What happened when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit? (2024)
November 20, 2010
THE EPITOME OF SHORT-TERM THINKING
This week we conclude our examination of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil by understanding why eating the fruit of the Tree led to death for Adam and Eve (and consequently, for all of us).
It’s easy to see what has become of humanity since the fall of man (just watch an episode of “Real Housewives”). But what were things like before Original Sin?
Naked bliss
Before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, they were in a state of complete innocence. They lived and thought only in the moment. They “walked with God” daily and thus received constant direction from Him. They never had to think about tomorrow or “what to do next”, because God was always there to tell them. Their only obligation was to obey.
The Bible makes a point of saying that they were naked and unashamed. They didn’t know the implications of being naked because they never thought that far ahead! They ran around naked and free in their naïveté without giving any thought to what would happen next. They were like babies in that sense (or college kids on spring break).
So what happened when they ate from the Tree? Well, as advertised, they gained knowledge of good and evil – of creation and destruction.
They knew what they didn’t know
Does this mean that Adam and Eve did not know what creation and destruction were before they ate the fruit? No, they knew about creation because God undoubtedly explained the origin of the world to them, plus Adam knew that Eve had been created. They knew about destruction because they witnessed it on a small scale whenever they ate fruit from the other trees (“destroying” it in the process).
But the complete definitions of good and evil are creation and destruction in the long-term.That is what Adam and Eve gained knowledge of: the long-term!
When they disobeyed God, they voluntarily disconnected themselves from His influence. Their constant “life guide” was gone. They were on their own for the first time in their existence. They were no longer led by an intelligence that was always and completely right and just. They had to figure out what to do next based on their own imperfect judgment and thought processes.
The human brain is in a constant state of creating and “rewiring” itself based on our thoughts and experiences. This is most dramatically true with infants because their lack of experience gives them the most new neural connections to make. As heretofore-innocent beings, Adam and Eve were in a similar position.
When they had to think long-term for the first time, brand new connections would have begun to form in their brains. They began to process long-term cause/effect relationships and they started to understand the ramifications of what they had done. They were able to imagine a future in which they were separated from God. They became afraid, and they hid.
When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they began to see all the long-term implications of their nakedness – desire, sexual intimacy, joy, pregnancy, heart break, child rearing, guilt, jealousy, etc. (basically, they took on the opposite mindset of a kid on spring break).
When they experienced this flood of knowledge and the guilt associated with it, Adam and Eve committed the first religious act by covering their “shame” with fig leaves.
So what WAS the forbidden fruit?
What was it about the fruit that caused this? Did it have some type of “magical” composition? Did it contain a deadly brain toxin (could this have been the origin of high-fructose corn syrup)? No, I think that it was just regular fruit. What made it significant was God’s command not to eat it, which entailed the choice to stop living with moment-by-moment direction from Him. It was the choice that disconnected Adam and Eve from God, not the fruity goodness.
God told Adam that in the day that he ate the fruit, he would die. How could God accurately make that prediction? Because He knew the causes that would lead to the effects. God knew that Adam and Eve were not always and completely right and just, so when they gained the knowledge of the long term and had the burden of decision, they would choose to pursue death by being comparative.
But God, being just, had to give them the opportunity to be contrastive – to repair their brains and live. Instead, they predictably chose to be comparative. They chose death.
And thus all of their descendants (us) follow the same pattern. We are all born innocent, however, since we are born without a connection to God, we all quickly gain knowledge of the long term. And since we are not always and completely right and just, we (like our original ancestors) choose to be comparative. We all eventually commit Original Sin and our brains become wired to pursue death. We damage our brains and compound and escalate that damage as we gain more experience.
Well that’s not terribly encouraging
But fear not. All is not lost. In the next post we will conclude our study of the first dispensation by examining the curses that God placed on Adam, Eve, and the serpent after Original Sin. The curses are the source of many of the struggles we face today, but in the midst of the curses He pronounced, God also gave us our greatest hope for redemption. Next time.
Remember to subscribe to this blog to receive new posts when they are published
This entry was posted in Terminology, The Dispensations, Two Trees in the Garden and tagged in Brain damage, comparative thinking, contrastive thinking, death, dispensations, evil, good, life.
“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” When God came into the garden, they hid from him. He noticed that they had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge
tree of knowledge
In Jewish tradition, the Tree of Knowledge and the eating of its fruit represents the beginning of the mixture of good and evil together. Before that time, the two were separate, and evil had only a nebulous existence in potential.
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_...
After she eats the fruit, Eve immediately changes. She begins to think of ways of becoming Adam's equal or perhaps his superior. But, fearful of losing Adam to another female creation, she decides that he must eat the fruit also. Adam does so but not because of Eve's arguments.
