Genesis 3:9-15, 3: 20,
Chapter 3
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.”
The man named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all living things.
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.