For you, me, and Adam to answer this question; we need the knowledge of good and evil.
Adam may have needed what he was denied by Yahweh to know if the tree of the knowledge of all things, is good or evil to eat from. As scriptures say, he was mentally and morally blind without it.
You and I cannot see any better than Adam could when our mental eyes are blind on issues and without knowledge of them.
It seems that Yahweh put Adam in a catch 22. Damned to being mentally blind and as bright as a brick and unable to reproduce or condemned to death if he educated himself.
I think that we desire as if it was something good many things that are not very good at all for us. God appealed to their irrational drives, their drive to survive, to seek sustenance and avoid death. The serpent tries to sell the fruit on its merit of providing an easy education and yet that (wisdom), for Eve, is only secondary what for the serpent, knowing as it is, is primary.
Are you suggesting that the drive to survive is irrational?
Are you saying Eve should not have eaten of the T Of K, and that Christians who sing of Adam’s sin as a happy fault and necessary to god’s plan, are wrong?
I apologize.
Irrational in the sense that it requires no cogitation. We normally desire to live without having to think about (or ask) why.
Eve sought the apple from hunger, as a fruit primarily and as a source of X after and not surprisingly since she had no concept of good beyond what is good at the moment.
Should she have eaten the fruit? I don’t know. Is it a tale about our fall or our evolution? Who knows, maybe it is a tragedy. But in general what the stories in the Bible mean change with the times.
The garden of Eden story is a good example of polysemy, the capacity for a narrative to have multiple meanings. Why? Because the images that underlie the story are of archetypal significance. The archetypes of the collective unconscious precede logic and transcend ethics. They are nature itself as we encounter it in our own psyche. The Eden story is actually a mythical portrayal of that very fact. Eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a fall from communion with the divine into duality.
Genesis 3:20 says “And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.” It doesn’t say that she was the mother of all humanity. It says that she was the mother of all living.
That contradicts the narrative of the Genesis Eden story in which Eve is formed out of Adam’s rib. There, Eve plays no part in giving birth to the living who are created by God without her and Eve doesn’t give birth until later and then only to human sons and daughters.
An Eve who is the Mother of All Living is bigger than the story! What’s going on here?
Please, don’t misunderstand me; The fruit’s important is not in dispute but my issue is that you think that Eve was aware, or was capable of understanding it’s importance when she lacked the discernment that only the fruit could give. Eve was tempted more by her hunger for sustenance than by a reasoned calculation about what is good or evil.
Now, you think that I’ll never understand Genesis? Well, who judges what’s a proper understanding of Genesis? I think that both you and I would be accused of lacking understanding by someone from the Church.
Is Yahweh a bad “parent”? Who knows? Certainly debatable. Again so much can be read into the bare scaffold of the story that would depend of your preconceptions. It can be read as a commentary about man’s state of nature and what prevents us from going back. Or a tale, like many others, about how humanity rebels against God (or gods) while stealing that which is divine (fire or knowledge) leading to punishment. And again the time in which the interpreter lives matters. For what is “good” parenting?
I think that biblical writers qualified knowledge, so that it is not that they are against knowledge itself but qualify it as knowledge of God. Knowledge of God and ignorance of God is evil.
Another theme that colors the Biblical stories is fidelity towards an anthropomorphic God. That personalization of God (rather than the impersonal Mover) adds the personal relationship as decisive. Understanding, under such preconceptions, becomes of secondary importance.