Tree of the knowledge of good and evil

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Heb. וְעֵץ הַדַּעַת טוֹב וָרָע [ez hada'ʕat toɸ va'ra], Greek. ξύλον τοῦ εἰδέναι γνωστὸν καλοῦ πονηροῦ, Latin lignum sapientiae boni et mali) is a tree in the paradise narrative of the Book of Genesis EU of the Bible. It is located along with the tree of life in the middle of the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:9 EU). God forbade man to eat of its fruit (Gen 2:17 EU).

From historical to symbolic interpretation

The paradise narrative, as part of the biblical prehistory, was understood predominantly historically in the churches until the middle of the 20th century. Today's historical-critical exegesis gives a number of explanations without reaching a consensus. The Catholic Old Testament scholar Bernd Willmes lists five different interpretive directions: the sexual, the ethical, the intellectual, the developmental-psychological and the emancipatory interpretation. The Protestant Old Testament scholar Andreas Schüle confesses an exegetical perplexity towards the narrative: The two trees are "an ultimately unsolvable riddle". Decisive for the understanding is the interpretation of the Garden of Paradise or symbolically of the Paradise Sanctuary as "archetype of the temple" (Hartmut Gese), in the middle of which the forbidden tree stands.

The ancient Christian exegete Origen and his successors had presented a non-historical interpretation, finding for it such terms as "the spiritual," "the pneumatic," "the mythical," "the tropaic" (i.e., the transmitted, metaphorical), or even "the symbolic." "To find it out and set it forth is, in Origen's eyes, the most important task of the exegete. Those who already do not want to look for it at all, who confine themselves to the historical, he contemptuously calls 'slaves of literalism' or 'of the letter.'" But Church Fathers like Jerome and Augustine did not follow him in this, but criticized him, sometimes sharply, for it. However, his view has never been condemned by the Church, not even that of Thomas Cajetan (1469-1534), who in the late Middle Ages was the only one to "interpret the first three chapters of Genesis purely metaphorically, like Origen."

Martin Luther and the Reformers remained on Augustine's line just as Thomas Aquinas and the medieval commentators had done before. The result was that grotesque and absurd historical questions had to be asked of the biblical text. After allegorism had been declared unscientific and relegated to preaching or pious contemplation in the course of the Middle Ages, it became impossible to deal adequately with fictional texts. Every detail had to be historically true to the "facts" in order to be "true." For only the literal sense seemed unambiguous, and only on that could theology as a science of faith be founded. "The disastrous consequences of this improper reduction became apparent in the development that began in the 17th/18th centuries. The forced nature of many an explanation and the evidence of fictional elements in the sacred stories deprived many people of their faith and led to the inability in exegetical scholarship to read the biblical stories as stories with any relation to reality at all."

According to the New Testament scholar Marius Reiser, today "almost everything in the Bible can be declared to be fiction", but the actual task of explaining where "the truth of a historical narrative (lies), which turns out to be a fictional text in whole or in part", "we still have not solved, indeed it almost seems as if it hardly interested anyone". Reiser himself argues with Origen for "the concept of the symbolic" to denote "the truth content of a biblical narrative that goes beyond the factual." On the eschatological-sacramental interpretation, cf. the following section below.

Interpretive connection of prehistory and eschatology

Like the 'last things' (eschata), the heavenly consummation and the judgment, the 'first things' (prota) are also beyond historical time. The eschatological-sacramental interpretation recalls the close connection between the first and the last things. The sacramental points to the space of the ecclesial liturgy, which - especially pronounced in the Divine Liturgy of the Eastern Churches - is the space of eschatological consummation and thus also of protological origin: 'In the Church Paradise regained. With Adam expelled from the garden, we wander in the field; with Christ brought back to the garden [of the Resurrection], the Church rests in Paradise." "Everything in the Church is parousia [Second Coming, Presence], everything is timeless and spaceless veiled reality in symbols, everything is eternal now in the mysteries of the Church. (...) Parousia, Second Coming - fantasy or reality?" In the liturgical celebration of the Paschal Mystery of Christ's death on the cross, resurrection, and Second Coming, the question does not arise in this way. The Church "can only speak in symbolic language; but she sees through the symbols" to the eternal reality of heaven: "Church - Paradise - Heaven" form a unity. From the Latin tradition, the Jesuit and Council theologian Friedrich Wulf says the same thing: "It is a continuous line from the original paradise of the creation story to the paradise of the Church to the final paradise."

