Two Trees to Choose From

Along with many other children, I read Rudyard Kipling’s “Just So” stories, as well as other myths of origin. How did the leopard get its spots and the chipmunk, its stripes? Why DO snakes crawl on their bellies while other reptiles have legs? As long as there have been Homo sapiens, archaeological evidence shows that they have questioned where things came from, how things happened, what was there before what we see today?

I see the Tanakh as a history of our people and a record of our covenant with God. But those early chapters from Adam and Eve until the story of Abraham begins are for me the “backstory”, our mythology, ancient people’s attempt to explain the origin of the world and all that is on its surface, in its seas, and visible in its skies. People are found all over the place, and they speak many different languages and have a variety of different physical types. Women were going through childbirth, which was not a pleasant thing to say the least and was fraught with peril. WHY?

To my mind, the Garden of Eden was an “incubator” in which humanity could thrive without danger of physical harm, starvation, etc, until they had matured to the point when they could be sprung out into the wider, merciless world. What might be a historical parallel? Mid-Africa, where we evolved in the first place? The Fertile Crescent, where civilization was actually born? Interesting to speculate.

And what are the specific attributes with which humankind has been equipped before being sent out into the larger world? The two trees in the center of the Garden of Eden give us an insight into what the ancient people who told these stories in the first place were speculating about. Two things that could potentially set us apart from the animals and illustrate how we might have been made in the image of God are (1) immortality and (2) conscious intention. Thus, the Tree of Life represents eternal life – human beings will never die; the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represents human discretion, free will, ethical choices, an understanding of various courses of behavior and the consequences of each. And of course, we have developed a detailed concept of the second alternative as a specific attribute of humanity and are aware that the first alternative, immortality, is not a human attribute. It is very interesting to me that our distant ancestors contemplated both as possibilities and expressed it as a deliberate choice that we made – to eat the fruit of the one tree rather than the other.

I for one am grateful that we did choose to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil! How boring it would be if we were to live forever but without free will. If we had no capacity to choose a course of action but were essentially programmed robotically in our lives. I could see that there would be no inventions, no fine arts, just a lot of one-dimensional people filling up the world and behaving predictably. Yikes, who would want to live forever under those circumstances? Instead, we have science, literature, art, music, and so many things to learn about to enrich our lives!