Knowing Good and Evil

Abstract

In the Garden of Eden, we are told, there were two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You would not be surprised to learn that eating the fruit of the tree of life would confer on human beings immortality; and that is what we find. After Adam's disobedience, God says that he must be banished from Eden 'lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever'.' If he did so he would acquire what in all cultures is regarded as a property of deity, eternal life. He would have become like God. However, the idea of human beings becoming like God, which does indeed have its place in the text, arises, not in connection with the tree of life, but in connection with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Why is the fruit of this tree also capable of making human beings 'like God'? And in what sense can God be said to know good and evil? Why should any good result be supposed to come from eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Growth in knowledge would in general, of course, be regarded as beneficial. But what is the knowledge which those who ate the forbidden fruit are represented as acquiring? One interpretation sees it as a growth in experience. Only by committing sin can human beings discover what it is like to sin, and knowledge of good and evil, from the inside, as it were, is thought by some to be a necessary condition of personal maturity. Being able to cope with moral dilemmas on the basis of such experience is part, so people say, of what it is to be a person. This idea of the educative value of sin fits in with an interpretation of the phrase 'knowledge of good and evil' which understands 'know' as 'have experience of'. The Hebrew word translated 'know' can certainly have this sense, which explains the special sense in which it is used in the first verse of the very next chapter of Genesis: 'And Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bare Cain.'2 Knowing good and evil in this sense would be, not simply knowing what is good and what is evil, but having, as it were, tasted