the tree
Gen 2:16 He told him, “You may eat the fruit of any tree in the garden,
Gen 2:17 except the tree that gives knowledge of what is good and what is bad. You must not eat the fruit of that tree; if you do, you will die the same day.”
The tree… yes, the tree that I guess most of us had one time questioned the meaning of the existence of that tree. Let’s look at the tree and do some thinking.
We know that God is almighty and He would not put the tree there if not for some use or purpose. All the trees in the garden were made for the purpose of feeding Adam and Eve. The purpose of the knowledge tree was put there to serve the purpose of not to be eaten by Adam and Eve. It was a very strange purpose indeed.
If God seriously didn’t want them to eat from the tree at the first place, I guess He probably had planted the tree somewhere else beyond their reach and even beyond their knowledge. As such, I believe God put the tree there with the knowledge that they will eat from the tree. If Eve and Adam would not eat from the tree, then it will be a redundant to put the tree there at the first place, as God knows that. Since the tree is there, I guess God put the tree there intentionally. May be we can think in terms of what would happen if God didn’t put the tree there.
If God didn’t put the tree there, what will be the fate of human beings today? Will we be all still living in Eden? There is one strange thing that I have noticed. Adam and Eve didn’t have any children while they were still living in Eden. King James Version of the record says that Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. I just cannot stop thinking that while Adam was in Eden, he didn’t know his wife or he just accepted his wife matter-of-factly without much interest on her physical, emotional or even spiritual conditions? May be that is why they didn’t have any children during their stay in Eden. To continue from my previous articles about thing in Genesis, I guess it makes sense to say that Adam and Eve only interested in each other after they have gained “the knowledge of what is good and what is bad”? During their stay in Eden, they didn’t even mind the other person was naked suggest that their way of thinking was very simple (or neutral or of total freedom). After eating the fruit, a whole new range of possibilities or options opened up for them to explore. But with each action taken, they have to weight or prepared to accept the consequences.
So, it is inevitably to come to a conclusion that the tree was needed if Adam and Eve were to fulfill the mission of populating the Earth. If the tree was not there, I guess there would be no one to write the Genesis. While saying this, I will stress that this is just a hypothesis. There are other functions of the tree that we might not be able to comprehend. However, I believe the history of mankind would not end if Adam and Eve didn’t eat from the tree. I believe God also created other people but didn’t put them in Eden as stated in Gen 4:14-17. If Cain was the second generation of the only human Adam and was put on exile, there should be no body around to be his wife and virtually no people around to kill him. It is interesting to think in this way, and I guess I might write on this some other time.
If the tree was not there, then Adam and Eve will never sin against God and perhaps human would live happily ever after. That would be equivalent to God creating robots in the most common sense. Thus for the sake of human freewill, the tree had to be there or else there will be no meaning for human freewill if human were created to not be able to sin. Thus it is also to say that the tree might be actually the instiller of human moral and value that follows after the stage of “the knowledge of what is good and what is bad” was obtained. I guess that is all for now, and hopefully I can come back to this with more insights.