Dear friends in Christ:
I am a Taiwanese currently attending RCIA(-like) programs in the Catholic Churches in my living city.
If I understand correctly, in the Book of Genesis there is no such word ‘sin’, the word ‘sin’ appears in later Books of the Bible. So although I am always taught that Adam and Eve ‘committed sin’ in the garden of Eden, I find I need more precise analysis about by what was the sin ‘committed’ or ‘brought about’.
Which understanding is correct: The sin of Adam and Eve was ‘committed’ or ‘brought about’ by (1) eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or by (2) disobeying the Words of God by free will, or by (3) the Words of God said to them immediately after God knew they ate the fruits?
Good question, one of the most important questions that you could ever ask about the faith.
The answer to your question is that they failed to repent. That was the problem. So you understand what I mean, from Leviticus 4:
"If any one of the common people sins
unwittingly in doing any one of the things which the LORD has commanded not to be done, and is guilty,
when the sin which he has committed is made known to him he shall bring for his offering a goat, a female without blemish, for his sin which he has committed.
Kindly note the
bold. That is the trigger to having to do anything. Now note the
italics. And act is unwitting, in the Torah sense, as it were, when one or both of the following is true:
(1) you do not understand the nature of your act;
(2) you do not know the requirements of the law (there is an ignorance of the law defense in the Torah, as shown above).
Here, we have both. First, they did not know the nature of their act, as their eyes were not opened until after they ate, i.e., was only after they ate that they knew what right and wrong was. Second, as you alluded to, God came on down and pointed out the requirements of the law…Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from the tree of which I said, You shall not…
Now, if you want to know that man’s state of mind in the garden, for a monumental blunder in the theology down through the ages, that man did not, repeat, did not blame the woman. He instead blamed God. And here, as always, please do your best to learn how to analyze the things that we say and write. Words are important. And this isn’t Sunday school as a child. This is now for keeps, as it were. So for blaming God, my lesson in understanding the English language 101:
The woman you gave to me, she gave me the fruit and I ate.
Why is he even mentioning something, anything, about being given the woman? What does that have to do with anything? It doesn’t. Unless your argument is, God, you gave her to me, she gave to me, and so you have some of the fault here, since if you hadn’t given her to me, then she wouldn’t, couldn’t have given me the fruit, as she’d not be here. And so it’s your fault God. That is why he says what he says about being given the woman, and on that note…
Note the “gave”, two of them. Forms of the Hebrew verb, natan, to
give. So, in his mind, women = fruit, in that both women and fruit are things that can be given to others. He apparently thought that he owned and possessed her. For what I mean:
So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and
brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.
See the* italics* there? That is the statement of purpose, answering the question, why did God bring the animals to the man? To name them.
Now compare that with:
So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.
As is readily observed, there is no statement of purpose, as God simply brought her to the man. The naming part is absent because, as Genesis 1 makes rather plain, the act of naming implies ownership, i.e., and God called to the dry land, earth…naming it, thereby stating God’s claim to ownership of the thing named.
And we know this because we have the man naming the animals, an exercise of the act of dominion over the thing named, and so Genesis 1 provides in this respect:
And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;
and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
He named them, he’s got dominion over them.
And on that note, if you want the original sin, is thinking that you can own and possess other humans. Started in God’s garden and then witness our long human history, to this very day, of slavery. Is the mindset of anti-Christ.
he finds that he is drawn toward what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good creator. Often refusing to acknowledge God as his source, man has also upset the relationship which should link him to his last end; and at the same time he has broken the right order that should reign within himself as well as between himself and other men and all creatures.288