Theopedia

Tree of Knowledge

Definition

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was the one tree God planted in the Garden of Eden that he forbade Adam and Eve to eat from, on pain of death (Gen. 2:9, 16-17). It served as the specific test of the covenant of works: a matter neither good nor evil in itself, chosen so that obedience to it would be a direct test of submission to God’s authority rather than to the intrinsic reasonableness of a moral command.1 Adam and Eve’s eating of its fruit was the fall into sin (Gen. 3:6-7).

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession names the tree directly as the covenant’s own test:

“God gave to Adam a law of universal obedience written in his heart, and a particular precept of not eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; by which he bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience; promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it.”2

The confession’s fuller treatment of the covenant itself, its parties, and its theological standing belongs to Covenant of Works; this article is scoped to the tree as the test’s own object.

Biblical Basis

God planted “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food,” including the tree of life, “in the midst of the garden,” and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:9). He commanded Adam, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17). The serpent contradicted the threatened penalty and promised instead that eating would open their eyes, making them “like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4-5). Eve saw that the tree was “good for food,” “a delight to the eyes,” and “to be desired to make one wise,” and she and Adam, who was with her, ate (Gen. 3:6). Their eyes were opened at once, but to shame rather than divinity: they saw that they were naked and sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves (Gen. 3:7). Afterward God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil,” and drove them from the garden “lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (Gen. 3:22), stationing cherubim and a flaming sword to guard the way back to it (Gen. 3:24).

Doctrinal Significance

Why this tree

A. A. Hodge reads the prohibition as chosen precisely because the matter it forbade carried no reasonableness of its own for Adam to weigh: “the matter forbidden was morally indifferent in itself,” so “the command was admirably adapted to be a clear and naked test of submission to God’s absolute will as such.”1 Berkhof draws out why a morally indifferent matter served the test better than a self-evidently right or wrong one would have: Adam already had the substance of the moral law written on his heart, so a command he could recognize as reasonable on its own terms would have left obedience mixed with agreement rather than testing submission as such. The prohibition “concentrated” the whole question onto a single point where “the demands of the law” met something “in a certain sense arbitrary and indifferent,” so that what was actually being decided was “whether man would obey God implicitly or follow the guidance of his own judgment.”3

Relation to the tree of life

A. A. Hodge, following Herman Witsius, treats the two named trees as a matched pair of symbolic institutions belonging to the covenant of works, alongside Paradise itself and the Sabbath.4 Of the two, only the tree of life functioned as the covenant’s seal in the strict sense, “the outward sign and seal of that life which was promised in the covenant, and from which man was excluded on account of sin, and to which he is restored through the second Adam in the Paradise regained” (Gen. 2:9; 3:22, 24; Rev. 2:7; 22:2-14).5 The tree of the knowledge of good and evil could not carry that same role, on Hodge’s reasoning, since it “sealed death, and therefore could not have been a seal of the Covenant of Works which offered life.”5 The fuller biblical-theological development of the tree of life’s own symbolism, including its reappearance in Revelation, belongs to Tree of Life.

The meaning of “knowledge of good and evil”

Charles Hodge weighs three ways of reading the phrase itself. The first takes “good and evil” as a merism, an idiom for knowledge in general rather than moral knowledge specifically: Scripture elsewhere expresses the ignorance of infancy as an inability to “discern between good and evil” (Deut. 1:39; Isa. 7:16) and describes spiritual maturity as having “senses exercised to discern both good and evil” (Heb. 5:14). On this reading, “the tree of knowledge of good and evil is simply the tree of knowledge,” and Adam gained, by eating, “a knowledge he never had before,” of whatever kind.6 The second reads the phrase as moral autonomy, the ability to determine for oneself what counts as good and what counts as evil rather than receiving that judgment from God’s own command, an “emancipation from the trammels of authority.” Hodge raises this reading only to set it aside: the knowledge Adam actually gained after eating was not this kind of self-sufficient moral judgment, since “he had less of that knowledge after than before his fall.”7 The third reads “good and evil” in a physical or experiential sense, happiness and misery, so that eating settled by bitter experience a question God already knew by omniscience.7 Hodge’s own conclusion is that on any of the three readings, what the tree actually delivered was “an experimental knowledge of the difference between good and evil” gained through the fall itself, not a knowledge the tree held out in advance.7

Not every conservative interpreter follows Hodge’s preferred reading. Old Testament scholar John N. Oswalt takes the phrase closer to Hodge’s second, set-aside sense: “the knowledge of good and evil of Genesis 2-3 is the ability to define the purpose of one’s existence for oneself. Truly that is to be ‘like God,’ and the desire for such is at the heart of human sinfulness.”8 Genesis 3:22 itself supports reading some real, if perverse, knowledge as having actually been gained: “the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22) is not, Hodge argues, sayable ironically, “which in this connection seems altogether unnatural,” so it “must mean that Adam had, by eating the forbidden fruit, attained a knowledge in some respects analogous to the knowledge of God, however different in its nature and effects.”9 A. A. Hodge takes the tree’s very name as retrospective rather than descriptive of some good the fruit itself held: it was called “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because through the disobedient eating of it mankind came to the thorough experience of the value of goodness and of the infinite evil of sin.”10

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t forbidding one specific tree, on pain of death, make God’s command in Eden arbitrary or even unkind? Charnock answers by pointing to what was not withheld: of the whole abundance of the garden, only “one tree” was reserved, which was “no mark of an ill-will in his Creator to him, but a reserve of God’s absolute sovereignty, and a trial of man’s voluntary obedience.”11

If eating from the tree really did make Adam “like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22), wasn’t the serpent’s promise true after all, and the forbidden fruit actually beneficial? Calvin identifies the promise of autonomous, god-like judgment as the temptation itself, the serpent’s own claim rather than a truth about the fruit.12 Genesis 3:22 bears this out by showing the actual content of what was gained: shame at their own nakedness (Gen. 3:7), not the moral or intellectual likeness to God the serpent had offered (Gen. 3:5).

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 17, “The Covenant of Works,” 311-312. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 1. ↩

  3. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 201-202. ↩

  4. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 313-314, citing Herman Witsius, On the Covenants, vol. 1, chap. 6. ↩

  5. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 314. ↩ ↩2

  6. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), chap. 7, “The Fall,” 124. ↩

  7. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, chap. 7, 125. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  8. John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?, Ancient Context, Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), “Notes,” n. 22. ↩

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, chap. 7, 123-124. ↩

  10. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 312. ↩

  11. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XII: On the Goodness of God,” 252. ↩

  12. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), bk. 2, chap. 2. ↩