Burned into the Western consciousness of both Christians and Jews, and even of non-believers, is the notion that ours is a Fallen World. Eve ate of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, then gave it to her husband Adam, and, thus, plunged our world into a cataclysmic mess.
Let’s take a closer look at this powerful Biblical story. We consider The Fall to begin with — knowledge. And what is it the knowledge of? The knowledge of Good and Evil. Since before eating the fruit Adam and Eve knew nothing of good and evil, they could not know they were doing evil in disobeying the Lord’s command to abstain from the fruit.
And since the first humans knew neither Good nor Evil prior to the so-called Fall, we must ask: Why should moral knowledge be a curse rather than a blessing?
Perhaps we can understand this myth better if we imagine what our species would have been if Eve had resisted the serpent’s lure. Why, we would not be human! Instead we would genuinely be what Desmond Morris called “The Naked Ape.”
Smart and verbal, we would lack the natural protection of simian body hair yet feel no impulse to clothe ourselves. More naked than most mammals, we would be copulating without concern for the consequences (some say we do this now; but the many institutions and laws designed to restrain the circumstances under which sex occurs would be absent as would the internal controls possessed by many people).
We usually think of Cain’s murder of Abel as following the first “sin” of disobedience and this is right — and wrong. Deliberate killing of one’s own species has been observed in many other animals; however, since other animals lack a moral intelligence, they are not “murderers.” It is responsibility that, along with other factors, can makes a slaying a murder. Thus, if the “Fall” had never occurred, Cain would have killed his brother with no knowledge that what he did was wrong and, therefore, no guilt.
Animals, children, and the insane do not have the knowledge of good and evil. Had the first humans abstained from the Forbidden Fruit, our entire species we would be no better. Thus, Genesis 3 is not the story of The Fall but of our Rise into full humanity.
