Forbidden Fruit
I find the first three chapters of Genesis fascinating. Possibly the worst thing that Darwin has done to us is to make every discussion of these chapters a debate on the age of the earth.
When I taught in Nicaragua, I would open every class period with a look at these three chapters. The book of Genesis is an introduction to the rest of the Bible. It seems to introduce the themes that stretch through scriptures to the book of Revelation. The book of Revelation is, in my estimation, a review of all that has happened in the Bible. A careful examination of the book reveals that it is a collage of verses and images and incidents from all the scripture that came before, almost like all of history from God’s point of view. But I want to start by looking at some of the themes in the first three chapters.
I believe that the fruit that Adam and Eve ate in the garden was the grape and not the apple. This is due to an error in translation. Malus (Bad) and Malum (Apple). The words are very similar in Latin and early writers thought that they belonged together – Apple and evil. Very similar, but I also believe that it is important to the understanding of the Bible that we explore some of the themes introduced in the story of creation and the fall.
The first reference to the potential for evil comes in Genesis 2:16: And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: 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.
Oddly enough, evil does seem to have exist before the fall. There are some people who refer to Adam’s fall as the second fall. The first and very similar fall was that of Satan, who was tumbled out of heaven because he wanted to be God. Somewhat an echo of Adam and Eve’s ambition.
One of the interesting words in the Bible is the word vine and tree. They seem to be the same word. How they are translated depends on the judgment of the translator. There are several occurrences of this in the Bible. The Hebrew language is one of the smallest. Words are forced to mean several things. The word used in the passage when Eve is taken from the side of Adam is the same word used in describing the side of the tabernacle. Future discussion.
My Bible Study Notebook 