By Paradise is meant here originally the "archetype of the Temple" and then also the archetype of the Church. The Jewish Torah scholar Friedrich Weinreb explains: "As soon as man takes from the tree of knowledge, the way to the tree of life, the way to the temple, is closed." This closing of access to the Temple and Tree of Life happens automatically where man begins to judge according to the visible or mere "perception, according to the provable" and forgets the invisible world of Heaven. By the 'tree of eternal life' is meant here the eternal Word of God or the Torah in the spiritual or mystical understanding; through this inner understanding it has only an inner unity - unity here means both spirit and eternal life. In contrast, eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil causes one to fall out of contemplative insight into a perception of the world that remains on the surface, a multitude of knowledge without unity, which is synonymous with 'dust' (matter) and death (cf. Gen 3:19 EU). The certainty of the hope of eternal life or the 8th day of resurrection beyond the seven-day creation "is also what makes the Bible the tree of life...which is 'one' over against multiplicity. He who knows the Bible as such a unity...knows the tree of life."

Like the Jewish tradition, Bonaventure interprets the external literal sense of Scripture as the tree of knowledge and the internal spiritual-mystical sense as the tree of life: "only in spiritual understanding does Scripture become the tree of life". The Word of God is "the tree of life, because it is through this center that we return and are made alive in this fountain of life. But if we incline to the knowledge of things by the way of inquiry, tracing out more than we are permitted, we fall from the true vision [contemplatio] and taste of the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil ..."

The certainty of the hope of eternal life is re-established with the resurrection of Christ on the 8th day (see Sunday). The mystical ascent to the vision of unity and the meaning of Scripture (cf. Lk 24:25-32) thus arises from eschatology or the 'last things'. The evangelical theologian Paul Schütz explains: "In biblical times, the future determines the present and, with the present, the past. (...) What the 'first' things, the prota, are, is here determined by the eschata, the 'last things'. Yes, they are created precisely by them." "In hope, prophecy lifts all ways of being in time toward fulfillment. All time, even the most distant past, is in it time opened toward fulfilled time." From this point of view, ancient symbolic thought understands all biblical narratives as models (typoi) and exemplars of the prophetically glimpsed coming that is already present in the liturgical-sacramental celebration of the Church.

Thus, for example, the fruit of the tree of eternal life becomes the symbolic prefiguration of the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity and love, as fruit of the 'tree of the cross'. Accordingly, in the Apocalypse of John, Jesus says: "Whoever is victorious," that is, whoever breaks through to Easter faith, "to him I will give to eat from the tree of life which is in the paradise of God" (Rev 2:7) - in the paradise or garden of God analogous to the house of God or the Church as eschatological greatness: "Ecclesia vivit in transitu - the Church always lives in transition." "Now the Church celebrates with her Lord Pèsach or transition from death to life."

Loss of the original harmony

However, this symbolic-eschatological or sacramental-mystical thinking was more and more abandoned in modern times in favour of a historical thinking. The Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1993 is still in line with the historical interpretation. According to it, the fall of man in the forbidden eating of the tree of knowledge as loss of paradise (Gen 3:23 EU) means the loss of the original harmony of creator and creature: "Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness. (...) The harmony they owe to original justice is destroyed. (...) Death makes its entrance into human history." This interpretation has its point of departure in the fact that, according to the Old Testament Wisdom Book (Wis 9:1-3 EU; cf. 2:23 EU), man's image of God is understood as 'holiness' and 'justice'. The Wisdom Book explains the death of the 'unrighteous' and 'wicked' as a result of the "envy of the devil" identified with the serpent of paradise (Wis 2:23f), while "the souls of the righteous are in God's hand", that is, may hope for "immortality" (Wis 3:1-4 EU). No explanation is given in the Wisdom Book or in the Catechism of the Catholic Church as to why the 'death tree' is in Paradise at all and thus endangers the original harmony, why the 'disobedience' or 'injustice' of the 'original couple' can have such consequences for the whole of humanity (cf. original sin), and how the narrative of the Fall is compatible with the fact that animals also die and that the lot of man and animal is the same, regardless of all 'justice' (cf. Koh 3:16-21 EU).

