Stacey Melissa

The story goes that Adam and Eve lost out on their opportunity to have everlasting life when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God told them that they would die in the day they ate from it, if they decided to do so. Well, they decided to do so, and... they lived for a few hundred years afterwards. As any apologist will tell you, God wasn't talking about the same kind of day we normally think of. One day was actually a lot longer period for God. So God didn't lie about the death sentence, says the apologist. Riiiiiggght.

But still, we're debating here... So for the sake of debate, we'll take the apologists on their word for that one. Anyway.... God is caught talking with another heavenly being after he scolds A&E, and he says that A&E must not be allowed to also eat from the Tree of Life, for then they would live forever, just like the gods.

Why was the Tree of Life there in the first place? God permits foraging it prior to eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Yet afterwards, after the death sentence, they weren't supposed to eat from the Tree of Life - I guess because that would have nullified the death sentence.

So let's examine the a couple possible scenarios:

(1) God originally intended A&E to have everlasting life, unless they from the Tree of Knowledge.
(2) God originally intended A&E to die at some point, regardless of whether they ate from the Tree of Knowledge.

In (1), there is no point to putting the Tree of Life there in the first place. No benefit would have come to eating from it prior to eating from the Tree of Knowledge, since A&E would have lived forever anway. And afterwards, God doesn't want A&E to eat from it.

In (2), God's threat of a death sentence was a moot point. God was going to kill them at some point anyway. According the the apologists, the death sentence wasn't to be literally carried out that day, so it is incorrect to say that the threat had any substance behind it by claiming A&E's deaths were accelerated by eating the fruit.

So my questions are:
(A) What was the purpose of the Tree of Life?
(B) Did God originally intend for A&E to have everlasting life?


Note: Background reading can be found in Genesis chapters 2 and 3.

judge

This link...http://custance.org/old/seed/ch6s.html

...explains Augustines understanding.

Probably a good place to start to try and see how it has been historically understood

Katarzyna

Good! Glad you made this clear!

My guess--God assumed A&E would eat from the Tree of Life occasionally, without knowing it was the Tree of Life. A&E would then be immortal, but wouldn't understand what that meant. That's the mechanism that ensured their immortality, while they were in the Garden of Eden. It wasn't something God (YHWH) bestowed upon them, it was something they got from eating the Life Fruit naturally.

Once they at from the Tree of Knowledge, they understood what eating from the Tree of Life meant... and thus they were forbidden to do so. And once they were cut off from the Tree of Life, they became mortal.

I'd guess that for A&E and their kind--they'd either have to continue eating from the Tree of Life in order to maintain immorality. Or they'd have to eat from the Tree of Life after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, when they knew what the ToL would give them.

But this is just a WAG...

Kat

sodium

Most gods had a special food for conferring immortality. The Norse gods had golden apples. They had to eat these apples occasionally in order to retain their agelessness and immortality. The Greeks gods had Ambrosia, which conferred immortality, but wasn't really necessary for the gods themselves. The Indian gods had Amrita, but they only needed it once.

Anyway, one possibility is that this story comes out of a mythology with a similar belief. The humans would originally have lived in proximity to the gods, and had access to their Tree of Life. But they got kicked out and lost access to it, with the inevitable results.

This makes sense because the gods would have also had access to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. After all, the gods would have had knowledge of good and evil, so it makes sense they would have at some point partaken from the relevant tree. When the humans ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became more like the gods in this way, but this just made the gods angry (being a jealous race), and they kicked the humans out of paradise.

It isn't really clear whether the Tree of Life is a one-time use like Amrita, or necessary continually, like the Tree of Knowledge. I think the best guess is that the Life Tree is one time, just like the Knowledge Tree. It was just the good fortune of the gods that the humans hadn't happened to have eaten from the Life Tree yet. They hadn't thought to deny it, because they assumed the humans wouldn't eat from the Knowledge Tree, so they'd at least have that to feel superior about.

Stacey Melissa

What I gather from Augustine (thanks for the link, Judge) is that A&E had the capacity to live forever, prior to snacking on some Knowledge. They snacked, so God took away that capacity, perhaps by placing the security around the Tree of Life.

All the replies so far (from Judge, Kat, and Sodium) are at least plausible. The thing I'm thinking about now is that Eden was doubly precarious compared to what I had thought. At first, I thought death could only have entered the world on by piggybacking on the sin of snacking on Knowledge. I hadn't thought of the possibility that death could also have entered through simple apathy or ignorance. Had A&E either not been aware that they needed to eat from the Tree of Life in order to keep from dying, or had they purposefully not eaten from it, then death could have entered there. It seems like a pretty big assumption on the part of God to think that A&E certainly would have eaten from the Tree of Life at some point. (Yes, I know I'm ignoring God's omniscience, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms that the theists probably don't want to mess with in this thread.)

Infidelettante

Might I point out the futility of questioning the motives of a being who puts things like eternal life in fruit.

JT

Stacey Melissa

Good point. But, hey - God's a pretty fruity character himself.