Fall in the Garden of Eden
Fruit falls from trees when ripe, if we don’t pick it, or if birds and insects and rodents don’t get to it first. Thinking about the Garden of Eden, I wondered what if the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil also fell? What if Eve found it on the ground and understood this as permission to eat? What if this were the temptation?
The idea of things going to waste, especially something as precious as knowledge, is intolerable. If this were the choice confronting Eve, I would not blame her for breaking the taboo. In fact, I would applaud.
Prompted by this slightly whimsical supposition, I wrote a new version of the pivotal scene Read it here before moving on to the commentary:
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Paintings of the Garden of Eden tend to depict it as an orchard, or a landscape of woods and meadows, but always trees bearing fruit. The text emphasises the trees. “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat,” God declared. “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.”
[Reader, they did not die.]
Combine the trees and the fruit with the nakedness of Adam and Eve and you have a childlike portrait of innocence. An image which the eating of the forbidden fruit destroys, primarily by making them ashamed of their nakedness. (Not the kind of insight I would have hoped to gain from the Tree of Knowledge.)
LABOUR OR LEISURE IN PARADISE?
A naked couple eating from abundant fruit trees denotes a life of easy gratification, an existence delivered from want and work, an eternal summer. This may be the popular understanding of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But we forget that in the previous chapter man is created, it seems, because something was missing from the agrarian landscape God had fashioned: “and there was not a man to till the ground.”
Adam was created to take that role in the picture and God invited (instructed) him to cultivate and keep the land. I suppose we are meant to assume he planted, harvested and ate his crops, or used them as feed for the beasts of the field, which he ate or didn’t eat, we don’t know. None of that is stated.
But we do know he was doing all this naked and that seems odd, and somewhat hazardous. I’m tempted to explain the disjunction as a result of story revisions and development over a many centuries from its (likely) Sumerian origins. Either that, or as an expression of scorn for the nudity of early tribes.
THE TREE OF LIFE?
The real puzzle of the narrative comes later when they are expelled from Eden “lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” The Tree of Life? Excuse me. Why wasn’t it mentioned before? Will they not already have eaten from it as it wasn’t subject to any prohibition? Is God just gaslighting them here, piling on the agony by exaggerating what they have lost? Or were they really going to live for ever?
The text does not seem to envisage pregnancy and children until after the expulsion from Eden so that suggests to me that Adam and Eve would have ploughed on for ever and that they must have been eating regularly if inadvertently from the Tree of Life.