Also according to Jewish understanding, the concept of 'justice' has a comprehensive sense concerning the harmony of heaven and earth or spirit and matter. According to Rabbi Nachum Twersky of Chernobyl (d. 1789), the Fall "tore apart the divine letters of the world" "and separated the last from the first". The last Hebrew letter as "the end of all the stages which are earthly materiality" is the Taw (numerical value 400), while the uppermost stage or heaven "corresponds to the Aleph [= One]. And therefore the righteous is called the All, because he belongs to heaven and earth," or the First and the Last, or Aleph and Taw united (cf. Rev. 1:17 EU; 22:13 EU). In the raising or exaltation of the lowest levels of reality upward "consists the true essence of perfect worship."

This perfect worship as a (sacramental) union of heaven and earth is biblically grounded in the narrative of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah (Gen 22:1-19 EU), on which the Jerusalem temple later rises (2 Chr 3:1 EU). Just as this story is a test of the "fear of God" (Gen 22:12) and of obedience as the "beginning of wisdom" (cf. Prov 1:7 EU; Sir 1:11, 21 EU; Job 28:28 EU), so too the paradise narrative can be read as the first "test of obedience", albeit with a negative outcome.

Interpretation in the biblical context

The harmony of the opposites of 'spirit' (cf. Gen 2:7) and 'flesh' (cf. Gen 2:21, 24) originally united in man is also expressed in the oneness of the two trees in the middle of the garden (Gen 2:9 EU): The tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolizes the earth or the (mortal) flesh, the tree of (eternal) life symbolizes heaven or the spirit, which is then reflected in the 'original couple' Eve and Adam. Both represent body and soul, below and above, outside and inside, earth and sky, night and day, moon (shadow) and sun, divided and whole, 'female' and 'male'. 'Male' is Hebrew sachar, which also means er-remember, i.e. decline of the spirit into itself. Symbolic expression of the inner unity of the spirit is the temple in Jerusalem as the 'navel' of the world. "As soon as man takes of the tree of knowledge, the way to the tree of life, the way to the temple, is closed." "Not only the temple, every thing is now a ruin: science, philosophy, poetry, everything is then broken, incomplete, unfinished." The broken or fractured is the finite and opposite, the sensual and corporeal, identical with the principle of 'earth' but now separated from the unity of 'heaven' (the soul, spirit or spirit-soul).

The unbroken unity of 'heaven' or paradise biblically opens up again only with the revelation of the Torah at Sinai; it means that "God gives man the key, the tree of life". Key, Hebrew mafteach, respectively petach: opening, door, is closely related to pesach (=Easter). The Torah is the instruction of the way back from the sorrowful duality of opposites and mortal flesh (cf. Gen 6:3) to unity in and with the one God. On this path, three behaviors in particular are to be avoided: "bloodshed" (= killing, also in the sense of 'insulting', taking away human dignity - cf. Mt 5:21-26); "idolatry" (also in the sense of a perception that remains on the surface, without essential insight) and "committing fornication" (in the sense of 'giving expression to nakedness', 'showing the body as a body'): "One puts emphasis on something that should in any case remain without emphasis and covered, because it is the tree of knowledge. One must pass by it, must not 'uncover' it" (referring to the uncovering of Noah's nakedness in Gen 9:22 as a second fall, as it were).

Interpretation from a Jewish perspective

Biblically, human sexuality has to do with the principle of duality, with the body as the visibly appearing or the enveloping 'flesh' - in contrast to the 'masculine' as the invisible dimension or the hidden spiritual or the principle of unity. Frederick Weinreb writes: "When woman came into being from a 'rib,' a 'side' of Adam, God closes this passage with 'flesh'; that man has 'flesh' is synonymous with the term 'woman.' The covering, the body of man, is the feminine." "Actually, what appears here as flesh is 'woman,' while the essential man, the 'man,' is something that is not to be sought in the appearance of man here. That is why it is always said [in Jewish tradition], 'Man, as seen here, is 'woman,' be he concretely man or woman.' (...) And when does one see the 'man'? When the union, the covenant with God, is there, then 'man' and 'woman' are visible together, otherwise not." The sign of the covenant with Abraham is circumcision, this can be understood as 'pushing back the flesh', as the beginning of the way back to paradise (= Promised Land).

