Why did God evict Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden? Christian dogma holds that God kicked them out because they violated his directive not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But that’s not the whole story. Here’s what the Bible actually says:
God didn’t want them to have
both knowledge of good and evil
and eternal life, so he threw them out to prevent them from eating the fruit of the tree of life. So the moral of this story is that Adam and Eve blew the one chance that humanity had for eternal life by getting themselves kicked out of the garden of Eden and thereby no longer being able to eat the fruit of the tree of life.
And that is the perspective from which the entire Old Testament was written-- except for the book of Daniel. That is the only book of the Old Testament that specifically describes the resurrection of the dead, the last judgment, eternal life, and paradise-- all four of those things.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the world of biblical scholarship said about the matter more than 25 years ago:
There’s plenty of evidence from the biblical text itself that on the whole the Old Testament authors didn’t believe in the New Testament notion of the resurrection. Here’s an excerpt from the Psalms:
If God doesn’t remember those who are dead, then he can’t forgive their sins. If the dead are cut off from God’s hand, then he can’t resurrect them.
Chapter 2 of the book of Isaiah describes the author’s vision of the end of time:
What is most significant about the author’s words is what they do not say. There’s no mention of the resurrection of the dead, of the last judgment, of eternal life, or of paradise. But here’s what he says
will happen:
That’s a description of farmers living in peace with the farmers of other nations. That’s not a description of angelic beings playing laudatory music in the vault of heaven.
In Zechariah Chapter 14 the author describes his vision of the end of time. Prior to that time the enemies of Jerusalem will surround the city:
But God will appear and will battle against the gathered nations:
God will bring about the destruction of Jerusalem’s enemies. And what then?
What is the Festival of Booths? It’s a Jewish religious observance. So in Zechariah’s vision everyone who survives the existential battle for Jerusalem will ultimately be converted to Judaism. And they will be required to go into the city of Jerusalem every year to observe the Festival of Booths. As far as I am aware there are no Christian sects that observe the Festival of Booths.
And as in Isaiah there is no mention anywhere in Zechariah of the resurrection of the dead, of a last judgment, of eternal life, or of paradise. The visions of these two very well known Old Testament authors have literally nothing in common with the New Testament vision of the end of time.
The book of Job has the longest discourse on man’s place in the universe of any book in the Bible. Job’s life was destroyed. He lost his oxen and asses to the Sabeans. His sheep and servants were consumed by fire. His camels were carried off by the Chaldeans. His sons and daughters were all killed when a great wind destroyed the house in which they were dining. And finally Satan afflicted Job with suppurating sores that covered his entire body.
Job debates the cause of his plight with several other men and claims that he was wrongly punished. But at no time throughout the discussion is there any mention of rewards or punishments in the afterlife. At the very end (Job 42:1-6) Job confesses to God that he was mistaken about God’s purposes. God accepts his apology and returns to Job everything that he had lost-- in
this life, not in any version of an afterlife.
The Christian dogma of Original Sin holds that the terrible
crime committed by Adam and Eve-- that of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil-- has propagated throughout the entire human genome. As a result every human who has ever lived has been tainted with that indelible stain and is therefore utterly steeped in evil.
But as we’ve seen above, the
story of the garden of Eden is less about the knowledge of good and evil than it is about eternal life. From what God actually said in Genesis 3:22, God would have been perfectly content to allow the humans to have knowledge of good and evil so long as they didn’t
also have eternal life.
The doctrine of
Original Sin is predicated on a complete misreading of the otherwise charming story of the garden of Eden. And it is one that has utterly warped the Christian understanding of human nature.
thehill.com
