What did they eat in the Garden Eden?

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504Katrin

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We know that they ate from the fruit hence had to leave. Which begs the question, did they eat something like manna. Since G0d told them that after their expulsion they had to work in order to have bread I assume that they had bread in Garden Eden lying aroud, or maybe also growing on the trees.
I conclude that it must have been some kind of manna, similar to the manna that Moshe and the others ate in the desert back in the day?
 
Well, depending on how literalistically you want to take these first few chapters of Genesis, we know:

Gen 1:11:“And God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth.” And it was so.” (RSV)

Gen 1:29: “And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.
So, they would have had plant vegetation to eat, fruit, and seeds.’” (RSV)

So they would have had a vegetarian diet of sorts: plant produce, seeds, fruit, etc.

Do you mean was the “fruit” described in Genesis 3 manna?

I don’t think we can know, the text doesn’t suggest it was, as (at a literalistic reading) it comes from a tree. Now manna came from “heaven” or, as one theory goes, from a kind of bush.
 
jonathan_hili said:
Well, depending on how literalistically you want to take these first few chapters of Genesis, we know:

Gen 1:11:“And God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth.” And it was so.” (RSV)

Gen 1:29: “And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food.
So, they would have had plant vegetation to eat, fruit, and seeds.’” (RSV)

So they would have had a vegetarian diet of sorts: plant produce, seeds, fruit, etc.

Do you mean was the “fruit” described in Genesis 3 manna?

I don’t think we can know, the text doesn’t suggest it was, as (at a literalistic reading) it comes from a tree. Now manna came from “heaven” or, as one theory goes, from a kind of bush.
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Thank you for your reply. What I mean is, since G0d said something along the lines of “In the sweat of your face shall you eat your bread” I assume that they already had bread in the Garden Eden also, not only the plants and fruits that are mentioned earlier (and that you, too, quoted). Now* if *they had bread in the Garden Eden, I wonder if it was some kind of manna?
 
504Katrin said:
Thank you for your reply. What I mean is, since G0d said something along the lines of “In the sweat of your face shall you eat your bread” I assume that they already had bread in the Garden Eden also, not only the plants and fruits that are mentioned earlier (and that you, too, quoted). Now* if *they had bread in the Garden Eden, I wonder if it was some kind of manna?
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Perhaps…

Personally, I don’t think we are to take this literalistically. Our first parents in Adam and Eve would have lived thousands of years before bread was invented.
 
CCC clearly states that figures of language are used.

There was a Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden.

It had seeds in its fruit that contained the next trees.

Prudence is one of those trees.

Some others have to have been the fruits of the Holy Spirit.

Love, joy, peaces, patience, kindness, faithfulness, generosity, meekness, and chastity.

We eat the fruit of those trees! “They hang down from God’s Love.”

The most beautiful thing in existence is Love.

God’s love is the most beautiful of all loves.

Beauty causes happiness.

God’s beauty causes the most happiness.

When those seeds/words grow, so does our love of God’s love–thus we delight more and more in His beautiful love. Thus our happiness grows.

Murder is ugly.

Rape is ugly.

War is really ugly.

Prostitution is ugly.

Boxing is ugly, legal or in a street fight.

Drunkenness is ugly.

Sobriety is beautiful.

Chastity is beautiful.

Meek is beautiful.

Kindness is beautiful.

Mother Teresa is beautiful.
 
Tree of Life—Out of the ground the Lord God made various TREES grow that were delightful to look at and good for food, with the TREE of life in the middle of the garden and the TREE of the knowledge of good and bad (Genesis 2: 9).

