Prohibiting Knowledge of Good Things

In my early days of being a Christian, I was puzzled by God’s instruction that Adam & Eve should not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because it seems like having knowledge of good and evil is a good thing. I was puzzled because it seemed like the only text I could find in scripture where God seems to prohibit something that is good and beneficial. Which brought me to the question; if that’s the case, on what grounds might a good and perfect God prohibit something that is good and beneficial to us? And I could think of only one reason why – it was prohibited because we weren’t yet ready for it, but one day might be. And what could that ‘it’ be? To become like God, of course. So that is how I interpret that part of the story in Genesis; the best thing we could possibly have cannot be given to us in one solitary grab – we have to work towards becoming Divine.

A correct interpretation of Genesis reveals it is richly layered with symbolic and archetypal meaning. Given the foregoing, I was pleased recently to hear a like-minded interpretation of Genesis 2:17 from Biblical scholar Jonathan Pageau – who shared his belief that when God says, “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” – Pageau contended that, actually, God would have given them permission to eat from it, because ultimately, it’s necessary knowledge, just not yet.

Most Genesis scholars see the tree as representing a kind of profound Divine wisdom over and above our current understanding – so the interpretation that humanity was not yet prepared to fully understand or handle being that much like God, but decided to take it anyway, seems to be a reasonable one. Because that really is what the primary sin is; our fallenness means missing the mark, where our very nature falls short of the glory of God, and the worst response to that is to put self ahead of God. It’s the fundamental error that bootstraps all other aspects of fallenness. And the primary sin has always been trying to put self ahead of God by attempting to become like God through pride and rebellion. When Satan (the serpent) tempts Eve to eat from the tree, claiming that they will not die but become like God, he’s cunningly revisiting his own fall for exactly the same sin, where he was cast out of Heaven for seeking to exalt himself above God.

So, when God said to Adam and Eve “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”, perhaps this prohibition is God’s mandate for preserving the order of creation and humanity's place within it, which would be consistent with the framework and writing style of the verses that precede it. That is to say, maybe the allegory really means something like: we are made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26-27), and we will eventually be transformed to be like God (1 John 3:2, 2 Corinthians 3:18, Philippians 3:20-21), but our greatest falling is to try to make ourselves like God prematurely or with misguided self-centred motives. With this interpretation, the story of the fall is a deeper story than simple disobedience. It conveys a profound issue that the full suite of human growth and self-understanding is available through a relationship with God, but attempts at premature attainment bring about in self-induced curses rather than Divinely bestowed blessings.