My understanding of that passage is that God didn’t lie, he just failed to mention that if they didn’t eat the apple, they would die as well. Didn’t eating the apple just give them the knowledge of death? Or is my theology lacking?
The lie isn’t in saying “if you eat this, you will die”, it’s in saying “in the day that you eat it, you will die”.
Eating the fruit supposedly gave them knowledge of good and evil, but indeed knowledge of mortality might be part of what’s meant by that. (But maybe not, since shortly afterwards God gets all worried that they might eat from another tree and become immortal.)
Good question, actually. I had understood the passage to mean that Adam and Eve were immortal until eating from the tree of knowledge, but now that I think about it that doesn’t make much sense in light of Genesis 3:22. Seems more likely that it’s equating innocence of death with freedom from death, which is a reasonably common motif in Abrahamic tradition; on its face, though, it’s hard to deny that it’s true at best from a certain rather tortured point of view.
My understanding of that passage is that God didn’t lie, he just failed to mention that if they didn’t eat the apple, they would die as well. Didn’t eating the apple just give them the knowledge of death? Or is my theology lacking?
The lie isn’t in saying “if you eat this, you will die”, it’s in saying “in the day that you eat it, you will die”.
Eating the fruit supposedly gave them knowledge of good and evil, but indeed knowledge of mortality might be part of what’s meant by that. (But maybe not, since shortly afterwards God gets all worried that they might eat from another tree and become immortal.)
Good question, actually. I had understood the passage to mean that Adam and Eve were immortal until eating from the tree of knowledge, but now that I think about it that doesn’t make much sense in light of Genesis 3:22. Seems more likely that it’s equating innocence of death with freedom from death, which is a reasonably common motif in Abrahamic tradition; on its face, though, it’s hard to deny that it’s true at best from a certain rather tortured point of view.