Genesis
Chapter 3
Sin
Sin
Now the serpent was the craftiest of all the wild creatures that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman:
“Did God really say: You must not eat from any tree in the garden?”
The woman said to the serpent: “We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden,
but of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden God said: You must not eat, and you must not touch it or you will die.”
The serpent said to the woman:
but God knows that the day you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil.”
The woman saw that the fruit was good to eat, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining knowledge. She took some of the fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
The woman saw that the fruit was good to eat, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining knowledge. She took some of the fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
The woman saw that the fruit was good to eat, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining knowledge. She took some of the fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
The Lord God called the man, saying:
“Where are you?”
The Lord God called the man, saying:
“Where are you?”
God said:
“Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree I ordered you not to eat?”
The man answered:
“The woman you put with me gave me fruit from the tree and I ate it.”
God said to the woman:
“What have you done?”
The woman said:
“The serpent deceived me and I ate.”
The Lord God said to the serpent:
“Since you have done that,
be cursed among all the cattle and wild beasts!
You will crawl on your belly
and eat dust all the days of your life.
I will make you enemies, you and the woman,
your offspring and her offspring.
He will crush your head and you will strike his heel.”
To the man, he said:
“Because you have listened to your wife,
and have eaten from the tree of which I forbade you to eat,
cursed be the soil because of you!
With sweat on your face, you will eat your bread
until you return to clay,
since it was from clay that you were taken,
for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living things.
The Lord God made garments of skin for the man and his wife, and with them, he clothed them.
Then the Lord God said:
“Man has now become like one of us, making himself judge of good and evil. Let him not stretch out his hand to take and eat from the tree of Life as well and live forever.”
So God cast him from the garden of Eden to till the soil from which he had been made.
And after driving the man out, God posted cherubim and a flaming sword that kept turning at the east of the garden of Eden to guard the way to the Tree of Life.
Commentaries
Sin.
This story, which is closely connected to the previous one, is based on a Mesopotamian myth. It aims to explore the origin of evil. If everything created by God is good, at what point did evil emerge?
In several places in the Old Testament, we find the expression “knowledge of good and evil” as a reference to the power to make the ultimate decision about things (cf. 2 Sm 14:17; 1 Kgs 3:9; Eccl 12:14). The great temptation for human beings is to position themselves as the absolute measure of reality, disregarding the will of God. Whenever humans have acted this way throughout history, the results have always been, and continue to be, a departure from God’s plan: injustice, oppression, totalitarianism.
The myth effectively illustrates the perspective of the sages of Israel: evil in the world originates in the hearts of human beings when they permit themselves to be trapped and dominated by their instincts—”adamancy”—and act without discernment or the guidance of the Spirit that God infused in them at creation.
Human beings self-destruct when they lose sight of the fact that God, an inherently liberating being, is the only valid point of reference for distinguishing right from wrong. When God is displaced to elevate human beings and their selfish tendencies, the result is sin, death, and perdition.