is closely connected to the “Tree of life”, which IMO represents our divine inner knowledge, that we are eternal spiritual beings, who are all spiritual sons/daughters of the Father God. This was the knowledge that was lost during the fall IMO, and is how evil entered into this world, and of course good, was always present. Once this knowledge left us, spiritual death entered in, whereby we believed physical death was the end. And with that, sin, death, corruption and all manners of evil came with it.

This is probably the first time you’ve heard this interpretation before…but to me, it makes perfect sense.


- JC

Joecroft
If you look at the whole story in the literal sense, then there ends up being too many things, which just don’t add up IMO…

Yes, that's one reason why i'm not following a literal interpretation.

Also, one would have to assume that Adam and Eve already had working reproductive parts/organs; which would mean that pain in childbirth, would already be a natural thing. But yet again, this is one of Gods punishments for Eve, eating from the tree of knowledge.

Do animals experience pain in childbirth? i had picked up the idea from somewhere that pain in human childbirth was a consequence of the anatomical changes resulting from bipedal movement. In which case it would indeed be one of the consequences of developing humanity, so the timing fits.

And yet we know from verses… Genesis 3:22...…that Adam and Eve had not yet eaten from the tree of life, or so it would seem (see further below). Which means they were mortal beings, who would have experienced physical death, whether they ate from the tree of knowledge or not…

I disagree that they had not eaten from the Tree of Life. You are assuming, like everybody else, that the Tree of Life would have conveyed immortality with a single act of eating. I challenge that assumption.
In my thread "Did they eat from the Tree of Life" (linked in the opening paragraphs of this thread) I argued that the Tree of Life conveys Life only with continuous eating.
I maintain that they were eating from that Tree all the time they were in the garden, since there was nothing to prevent them- in fact, the whole point of putting them in the garden was to enable them to eat from the Tree of Life which was deliberately placed at the centre.
That is why I stated in the opening paragraph of this thread that they were eating from the Tree of Life.
The effect of God's decision was to cause this eating to cease, which made them begin to die.

We know that God tells Adam Eve, that if they eat of the Tree of knowledge, they will surely die etc…And yet they apparently don’t know (or shouldn’t know) what death is yet…And the same goes for Eve’s conversation with the serpent. Eve explains to the serpent that they will die, if they eat from it etc… and then the serpent tells her “you will not surely die” and then she makes her decision, based on that interaction. In other words, they’re (Adam and Eve) having conversations, about concepts, that they shouldn’t know anything about.

Even if they don't know what death is, they know from God's attitude that it is something bad.
And they do know that God has told them not to do it, which ought to be enough in itself.

One solution, is that Adam and Eve were already partaking and eating from the “Tree of life” while residing in the Garden of Eden. And it’s there banishment from it, which leads to the problems/death etc…

Yes, that is the solution which I originally adopted and have just outlined again.

The trees aren’t literal trees, but are instead pointers for the things they represent. So the “tree of knowledge” is about going after a type of knowledge. The serpent represents our own egos and lower aspects, following after our own knowledge i.e. living in our own selfish ways...etc and turning away from the knowledge of God.

Have you noticed that I don't take them as literal trees either?
You might like to re-read the OP and the two associated threads found in the links, to see how much of them you really disagree with.

reply to post by Joecroft


I like this interpretation! (albit easier on the ears than my two (totally ignored) metaphorical interpretations of the two trees and the human interaction of them). Nicely done; your knowledge of scripture and ability to pull an insightful corrosponding answer from your study (out of thin air) always surprises me.