The Forbidden Fruit

So Eve takes a bite out of the "forbidden fruit"... what the hell is forbidden fruit?  Well let's start with the tree from which this fruit is coming from. 

Genesis 2:16-17, "And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die."

So it's the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat from.  In other words, God wants his first human creations to live in blissful ignorance.  As chaotically temperamental as God has been thus far in the Old Testament, I can at least understand God's point of view on this.  Yet at the same time, knowledge is a powerful temptation to resist.  God is clearly acting as a parent... more accurately a patriarch, sheltering his children from the realities of the universe.  Like conservative adults keeping their kids away from R rated movies, God appears to want Adam and Eve to exist in peaceful Eden with not a care in the world.  But does God really want that?  If God had wanted his human creations to truly be ignorant, then why did he create the 'tree of the knowledge of good and evil' in the first place.  The premise of Eden is identical to the premise of life for every individual.  We are all presented with temptations.  We are all presented with the prospects of greater knowledge.  We are all curious.  Adam and Eve did what any self-righteous children would do, they tested the rules.  They questioned authority.  They challenged the system.  Bending the rules and testing the limits of what one can get away with is a classic theme of adolescence and seeming every popular coming-of-age story.  Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn are the Adam and Eve of the 19th century.  Childhood mischief can be found throughout Native American creation stories as well.  It is human nature to question, and I think this aspect of Genesis is absolutely vital to representing human nature accurately.

So if a primary aspect of human nature is curiosity, and God created us in his image... then God must be curious as well.  The word 'curiosity' is a more positive variation of the word 'temptation', but I think it is certainly fair to say that God has temptation as well.  God was tempted into creating the universe, and he was tempted into tempting his creations; Adam and Eve.  God is no less curious than his children.


When Eve takes a bite of knowledge, she sets off the human tradition of progress.  Spied through the eyes of a cultural anthropologist, one can deduce two main points.  The culture that created this story actually just created and excuse to explain why their attempts at progress are justified.  In the same token, they also are able to justify the subjugation of women by blaming the original sin on Eve.

Call me judgmental but the more I read the bible the more I sense that the Old Testament's stories spawned from a rather backwards middle-eastern culture.