WHO WAS LYING: SATAN OR GOD?

The above question may seem heretical to even ask, so let me explain. During the story of the Fall, the following events transpire:

    God warns Adam and Eve against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil or in that day they will die. (Genesis 2:17)

    Satan tells them that they will not die but that on the day they eat, they will be like God knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:5)

    They eat of the tree and immediately know that they are naked. (Genesis 3:7)

    God reveals his punishment for their disobedience including the fact that they will eventually die. (Genesis 3:19)

    God says, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; now he might eat from the tree of life and live forever.” Therefore the pair is banished from the Garden of Eden. (Genesis 3:22-24)

The incident is ripe for misinterpretations of all sorts. According to the most extreme view, this is how the events are said to play out:

    Out of fear that Adam and Eve will rival His own position and power, God tries to scare them away from eating the tree that will make them equal to Himself by untruthfully telling them that they will die as soon as they have eaten.

    Satan wishes to help mankind, and so he exposes God's words as being an utter lie and reveals to Adam and Eve that God's real motive is jealousy since He knows that eating of the tree will give them as much knowledge as He possesses.

    When they eat from the tree, they find out that Satan is perfectly correct since they now have the knowledge of good and evil that God was hoarding for Himself. And in addition, they didn't die at once the way God had said they would.

    God gets so frightened at the couple's new-found power, that He quickly bars them from access to the tree of life so that at least they will eventually die and not be a threat to Him anymore.

According to this scenario, Satan is the hero of the story, and God is the petty villain. In other words, what we have here is the Jewish equivalent of the Greek myth of Prometheus defying the gods by bringing fire down to earth for mankind to use and enjoy. The Bible scholar David Carr, for one, appears to endorse this scenario to some extent when he states, “The snake introduces doubt through rightly predicting the consequences of eating the fruit – the humans will not be put to death as implied in the language of 2.17 and their eyes will be opened (see v. 7) so they gain wisdom, knowing good and evil.”

Some of the stated and assumed pillars supporting this and other revisionary interpretations of the Fall include the following questionable beliefs with accompanying rebuttals from the scholarly literature. Are these assumptions correct? As Kenneth Gros Louis says, “We are left...with unanswered questions which have challenged the ingenuity of biblical commentators...There are no answers to these questions, of course, only alternatives...”

Adam and Eve had never seen physical death before and therefore had no idea what God was talking about when he warned them of the consequence of disobedience.

That statement is based on the common but totally unwarranted assumption that there were no animal deaths prior to the Fall and that consequently even the present carnivore species were exclusively plant-eaters in those days. As Kline says, “Death, formerly present in nature in subservience to man, would now terrorize man the covenant-breaker as the wages of sin.”

In concurrence with the above, Ellison states, “The warning of the death penalty suggests strongly that the man knew the meaning of the word. It was human death, not animal death that man's sin introduced into the world.”

Since Adam and Eve did not have any knowledge of the moral concepts of good and evil before eating from the fruit of the tree, they certainly can't be blamed for disobedience when they didn't know that it was morally wrong.

Stuart feels that “knowing good and evil” is a Hebrew idiom called a merism in which two polar opposites express the totality of everything in between also. Thus, in this case it simply means “all sorts of knowledge.” Agreeing with this interpretation, E. Achilles comments on the Greek version of Genesis 3:5 – “The expression 'good and evil'...means in the widest sense 'everything'...In a passage like Deut. 1:39 it means the knowledge brought about by maturity rather than omniscience.”

Ellison explains that “good need not have a moral sense, and the same is true of the use of evil. Since man, unlike animals, was not created with an intuitive knowledge of what is good and bad for him he was dependent on God for daily guidance.” This explanation is in total agreement with other Scriptural passages in which it is obvious that “good and evil” mean good and evil from mankind's point of view, not necessarily God's.

However, A.P. Ross and other commentators feel that “the knowledge of good and evil” should be taken in a moral sense and that Adam and Eve acquired the first-hand experience of evil in the actual eating from the tree. Thus, as Kenneth Gros Louis suggests, there was nothing special about the tree, but it was the act of mankind's disobedience itself that taught “him the difference for the first time between good and evil. I am not at all sure that such an interpretation fully answers the objection above.

Satan was correct in implying that divine jealousy of His prerogatives was God's motive for not wanting Adam and Eve to eat from either tree.

That pronouncement appears to be confirmed by God's seemingly worried response in Genesis 3:22-24 that Adam and Eve might become fully like Him if allowed to live forever. But unless one wants to take a purely contrarian view, a much more humane motive seems more likely, as expressed below.