Genesis 3: 22—Then the Lord God said: “See! The man has become like one of us, knowing what is good and what is bad! Therefore, he must not be allowed to put out his hand to take fruit from the TREE of LIFE also, and thus eat of it and live forever”.
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**Genesis 3: 24—When he expelled the man, he settled him east of the garden of Eden; and he stationed the cherubim and the fiery sword, to guard the way to the TREE of life.
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Deuteronomy 21: 22-23—If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his corpse hung on a TREE, it shall not remain on the TREE overnight. You shall bury it the same day; otherwise, since God’s curse rests on him who hangs on a TREE, you will defile the land which the Lord, your God, is giving you as an inheritance.
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Isaiah 61: 1 The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; 2 to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; 3 to grant to those who mourn in Zion-- to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he may be glorified.
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Isaiah 61: 3 To appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to give unto them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the LORD, that he might be glorified (KJV).
**
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**Proverbs 3: 13 and 3: 18—Happy the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding! She is a TREE of LIFE to those who grasp her, and he is happy who holds her fast.
**
**
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**Proverbs 11: 30 (New American Bible)—The fruit of virtue is a TREE of LIFE.
**
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Proverbs 11: 30 (King James Version)—The fruit of the righteous [is] a TREE of LIFE; and he that winneth souls [is] wise.
**Proverbs 13: 12—Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a wish (N. B. hope) fulfilled is a TREE of LIFE. **
 
God is our LIfe.

Life’s tree.

So, it is God’s tree planted with His seeds.

God is the Gardener.

Tree of Life, or life’s tree. God is Life. It is life’s trees.
 
I’m no theologian. I just wonder sometimes about things.

I have sometimes thought if we knew for sure what the “knowledge of good and evil” is, we would know the answers to a lot of things about our first parents.

I have sometimes wondered if the “knowledge of good and evil” was, (and is) in fact our arrogating to ourselves the freedom to reject Providence. If so, then it’s possible Adam and Eve ate the very same things we eat and even worked to get it, but had no objection to doing so and were content all the same because they fully accepted Providence.

Jesus talked about that some, “look at the lilies of the field”, “regard the ravens”, and so on. He was talking about accepting Providence joyfully. And perhaps Adam and Eve did just exactly that, until the moment when the tempter said “no, no, no, this is no good. God is a tyrant. Look, you can decide for yourself what’s good and what’s not”.

Maybe even their deathlessness was simply the deathlessness of which Jesus spoke. Even though you die, you shall live.

And so, we self-expelled from Eden, perhaps, because we refused to accept the one we were in.
 
504Katrin said:
We know that they ate from the fruit hence had to leave. Which begs the question, did they eat something like manna. Since G0d told them that after their expulsion they had to work in order to have bread I assume that they had bread in Garden Eden lying aroud, or maybe also growing on the trees.
I conclude that it must have been some kind of manna, similar to the manna that Moshe and the others ate in the desert back in the day?
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You are making the assumption that man did not have to work before the fall. This is wrong. The result of the the fall is not that man had to start working, it is that work became hard, tiresome, not fun (ie by the sweat of your brow). Man had work to do before hand, it is just that man was at peace with his work (with his whole life). We will likely have work in heaven. We are not made to be idle.

John Paul II’s introduction in LABOREM EXERCENS:
THROUGH WORK man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society within which he lives in community with those who belong to the same family. And work means any activity by man, whether manual or intellectual, whatever its nature or circumstances; it means any human activity that can and must be recognized as work, in the midst of all the many activities of which man is capable and to which he is predisposed by his very nature, by virtue of humanity itself. Man is made to be in the visible universe an image and likeness of God himself, and he is placed in it in order to subdue the earth. From the beginning therefore he is called to work. Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature.
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(boldness added by me).

