First, what is the general meaning of this passage. Second, what do you think is the true nature of the passage, of its intentions?What is the true nature of this Biblical passage?
Knowledge = Bad
Ignorance = Good
Well there could be a couple ways of looking at it.
The idea could be that Adam and Eve would no longer exist as they had been after "eating the fruit." After gaining knowledge of good and evil, the blissfully ignorant Adam and Eve would no longer exist - they would have died as a result of it.
Either that, or God was lying.
..What is the true nature of this Biblical passage?
2:15-23 The penalty for violating the commandment was death (v.17)鈥?instant spiritual death and progressive physical death. In the process of naming the animals and birds, Adam would have noticed that there were males and females. Each one had a mate that was similar to itself, yet different. This prepared Adam for a helper who would be comparable to himself. His bride was formed from one of his ribs, taken from his side as he slept. So from Christ's side, His Bride was secured as He shed His life's blood in untold agony. Woman was taken not from Adam's head to dominate him, nor from his feet to be trodden down, but from under his arm to be protected, and from near his heart to be loved.
God gave headship to man before sin entered. Paul argues this fact from the order of creation (man was created first) and the purpose of creation (woman was made for the man) (1Co_11:8-9). Also, although it was Eve who sinned first, it is by Adam, the head, that sin is said to have entered the world. He had the position of head and was thus responsible.
Verse 19 is clearer with the pluperfect tense: "The LORD God had formed . . . every beast," i.e., before He made man.
The meaning is God saying that the Tree of Knowledge is not to eat, because if you do, you will die...spiritually because their sin separated them from God. God did not give Adam and Eve a choice in eating from this tree. He told them NOT to eat from the tree.What is the true nature of this Biblical passage?
Genesis 2:17- God introduces the freedom of choice
and warns about the consequence of a wrong choice
Knowledge lead to the making of the A-bomb that will be used to wipe out humanity
Satan was that tree.
The story of the Fall of Adam and Eve is the story of the Agricultural Revolution. It is far too much of a coincidence that the genealogies of the Bible point back ~8,000 years which is more or less when history tells us the Agricultural Revolution happened. There are all sorts of contextual clues in the Bible as well.
Cain, for example, was considered the first farmer who built a city. You can't have a city without agriculture. Adams punishment was that he must work the land, a clear reference to agriculture. Even the concept of ownership of the land described in Genesis 1 is an attitude completely absent from non-agriculturalists.
It is important to realize that before this 'totalitarian' agriculture, humans lived quite comfortably foraging, hunting and with low level farming. The myth that our lives are easier now because of agriculture has been shattered. Hunter gatherers had far more free time and they regularly mixed work and play. It required fewer calories than an agricultural lifestyle and the people lived in harmony with nature.
Before the AR, humans lived as any other animal. When they hunted, sometimes they caught the prey and sometimes they didn't. Sometimes the lion catches the gazelle and sometimes it doesn't. Who should eat and who should go hungry and who should live and who should die was not up to humans to decide. Agriculture requires a completely different mentality. Agriculturalists insist that food rights solely belong to them. They believed they could decide who should eat and who should go hungry and who should live and who should die. Previously, this was the knowledge of 'the gods.' These Agriculturalists decided they knew good from evil and it was good for them to have all the food. It is good for them to kill off their competition, to destroy ecosystems to set up a monoculture farm of what humans like to eat.
Even today, indigenous, non agriculturalists peoples resist agriculture as something untenable and unsustainable. The same holds true for the Piraha in the Amazon and the Bushmen of the Kalahari. The Pawnee referred to agriculture as cutting out the hair of their earth mother goddess, Atira. There are countless stories in indigenous cosmologies of temperance and using good judgment in respecting the ecosystem as a whole. These groups know that to live outside the laws of nature means death. This quote was a warning from a neighbour about the dangers of Agriculture. This neighbour was eventually killed or assimilated and their stories were assimilated as well. These civilization builders seemingly liked the story and said, "yes, we do have knowledge of good and evil and that's why we must take over the world and rule it." That's why they invented the gods.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that there were neighbours of the early Agriculturalists who thought the same way as the Pawnee. Surely they criticized these Agriculturalists, "you don't get to decide who lives and who dies, that is not the knowledge of the gods. You don't get to decide it is good for you to eat and bad for your competitors to eat." They knew this behaviour wasn't sustainable even back then. Nothing can survive living outside the laws of nature because of the way the balance of the ecosystem is upset.
Agriculture allows for a food surplus. An increased food supply will always result in an increase in population. This increased population requires more food. The only way to maintain and agriculturalist lifestyle is to expand and expand they did. Fast forward some 8-10,000 years and we're now in a period of mass extinction at a rate not seen since the fall of the dinosaurs and we're the ones causing it. There are over 7 billion humans spread out on nearly every part of the world. The former lush rainforests of the Middle East are long gone. We have run out of places to grow into and there are no new lands to colonize. The cracks are showing and the collapse of civilization is becoming more and more imminent. Many of us see now that it was always inevitable. We simply can't live indefinitely living in an unsustainable way.
The Abrahamic faiths are particularly eschatological because they've been waiting for that end since the beginning. They knew it would come but they couldn't have guessed how hard we have tried over the past thousands of years to fill our unsustainable desires. How many species have we killed? How many cultures have we destroyed?
There are only two questions left as far as I'm concerned...
When the crash happens, are any humans going to survive and how many other species are we going to take down with us?
What are you going to do to protect your landbase from total ecological collapse?
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