“The motivation for the expulsion, which was obviously made known to man, was to impress on him that, though physical death would not come for any centuries, it was inevitable.” (Ellison)

“The story closes with the Lord's reasoned decision to prevent humankind from expanding life in such a painful state. The reasoning in verse 22 may be literal, that humans actually had become like God in this respect, but it may also be irony, for in general they had become anything but divine. It is clear that whatever they had become was evil, for God acted to prevent them from continuing on perpetually in that condition.” (Ross)

The motive Ross assigns to God is no doubt correct in consideration of the later (Genesis 6:3) and further limitation of mankind's lifetime to 120 years in order to minimize the damage sinful human beings were doing to themselves, other human beings, and the environment.

Satan's motive was to free mankind from the limitations put on it by a jealous God.

We can best judge Satan's motive by (a) looking at his actions in the rest of the Bible as Tempter and Accuser of mankind, not helper and (b) considering the subsequent consequences of his words in the lives of Adam and Eve. One would be hard put to consider Satan the friend of mankind by any stretch of the imagination.

The word “die” means physical death.

C.J. Collins points out that we must consider (a) the wide range of biblical meanings for the verb 'die' and (b) the fact that the reliable character in the story is obviously meant to be God, not the snake. With these in mind, the only sure way we can define the word in this context is by considering what did, in fact, happen to Adam and Eve.

Hoekema suggests two other possible understandings of the expression “in the day that you eat of it you shall certainly die”: (a) Because of God's grace, he delayed the immediate execution of the death sentence or (b) “In the day that” is a Hebrew idiom meaning “as surely as you” as it is utilized in I Kings 2:37 and Exodus 10:28.

The expression “in that day” means within the same 24-hour period.

Wenham notes, “Though this phrase can mean vaguely 'when' (cf. 2:4; 5:1), it tends to emphasize promptness of action (e.g., Num 30:6,8,9 etc.)...” And 3:7 shows that their eyes were indeed opened promptly once they ate of the fruit. But Satan was only telling a partial truth when he denied that they would die on the day they partook since to be expelled from the Garden and God's presence “was to enter the realm of death.” In the same manner, P.S. Johnston explains that “their condition of mortality was sealed on the day of their sin.”

“Death for the OT means above all the inability to function, and this was the chief result of man's disobedience; God's warning went into full effect. Man's physical death was merely the logical and inevitable sequel.” (Ellison)

Adam and Eve did become as God (or “gods”) once they had eaten of the fruit except for their limited life span.

Bullock says, “Yet Adam and Eve, once they had acquired this treasured knowledge, did not know good and evil as God did; rather, theirs was a distorted knowledge acquired from the vantage point of disobedience.”

Hendel: “Yahweh admits publicly that the humans have become 'like one of us, knowing good and evil' (3:22), and this serves as a rationale for the expulsion of humans from Eden, so that they will not become completely 'one of us' (Note the equivocal nature of the simile 'like one of us,' as it is at best partial and incomplete.) In sum, while the humans are at end irrevocably human, the ending of the story is also conditional on the fact that they have become 'like gods' with respect to their illicitly gained knowledge...Is this knowledge 'like the gods'? Surely not, or at least, not entirely so.”

Kline: “The kind of God-likeness that resulted from following the serpent's counsel was religiously a devil-likeness. The sense of shame attaching to physical nakedness manifested consciousness of inner nakedness, the stripping of the glory of holiness from the soul.”

“The Fall is immediate upon eating the forbidden tree...The impulse to cover themselves and hide from God embodies the essential change that has occurred, encompassing shame, self-consciousness, the experience of loss and the awareness of separation from God.” (Dictionary of Biblical Imagery)

A.P. Ross notes that “when the woman concentrated on the tree, she saw that it was good, and desirable – the knowledge of evil was not in her thoughts. But after the man and the woman ate from the tree...now the knowledge of evil was overwhelming.”

Getting back to the original question, it appears obvious that Satan (through the snake) was the one who was lying. However, remember the statement in Genesis 3:1 concerning the subtle and crafty nature of the serpent. Thus:

Jacques Ellul says that “in the dialog between Eve and the devil, the latter doesn't lie. He does inform her that people will be as gods, determining good and evil, and that the will not die. But basically he seduces by shifting meanings and values. Finite reality becomes ultimate truth.”

And K. Gros Louis states, “In an ironic sense, the serpent is right: their eyes will be opened.”

Finally, “Diverting attention from the spiritual direction of man's likeness to God, the tempter redirected the issue to a merely formal, existential matter of ascent along a supposed scale of being toward god-hood.”