so what was it that Adam and Eve partook of if not a real tree that "it was good for food", ''it was pleasant to the eyes", ''and desirous to make one wise"? Gen 3:6
They didn't know what heartbreak was. But they had had it described to them, and what causes it. For Eve, it wasn't enough to know about it and not
know it. That is, she noted that in order to understand evil fully, one must partake in it. Additionally, that doing so should theoretically make her as smart as the God that already understood it. This is why harlotry is one of the most major and continuous themes in scripture, because it was her original sin. She used sex to control Adam. He retaliated with "warfare", he performed some violent act of conquest, probably forced himself on her.
This is why slavery is the other major theme in scripture.
The reason it is presented figuratively for us, is because if it was presented as a literal story about sexual transgression, we wouldn't learn anything by it because we would stop at the physical thinking level, as if it were simply a story, and not understand the inner effect it had on them.
We know that a talking snake doesn't make literal sense, and there's no sin in eating a literal fruit. But if you believe the snake is that moment when you reason between right and wrong, instead believing that God allowed some third party devil entity to mess up His paradise, it makes God look a bit innocent and prevents us from scapegoating our own responsibility on some external force. If fruit was figurative when Jesus talked about it, it was figurative in the scriptures He studied.
Both trees were the same tree. It's your motive in eating from it that makes life or transgression.
If that isn't the case, then the simple act of
any disobedience in order to "eat" from the "knowledge of good and evil" would suffice, like eating a literal fruit you were told not to for whatever undisclosed reason. If it was a literal tree, that would be good enough for me.
But since the punishment always fits the crime, their reaction to nakedness and the punishments based on fertility pretty much spill the beans on what they did.
None of God's word makes sense unless we do this
"Repent at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will
make known my words unto you."
Here's the same poetic snake from the garden, "Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: remove thy foot from evil."
Remove your foot,
after you have bruised it's head.
Man has to plow the earth to get it to grow. Man has to dig under the surface of the words. Man has to labor in bed to "know" as the biblical term goes, to experience that is, that his wife has been satisfied, etc.
And God bless you.