From same document:
  1. In the Book of Genesis
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The Church is convinced that work is a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth. She is confirmed in this conviction by considering the whole heritage of the many sciences devoted to man: anthropology, palaeontology, history, sociology, psychology and so on; they all seem to bear witness to this reality in an irrefutable way. But the source of the Church’s conviction is above all the revealed word of God, and therefore what is a conviction of the intellect is also a conviction of faith. The reason is that the Church-and it is worthwhile stating it at this point-believes in man: she thinks of man and addresses herself to him not only in the light of historical experience, not only with the aid of the many methods of scientific knowledge, but in the first place in the light of the revealed word of the living God. Relating herself to man, she seeks to express the eternal designs and transcendent destiny which the living God, the Creator and Redeemer, has linked with him.
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The Church finds in the very first pages ofthe Book of Genesis the source of her conviction that work is a fundamental dimension of human existence on earth. An analysis of these texts makes us aware that they express-sometimes in an archaic way of manifesting thought-the fundamental truths about man, in the context of the mystery of creation itelf. These truths are decisive for man from the very beginning, and at the same time they trace out the main lines of his earthly existence, both in the state of original justice and also after the breaking, caused by sin, of the Creator’s original covenant with creation in man. When man, who had been created "in the image of God… male and female"9, hears the words: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it"10, even though these words do not refer directly and explicitly to work, beyond any doubt they indirectly indicate it as an activity for man to carry out in the world. Indeed, they show its very deepest essence. Man is the image of God partly through the mandate received from his Creator to subdue, to dominate, the earth. In carrying out this mandate, man, every human being, reflects the very action of the Creator of the universe.
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Work understood as a “transitive” activity, that is to say an activity beginning in the human subject and directed towards an external object, presupposes a specific dominion by man over “the earth”, and in its turn it confirms and develops this dominion. It is clear that the term “the earth” of which the biblical text speaks is to be understood in the flrst place as that fragment of the visible universe that man inhabits. By extension, however, it can be understood as the whole of the visible world insofar as it comes within the range of man’s influence and of his striving to satisfy his needs. The expression “subdue the earth” has an immense range. It means all the resources that the earth (and indirectly the visible world) contains and which, through the conscious activity of man, can be discovered and used for his ends. And so these words, placed at the beginning of the Bible, never cease to be relevant. They embrace equally the past ages of civilization and economy, as also the whole of modern reality and future phases of development, which are perhaps already to some extent beginning to take shape, though for the most part they are still almost unknown to man and hidden from him.
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THE tree of knowledge of good & evil.

It is one tree. It can be good. It can be evil.

I think it is our knowledge and conscience ran without listening to GRACE.

When we follow the lead from GOD’S GRACE, our tree is good.
 
tafan said:
You are making the assumption that man did not have to work before the fall. This is wrong. The result of the the fall is not that man had to start working, it is that work became hard, tiresome, not fun (ie by the sweat of your brow). Man had work to do before hand, it is just that man was at peace with his work (with his whole life). We will likely have work in heaven. We are not made to be idle.
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You have a good point here 🙂 Before the expulsion, why should G0d have made them work for food with pleasure in the first place? And what lead you to thinking that work in Eden was physical work, what about mental work, work with the mind?
 
504Katrin said:
You have a good point here 🙂 Before the expulsion, why should G0d have made them work for food with pleasure in the first place? And what lead you to thinking that work in Eden was physical work, what about mental work, work with the mind?
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I would doubt that all of the work in Eden was mental work. Certainly mental work is one example we have (naming all of the animals). But we are told that they could eat from all of the trees except one, so they likely had to at least gather their food, and prepare it. Why would you think Adam and Eve did not have to work in Eden?
Why would God have made men with physical bodies and without a physical purpose? Work, of all types, is an inherent part of human dignity. It won’t go away in paradise.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I’m no theologian. I just wonder sometimes about things.

I have sometimes thought if we knew for sure what the “knowledge of good and evil” is, we would know the answers to a lot of things about our first parents.

I have sometimes wondered if the “knowledge of good and evil” was, (and is) in fact our arrogating to ourselves the freedom to reject Providence. If so, then it’s possible Adam and Eve ate the very same things we eat and even worked to get it, but had no objection to doing so and were content all the same because they fully accepted Providence.

Jesus talked about that some, “look at the lilies of the field”, “regard the ravens”, and so on. He was talking about accepting Providence joyfully. And perhaps Adam and Eve did just exactly that, until the moment when the tempter said “no, no, no, this is no good. God is a tyrant. Look, you can decide for yourself what’s good and what’s not”.

Maybe even their deathlessness was simply the deathlessness of which Jesus spoke. Even though you die, you shall live.

