This week, I had the privilege of meeting with a student group of evangelical Christians who visited Salt Lake City as part of an extended field trip in their religious studies program. They reach out to various religious and irreligious communities to discuss philosophy and tradition, with the goal to build understanding and critical thinking skills. Together with two of my colleagues in the Church History Department, I fielded questions for a couple of hours from an audience of about 150. Their group leaders directed the topic: How do Latter-day Saints and evangelical Christians compare in their ideas and practices related to eternal life?

Curiously, (at least to me) the conversation moved quickly to the Eden narrative in Genesis and the actions and fate of Adam and Eve. I didn’t have much to say during this exchange, mainly because I’m not much interested in the story. (And unlike the conversation partners on both sides, I could sense I’m quite an outlier in my view of the text as mythic and not historical.) But it was abundantly clear how this story functioned for both groups and was a conceptual tangle to sort out.

How we answered the question—whether Adam and Eve rebelled against God in partaking of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—determined so much of the theological reasoning for eternal life. This topic emerged organically as something rather fundamental to the whole project of understanding both communities’ traditions of salvation and afterlife.

What is “commandment”?

We fixated on Eve’s action to partake of the fruit as either an act of conscientious choice or an act of rebellion. If Eve had rebelled against God, then this brought sin into the world and placed humankind in a fallen, disgraced condition needing Jesus’s salvific intervention. On the other hand, if Eve had made a moral choice to know good and evil as God, then this opened humanity to moral capacity, moving us from a state of innocent inaction to one of agency and a pathway toward integrity and goodness—we could do goodness, we could bring goodness, whereas innocent infantile existence meant we were good but could not enact goodness. (Of course, such moral agency and independent self-determination also opened the way for corruption and immoral action, evil.)

But we didn’t contemplate our assumptions of commandment in the first place. I kept thinking to myself how this notion of God making a command and that command being either obeyed or disobeyed was itself historically developed within early Israelite religion on through Judaism and into Christianity. Both Latter-day Saints and evangelical Christians inherited a vocabulary of commandment, repentance, sin, salvation, that isn’t a constant in even the biblical texts we cite.

I’ve been curious ever since to unpack this idea of “commandment.” Knowing something of the Roman-occupied Judaean setting for much of the transmission, copying, compiling, and canonization of the biblical texts, my reflex is to situate “commandment” within the Roman culture of imperium (=command; order of command; efficient social order) and consider the possibility that imperialism was projected onto God, rendering God imperator, the Emperor of Emperors, and the powers associated with imperator an extension of God’s relationship toward human beings.

But that’s just my reflex. I’m not going to reach a firm conclusion in the space of this post, since I can already tell this kind of inquiry would demand significantly more reading than I’m going to entertain at the moment. Just to start, though, I’m interested in revisiting Genesis and making sense of the Edenic directives God made toward Adam and Eve.

Two Earliest Texts

It’s a complicated approach when you want to examine the earliest texts of Genesis. We’re dealing with transmission chains that move through multiple languages, regions, and copyists, with evidence that the texts of the Hebrew Bible were revised more than once by competing stakeholders. (Hello, David, Solomon, Josiah, and a few unnamed redactors.) Letting the biblical scholars present earliest texts, though, we have basically the Masoretic Hebrew and Septuagint Greek versions of Genesis that get us to the earliest surviving forms of the text. For the Masoretic, I’m relying on Robert Alter’s masterful translation; for the Septuagint, I’m relying on the Society for Biblical Literature’s version, the Lexham English translation.

Passages

The key passages appear in Genesis 1:27–28 and 2:16–18.

Hebrew Text

And ’Ělōhîm [God] created the ’āḏām [human] in his image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer it, and hold sway over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the heavens and every beast that crawls upon the earth.”

And the YHWH ’Ělōhîm [LORD God] commanded the ’āḏām [human], saying, “From every tree of the garden you may surely eat. But from the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die.” And the LORD God said, “It is not good for the human to be alone, I shall make him a sustainer beside him.”

Greek Text

So Θεὸς [God] created ἄνθρωπον [humankind] in his image, in the likeness of God he created it, male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky, and over every animal that moves upon the earth.”

And Κύριος ὁ Θεός [Lord God] commanded the ἄνθρωπον [man], saying, “From every tree of the garden eating you may eat, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day of your eating from it dying you shall die.” Then the Lord God said, “it is not good that the man is alone. I will make for him a helper as his opposite.”

Word Study

I’ll save word studies for lemmata like ’Ělōhîm, YHWH ’Ělōhîm, ’āḏām, Θεὸς, Κύριος ὁ Θεός, and ἄνθρωπον for another day. (Alter’s commentary in his Hebrew Bible translation offer some useful starting points for the Masoretic lemmata; sadly I’m not familiar with a ready Septuagint analysis.)

