Why an apple?

Genesis says nothing about the "forbidden fruit" being an apple, so why does everyone think it was an apple?  Here is a link that provides some interesting insights into this apparent misconception.  Personally I like the linguistic explanation... In latin, malum means both apple and evil... interesting.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2682/was-the-forbidden-fruit-in-the-garden-of-eden-an-apple

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.

In the Beginning...

This blog will be my first of many to come as I attempt to read the entire bible.  So at this point we've made it through the first page.  It is now 'Day Six'.  God has decided to leave all the most important necessities for a civilization beyond the basic natural environment for his last day of work.  The clear hierarchy of living things determined by a cattle-and-crops relying sedentary civilization reflect a classically human, ego driven perception of an elitist self.  But it is how the bible describes God creating man that struck me as cleverly leaving a loophole for those loving Christians prone to sexism.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

 God goes on to tell them to have sex a lot and take over the earth essentially; a principle of every evolved species on the planet.  But it is the whole 'man created in the image of God' thing that bothers me.  Could one argue that the bible states God created "him" in the image of God, but not necessarily 'her"?  It continues to say that God created male and female, but at the mention of anything feminine, the 'in his image' description is absent.  A discrepancy in translation to modern English perhaps, but it seems that if the message of humans being created in God's image is intended to apply to both men and women, this passage would be worded a little differently... So much for the word of God... this is clearly the work of imperfect human beings.

God goes on to create the garden of Eden and plants Adam right in the middle of it.  I find it a little ironic that Eve is created from Adam's rib.

And Adam said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man".

If the bible read, "he was taken out of woman", that would actually sound a little more natural like birth.  Instead, the creation of the first woman is uniquely inhuman and arguably only an afterthought of God's after he had made his precious masterpiece; man.  Eve is apparently only an addition to supplement man on his journey through life.

Now I will admit I have been rather critical of the first pages of Genesis so far, but despite the bible's sometimes blatant sexism,  I find the story of original sin to suggest an interesting psychological shift in Adam and Eve.  Once they eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, they immediately become self-conscious and try to cover themselves.  Genesis implies that will knowledge comes self-awareness, the very core of the ego complex.  An elegant element of these first few pages, a classically egocentric author has just explained the origin of his tendencies, unraveling along with a sense of purpose and free will as God punishes humanity to a life of hard work tending to crops to survive and an eventual and ominous return to dust.  This so called "punishment" ought to be looked at from God's perspective.  If I were God and I had created Adam and Eve, a pair living untested and unconcerned in a plentiful garden, I would not be able to resist in testing their maturity.  Like innocent children, Adam and Eve initially exist in sublime ignorance.  God has dangled the temptation of 'infinite possibility' in front of Adam and Eve.  Once one of them finally gains a little independence and confidence (ironically Eve), God grants us the adventurous test of life.  It reminds me of when parents push their kids to get out of the house and get a job.  Eve is given an even greater punishment, to live subserviently to man along with the horror of childbirth.  Or perhaps it is simply the more mature and independent of the Eden dwellers that God decides to give an even greater test.  Maybe God is trying to push the potential of those he has created, like a proud parent.

Then Eve produces Cain and Abel.  Perhaps Cain and Abel are the evil and good of the tree of knowledge.  Eve consumed the knowledge and produced both good and evil with it. 

Geneisis continues to catalog some of the descendants of Cain and then tells of the birth of Seth to Adam and Eve.  Then suddenly Genesis repeats the story of the birth of a son, Seth, to Adam.  Worded and repeated as if written by two different authors, the history of the source of this book bleeds through the text.

I'm going to continue now to read the rest of Genesis, but these were my first remarks.

My First Blog Post

This is my first blog post.  I'm looking forward to an interesting class and a good year!