Forbidden-fruit theory (Bushman & Stack, 1996) encompasses commodity theory that holds that the more a commodity is perceived to be unavailable or not easily obtainable, the more it is valued compared to a commodity that is freely and easily obtainable.
The Book of Jubilees, an apocryphal Jewish work written during the Second Temple period, gives time frames for the events that led to the fall of man by stating that the serpent convinced Eve to eat the fruit on the 17th day, of the 2nd month, in the 8th year after Adam's creation (3:17).
The Archangel Michael attended Adam's death, together with Eve and his son Seth, still living at that time, and he was buried together with his murdered son Abel. Because they repented, God gave Adam and Eve garments of light, and similar garments will clothe the Messiah when he comes.
The sin of the Tree caused God's presence (Shechinah) to depart from earth; in kabbalah, the task of beirurim rectifies the sin of the Tree and causes the Shechinah to return.
The story of Adam and Eve is meant to teach the importance of obedience. Had Adam and Eve been obedient to God, they could have lived in paradise forever.
Their physical condition changed as a result of their eating the forbidden fruit. As God had promised, they became mortal. They and their children would experience sickness, pain, and physical death. Because of their transgression, Adam and Eve also suffered spiritual death.
In these texts, following her consumption of the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Bad, Eve becomes alienated. She is alienated from the man who is with her: he will now 'rule over her'. She is alienated from her maternal body: she will now give birth in pain.
They were condemned to a life of toil that ultimately ends in death: "By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."
When confronted, Adam tells God that Eve gave him the fruit to eat, and Eve tells God that the serpent deceived her into eating it. God then curses the serpent, the woman, then the man, and expels the man and woman from the Garden before they ate of the tree of eternal life.
Central to the story, too, is the “forbidden fruit.” Harvested from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God expressly forbids Adam and Eve from eating it. So, of course, they devour it. Their taboo snack results in a curse plaguing humanity with toil, disease, and death.
Revelation 20 tells of what happened to Satan during the period known as the Millennium. Satan is bound in chains and cast into a bottomless pit. The chains and bottomless pit are best understood as metaphors since Revelation is a highly symbolic book.
Lucifer claimed, with agency removed, no one would have the ability to sin against God, that not one soul would be lost, and all would be able to return sinless to the presence of Heavenly Father without the need for a Savior.
Jewish midrashic literature avows that, in addition to the patriarch couples, Adam, the first man, and his wife, Eve, were also interred in the Cave of the Patriarchs, a tradition supported by ancient Samaritan texts.
Lilith's name is not included in the creation story of the Torah but she appears in several midrashic texts. There are multiple origin stories for Lilith, but the most popular story depicts Lilith as the first wife of Adam.
The location of Eden is described in the Book of Genesis as the source of four tributaries. Various suggestions have been made for its location: at the head of the Persian Gulf, in southern Mesopotamia where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers run into the sea; and in Armenia.
According to the Qurʼān, both Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in a Heavenly Eden. As a result, they were both sent down to Earth as God's representatives. Each person was sent to a mountain peak: Adam on al-Safa, and Eve on al-Marwah.
The Old Testament tells of Adam and Eve, our progenitors. They lived in paradise in total innocence until the serpent (the devil) enticed them to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. As punishment for their disobedience, God banished them from Paradise.
So 69 weeks amount to 483 years; for, from the said year of Darius, unto the 42nd year of Augustus, in which year our Saviour Christ was born, are just and complete so many years, whereupon we reckon, that from Adam unto Christ, are 3974 years, six months, and ten days; and from the birth of Christ, unto this present ...
In the Old Testament, the apple was significant of the fall of man; in the New Testament, it is an emblem of the redemption from that fall. The apple is represented in pictures of the Madonna and Infant Jesus as another sign of that redemption.
Most artists, especially after the Renaissance, chose to depict Adam and Eve with navels because they looked unnatural without them, but a few painters—including 16th-century Dutch artist Jan van Scorel in his Adam and Eve in Paradise—selected the former interpretation and depicted the Biblical pair as smooth-stomached ...
In the poem Eve breaks God's ban on eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. God expels Adam and Eve from Paradise as a result of their actions; he also makes Adam work hard to farm difficult land to produce food and that Eve will suffer pain in childbirth from now on.
no-nonsense, driven, and competent. EVE was built for one purpose and initially, all she of her focus is on that one directive. But after spending time with robot WALL-E, EVE starts to learn that there's more to life than orders and goals—like love, for one.
Introduction: My name is Mr. See Jast, I am a open, jolly, gorgeous, courageous, inexpensive, friendly, homely person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
We notice you're using an ad blocker
Without advertising income, we can't keep making this site awesome for you.
