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Back to Question of the Week Q: I'm trying to gather as much information as I can about the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. Why did G'd place them both in the middle of the garden, what do they both symbolize, what are the moral lessons that are to be learned through these trees? I'm delighted to hear your answer. thanks, Aies21, in Israel |
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A: Dear Aies21: You've just asked me to write a doctoral dissertation, which I refuse to do without actually getting a Ph.D when I finish, so instead, I'll try to summarize a few possible perspectives from current scholarship. The reason that your question is dissertation-sized is that these two symbols loom large in many post-Biblical Jewish texts, especially kabbalah and Jewish mysticism. Since I'm not really much of a Kabbalist, I'll limit myself to the Biblical texts themselves. The "tree of life" is mentioned in Genesis 2:9, 3:22-24, and a few times in Proverbs, usually at a metaphor for Torah. Harper's Bible Dictionary tell us that: [The Tree of Life] is a well-known image deeply rooted in the mythological and iconographic traditions of the ancient Near East. Widely depicted on seals, reliefs, and other artistic forms, the sacred tree represented fertility, or ongoing life, as well as immortality, or eternal life. However it is the other sacred tree mentioned in Genesis, the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil," which figures more prominently in the story of Adam and Chava [Eve] in Gan Eden [Garden of Eden]: God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Genesis 2:15-17) Of course, many of us know what happens next: the serpent points out that the fruit of this tree is good to eat, and Chava then gets blamed for their disobedience. She and Adam are then expelled from the Garden. While the "tree of life" appears elsewhere in the Bible as a metaphor or symbol, we don't hear anything else about the "tree of knowledge of good and evil" after the Gan Eden story. The noted Biblical scholar Nahum Sarna, in the JPS Torah Commentary, argues against the two most common interpretations of the "tree of knowledge of good and evil," which are that it represents a sexual awakening, or that it represents the capacity of humans to make moral judgments. Against the sexual interpretation, Sarna notes that marriage seems to be part of God's plan- after all, both men and women were created, and it was "not good" for the first "human" to be alone. Nor, again according to Sarna, does it make sense for God to be opposed to moral judgments, because the very command not to do something (like eat from the tree) would not make sense if humans could not distinguish between right and wrong. It should be pointed out that the Torah often views right and wrong in terms of obedience to God's instructions; the Biblical mind may not understand personal conscience in the same way that moderns do. Therefore, Sarna believes that "good and evil" is a merism, or use of symbolic language, to mean "mature knowledge and responsibility." He compares this phrase to an identical one in Deuteronomy: And the little ones that you said would be taken captive, your children who do not yet know good and evil-- they will enter the land. I will give it to them and they will take possession of it. But as for you, turn around and set out toward the desert along the route to the Red Sea! (Deuteronomy 1:39-40) The context of this passage is that the Israelites who rebelled against God will not go into the Land of Israel, while the innocent, naive little children will. Therefore, the tree of "knowledge of good and evil" probably symbolizes not the ability to distinguish right and wrong, but the capacity to "make independent judgments concerning human welfare." In other words, to be an adult, responsible for one's actions. Thus "eating from the tree" may mean entering into a different kind of relationship with God- not the childlike existence that Adam and Chava had in the Garden, where all their needs are provided for, but a new stage of life, in which they must take some responsibility for their own welfare, working the land and fending for themselves. This makes sense as a sacred story, or myth, explaining to those who tell it how the world got to be the way it is. For more information about trees in Torah, and especially in later Jewish thought, you might want to check out a new anthology devoted to the topic: Trees, Earth and Torah: A Tu B'Shvat Anthology, which contains many essays delving into all aspects of trees and their symbolism. NJL |
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