And so, we self-expelled from Eden, perhaps, because we refused to accept the one we were in.
Click to expand...
Catholicism explains the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in paragraph 396 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition.
scborromeo.org/ccc/para/396.htm
 
My understanding, comes from a man I knew to have read his own bible, completely, over two hundred times, named Peter S. Ruckman. I have only done it 24 times. He surmized that as Gen. 49:11 says, " the blood of grapes ", and Ezek. 15:2 says, “the vine tree” (a vine can be a tree- according to the book I believe to be the final authority, for all matters of faith and practice-the King James 1611), then you have the Lord Jesus lifting up the cup and saying, “this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.” (Mark 14:24) It would seem plausable that we got our blood from the grape. My guess would be a dark one, because, “men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”(John 3:19). But I would be interested in knowing what grannymh was talkin’ about, cause I’s a sure it wern’t no apple. No proof.
 
P.S. I ain’t no Protestant either, I’s a bible believer, which was here before any beloved Catholic (catholic means universal, does it not?)
 
Jimford said:
My understanding, comes from a man I knew to have read his own bible, completely, over two hundred times, named Peter S. Ruckman. I have only done it 24 times. He surmized that as Gen. 49:11 says, " the blood of grapes ", and Ezek. 15:2 says, “the vine tree” (a vine can be a tree- according to the book I believe to be the final authority, for all matters of faith and practice-the King James 1611), then you have the Lord Jesus lifting up the cup and saying, “this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.” (Mark 14:24) It would seem plausable that we got our blood from the grape. My guess would be a dark one, because, “men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”(John 3:19). But I would be interested in knowing what grannymh was talkin’ about, cause I’s a sure it wern’t no apple. No proof.
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Call me granny.

I have a confession. Not only have I not read the whole Bible, I have only read a few Bible verses more than 24 times, but these are some of the important ones which taught me about God, like John 3: 16; Romans 5: 12-21, and chapter 14, Gospel of John where Jesus said: “I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” Verse 18.
Actually, I learned the life of Jesus as child by listening to the Scriptures read at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. I love the story about the Samaritan woman at the well. Currently, I use the footnotes in the* Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition *when I want to find something in Scripture.

All of the first three chapters of Genesis are my passion. Once we get by the organic fruit tree, apple or whatever, there is so much to learn about the loving relationship between our first parent Adam and our Creator. Genesis 1: 26-27 and 31. May I ask what are your favorite verses?

In the meantime, we need to understand the meaning of the forbidden tree’s odd name, The Knowledge of Good and Evil. What this name says is that between the two extremes of good and evil, there exists all the possible knowledge in the world. What could possibly be beyond total good and total evil? Eve, being an observant woman, saw that this particular tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, desirable for gaining wisdom. Genesis 3: 6. Satan had planted the idea that eating the tree’s fruit would make a person be like gods who know what is good and what is evil. Genesis 3: 5.

The meaning of the tree’s name describes the real temptation in the garden which was for Adam to be a real god. Being made in the image of God gave Adam the spiritual capability of deep friendship with God. But that is not the same as being a real god with the power of all knowledge of everything between good and evil.

As you pointed out, there is no proof of an apple. What is obvious is that Adam chose to do something to break humanity’s relationship with divinity. Genesis 3: 13.

As believers in the Bible, we use our eyes to see the words and use our hearts to listen to God as He reveals His love for us. John 3:16. Jesus, Himself, said: “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life.” John 14: 6.

I know I only talked about the name of the tree. If you wish, please share with me your impressions of this.
 
Favorite verse in the O.T. is Ps. 138:2- “I will worship toward thy holy temple, and praise thy name for thy lovingkindness and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name.” In the N.T. its,though there are so many good ones, but I Corinthians 1:10 is what I really adore, and 2 Cor. 2:14. 1 Cor. 1:10 says- “Now I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” 2 Cor. 2:14 says- “Now thanks be unto God, which always causeth us to triumph in Christ, and maketh manifest the savour of his knowledge by us in every place.”
 
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