The harmonious interaction of the two principles spirit and matter, unity and duality or tree of life and tree of knowledge stands, according to Weinreb, in a way for a sacramental understanding of reality as a connection ('marriage covenant') between grace and the material world, heaven and earth, spirit and flesh ('one flesh': Gen 2,24; cf. Eph 5,31f), the hidden invisible and the visible, the infinite and the finite, in numbers: between 1 and 2 or 4 (in the biblical number symbolism the tree of life has in the sum of the numerical values of the Hebrew letters the value 233, the tree of knowledge 932, the ratio of both numbers is 1:4; cf. also the four rivers from one stream Gen 2,10).

From the "fig leaves" in Gen 3:7, the tree of knowledge is said to be a fig tree, the fig being the 4th fruit according to the biblical count (cf. Dt 8:8). "That the fig embodies this principle of the tree of knowledge is probably also expressed in the many small 'seeds' in the appearance of this fruit, which represent the urge to multiplicity, to great fruitfulness. One therefore sees in man's act of eating from the tree of knowledge also the act of the sexual act."

Thus, with sexuality as the principle of duality, the term 'flesh' is closely connected. The term 'basar' (בָשַר), flesh, "is used primarily for 'sexual organ', also for the body itself, for the sexual organs are, after all, the prerequisite for the body to come into being at all. Thus one can say that the body is nothing other than the sexual organ. (...) This organ comes into being only when man is confronted with the tree of knowledge and takes of its fruit." Eating, then, is a consequence of God's creation of the material body. Created is not only the invisible creation, but precisely the visible creation (cf. Heb. 11:3). However, this should remain determined by the Word or Spirit of God (cf. Rom 8:4f; Gal 5:16) and thus retain its sacramental character of referring to the Creator, which it has just lost through the Fall. Paul explains: "The desire of the flesh leads to death, but the desire of the Spirit leads to life and peace" (Rom 8:6).

Similarly, Weinreb says: "To take from the tree of knowledge, it is said in [Jewish] tradition, brings death. And death is expressed in man by the fact that he has sexual organs. That is the stamp of death on man. Man, after all, can only exist if what has gone before always disappears." Death and birth are reciprocal (Adam and Eve in paradise were not 'born' naturally).

Interpretation from a Christian perspective

The Innsbruck Catholic theologian Willibald Sandler points to the commonality of the basic structure of prehistory and biblical history for the interpretation of the Fall: "The basic deuteronomic structure of the Torah - two paths: life and death - is reflected in the two trees in the middle of the garden: tree of life and tree of death. If we want to see the Torah, God's law, prefigured in Paradise, it is not alone and not first in the forbidden tree. Above all prohibition, God's instruction is commandment aimed at life. And therefore, for them, the tree of life comes first. The fixation of the law on what is forbidden corresponds to the serpent's cunning ..." This is not far from the Kabbalistic notion that an external, literal understanding of Torah as 'law' and 'prohibition' is only a product of the Fall.

According to Christian tradition, too, there is a close relationship between the Fall in eating from the tree of knowledge and sexuality. The forbidden tree, Sandler argues, "can also stand for sexuality": "not for sexuality per se, for it is essentially good, but for the untimely and misplaced exercise of sexuality. It ravages the garden." Note, moreover, that the biblical term 'cognize' is "the Hebrew term for 'to perform sexual intercourse.'"

These fertility powers of the earthly are also expressed by the symbol of the serpent. It signifies endless development in the material, but in spiritual blindness - without hope of immortality (cf. Wis 2:6-9, 21-24) and thus in the loss of the eternal fullness of life with God (Gen 3:22 EU). Without the 'sight' of hope (cf. Eph 1:18) and faith, man loses the paradise actually intended for him by God (Gen 3:23 EU) and the access to the tree of life (Gen 3:24 EU), which is only open to him again with the 'victory' of faith in the divine revelation (Rev 2:7).

Sandler also speaks of the tree of knowledge as the "tree of unthankfulness" and of the "presumption of unthankfulness": "Even God cannot give that what is given is not gift but unthanked property." The tree of life would then be, conversely, the tree of thankfulness or thanksgiving, Greek eucharistia. It is in this sense that it has been understood in the Christian tradition (cf. for example Bonaventure, Lignum Vitae). This explains the identification of the cross (cross of Christ) with the tree of life (according to Justin Martyr, 2nd century).