A Tale of Two Trees
Few questions generate more confusion—or more heat—among Christians than how we’re supposed to read the creation account in Genesis. For those shaped by a more fundamentalist approach to Scripture, the answer can seem obvious: we must take it literally. We should simply “believe” the Word of God, on a plain reading. As the old saying goes, “If we don’t believe everything in the Bible, how can we believe anything in the Bible?” Soundbites like this sound really persuasive. If God says that’s how it happened, then who are we to argue?
Yet many still have a quiet unease—doubts that they may feel reluctant, or even embarrassed, to voice. Others go further and insist Genesis cannot be read literally at all, because it seems to go head-to-head with modern science. Which leaves us with an uncomfortable dilemma: either the Bible is mistaken, or science is. Either way, the credibility of Christian faith takes a hit, as there can surely be only one winner. Still others attempt a synthesis, suggesting that Genesis speaks truthfully, but not precisely in modern scientific terms—for instance, interpreting the “days” of creation as representing consecutive periods of time. This approach has the advantage of affirming the biblical sequence as essentially correct, even if the terminology is simplified. And at first glance, it seems to have quite a lot going for it: everyone wins. Yet despite well-meant intentions, it stumbles almost immediately. Day and night feature before the creation of the sun and moon, reflecting ancient cosmology and a lack of awareness of the source of light. But such well-intentioned thinking is searching for correspondences between science and the text (to “prove” or at least “point towards” its truthfulness) that were never supposed to exist.
I have written previously on how to understand what Genesis is (and isn’t) trying to tell us—and, just as importantly, how Genesis goes about it. See, for example, my book How to Read the Bible Well, and this blog article: https://www.steveburnhope.com/blog/in-the-beginning-?rq=genesis. The key is to lay aside our modern spectacles, which assume that Genesis is attempting to teach timeless scientific truths—truths that correspond to modern scientific categories and modern definitions of factuality. But these assumptions are misplaced—they’re a product of the modern mindset.
First, it is anachronistic to assume that for Genesis to be reliable, it must correspond to what twenty-first-century science knows. Why should the benchmark be the twenty-first century rather than the eleventh, or the sixteenth, or even the twenty-third? Second, Genesis is primarily concerned with who? questions and why? questions, not how? questions and when? questions. It’s not interested in the mechanics of manufacture.
The “truth” that Genesis aims to convey is directed at a different target than the one we tend to assume today. Its message is timeless not because it offers a timeless scientific understanding (as if such a thing could ever be finalised), but because it offers a timeless theological understanding. Genesis addresses questions such as: Who created the world? Why did they create it? Who are we? What has gone wrong? And what does it mean to live rightly in God’s world?
Its use of picture language serves that purpose well. It’s easy to remember—which was particularly beneficial in an oral culture in which the story was first told—and it avoids being tied to the scientific assumptions of any one era. In other words, Genesis communicates enduring theological truth through imagery and narrative, rather than through the categories and assumptions of modern scientific explanation. This framework for reading Genesis fits with everything we see in the creation narrative.
To illustrate what I’ve been saying, let’s return to the rather cryptic title of this article (which some astute readers may already have figured out).
In the Garden of Eden was all manner of vegetation and fruit-bearing trees (Gen 1:11–12; 2:9). Yet two trees are singled out for special mention: “In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
Famously, in v.16, Adam and Eve are told: “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . .” We all know what happened: they failed—a failure that adversely affected humanity and its destiny in some way thereafter.
Christian interpretation (since Augustine in the fourth and fifth centuries) developed this failure into a systematic theology called Original Sin: the notion that, from that moment, human nature was instantly and permanently corrupted. The Calvinist Wayne Grudem astonishingly extends this claim even to babies being sinful in the womb and therefore already subject to God’s righteous condemnation (shocking, one might say, but consistent with a Reformed framework).
Is this the theological understanding that Genesis is seeking to convey? Perhaps. It is so deeply ingrained in Christian thinking that many assume there is no other possibility. But there are at least a few things worth pondering.
The first is that mainstream Jewish interpretation has never seen the consequences as an inherited passing down of Adam and Eve’s guilt articulated as original sin (in other words, that we are all basically doomed before we even start). Certainly, the story portrays moral disobedience and its serious consequences, and it sheds light on a human condition that leads all of us to do both good and evil, but it does not function simply to “pin the blame” on our original ancestors. (Later New Testament reflection on Adam as “representative” of humanity is in a different thought category.)
The second is that Christians commonly misread the function of the forbidden tree. It is sometimes assumed that God never wanted Adam and Eve to know the difference between good and evil—that he intended them to remain in a permanently innocent, naïve state (one to which we will also return in heaven). But this is implausible. Learning the difference between good and evil is an important part of growing up and indeed, of being parented well. It is hard to imagine God the Father desiring anything less for his children, especially when we were created with free will: the power to make choices.
The theological statement being made by “eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” is Adam and Eve effectively declaring: “We will decide for ourselves what’s good and evil, thanks very much”; rather than learning that from God, in his timing. The question was never whether they would acquire such knowledge, but when and from whom. When Genesis 3:6 tells us that Eve saw the fruit was “good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom,” it’s not presenting that as a lie. The fruit was indeed desirable—that’s precisely the point. The sin was not pursuing curiosity, but autonomy.
The first divine moral lesson was centred on one simple instruction: do not eat from that one particular tree. But it could just as easily have been “don’t climb that mountain,” or “don’t swim in that lake.” The specific command itself is secondary. The point was whether Adam and Eve would obey it simply because God said so, or only if it suited them. Exercising their free will choice in that way is pointing to a default in human nature towards doing our own thing versus what God says is best and right—not caused by inherited guilt (which would make us de facto victims of Adam and Eve’s actions) but a universal human propensity.
Many Christians read this story as God being petty or harsh in imposing such severe consequences over one measly piece of fruit (typically assumed to be an apple, though Genesis never says that). But that is to look down the theological telescope the wrong way. Adam and Eve were free to eat from every other tree in the garden, which can hardly be said to be imposing a hardship. Moreover, to that point, there was no prohibition on eating from the tree of life.
Genesis is also pointing to a theological explanation of the consequences of choosing to ignore what God says is best and right for us—not as the direct consequences of Adam and Eve’s choice in the garden (over which we have no control) as the doctrine of original sin tends to suggest, but as the consequences of our own choices in our own situations. Life becomes hard work (“painful toil”). The world becomes hostile as well as beautiful (“thorns and thistles”). And we lose access to both the intimate in-person presence of God and the fruit of the tree of life, which God immediately places off-limits to prevent our fallen state from being “locked in” to the present human condition forever (Gen 3:24). The final result is that not only decay but death itself enters the world. Surprise, surprise: the snake lied in Gen 3:4, and Adam and Eve bought it.
The first recorded deaths in Genesis are those of the animals from whose skins God personally makes garments to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness (Gen 3:21). It hints at the first “sacrifice for sin”—the first sacrifice to symbolically respond to human guilt and shame. And it points forward to an ultimate redemption—an ultimate sacrifice for sin and an ultimate divine victory, through Jesus, as “Eve’s offspring” (Gen 3:15; cf. Jesus’ ancestry in Luke 3).