I’m interested in two verbs in these passages—where God is described as saying and commanding. Is there a difference between these two actions? Is there any nuance or emphasis at play? And of course, are there contextual elements that inform how we should read these verbs?

“God said to them”; “the LORD God commanded the human, saying”; “the LORD God said”—these are the instances. Let’s fetch the lemmata in Hebrew and Greek:

וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים / wayyōʾmer ʾĚlōhîm: āmar = to say, to pronounce, to command, to intend, to mean.1

וַיְצַו יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים עַל־הָֽאָדָם לֵאמֹר / vayṣav YHWH ʾĚlōhîm ‘al hā’āḏām lē’mōr: ṣāvâ = to constitute, to appoint, to decree, to charge, to command, to commission.2

καὶ εἶπεν ὁ θεός / kai eipon o Theos: eipon = to say, to speak.

καὶ ἐνετείλατο Κύριος ὁ Θεὸς τῷ ᾿Αδὰμ λέγων / kai eneteilato Kyrios o Theos toi Adam legon: eneteilato = enjoin, will, command, authorize, invest with; legon = put in order, arrange, reckon, say, speak, call, name.

In both the Hebrew and Greek versions, we see two different verbs used: the [ṣāvâ/eneteilato] action (that appears as “commanded” in both Alter and Lexham translations); and the [āmar/eipon/legon] action (that appears as “said/saying” in both translations as well). The fact that these actions are distinguished from each other by different words may or may not be significant. Let’s assume there is an intentional distinction being made. Relative difference has one action gain more specific rhetorical detail, while the other has more regular rhetorical function—the [ṣāvâ/eneteilato] action appears less frequently, seeming more direct; the [āmar/eipon/legon] action appears more frequently, seeming more regular.

We might consider God’s action toward Adam and Eve one of constituting, appointing, decreeing unto them to eat freely of the trees throughout the garden but avoiding the tree of knowledge. I think it intriguing how the Greek text adds legon instead of eipon after the appointment/decree, so that instead of suggesting that God said this, God arranged or put in order what follows. Almost like we could say that God ordained for Adam and Eve to eat freely except for the tree of knowledge.

Accretions

This far into this word study, I can already detect theological accretions from Christian interpreters. Place those theological ideas on pause, and just sit with this earliest surviving text for a minute, and it appears more nuanced than our vernacular use of “commandment” implies. Is God issuing a formal command to Adam and Eve at this moment? It falls within the same rhetorical function as throughout the Creation narrative when God says and puts in order each element of Creation. When God says for the lights to govern the day and night, for flora and fauna to appear on the earth, etc., God performs the same relative action as when God ordains/puts in order/arranges for Adam and Eve to eat freely except for eating from the tree of knowledge. We certainly could read from this that God ordered things and that they happened as so ordered. But I wonder about the nuance here—a nuance of God speaking of the real, of declaring what is, and this being allowed, being presented, being put in motion.

I’m more comfortable with this part of the narrative showing God less as imperator and more as a parent figure, quite simply introducing Adam and Eve to this garden place, and merely offering them what is before them: there are plenty of trees whose fruit, when eaten, is inconsequential; but you must understand, if you partake of knowledge of good and evil, you will die. The implications from the rest of the narrative show as much: they partake of knowledge and suddenly realize their own nakedness and their capacity for guilt. The consequences arrive, and they cannot remain in the garden.

Being Fruitful

It’s also striking to me how God declares/says/ordains for Adam and Eve to be fruitful, as the first thing to do while in the garden. This is a play on words, a direct play at the first utterance of God to the ’āḏām and what will be the first action of the ’āḏām in the garden: to partake of fruit. These two references pointing to each other must mean something more than simply (in the traditional Christian readings) growing fruit/harvesting from the earth. In the context of the decree that Adam and Eve eat freely of all but one tree, being fruitful would run together. We can just as easily say God told Adam and Eve to go after fruit, to be full of fruit, taste of the whole garden, not simply dabble. A true fullness of being fruitful would be total: they would eat of all varieties of the fruit, knowledge and life included.

Rhetorically, the distinction is not major: God told/appointed/decreed Adam and Eve to both eat abundantly of the garden’s fruits and not to eat of knowledge, to both multiply and not to know how to multiply.

Rebellion?

I’m satisfied the narrative presents us with a moment when God presented Adam and Eve with the garden and told them of their situation. And they were free to choose. I just don’t see rebellion at play here. Consequence, severe consequence, yes—but necessary, inexorable effect of their moral action. Knowing good and evil, they could not remain so innocent, they could not unring that bell and return to ignorance. They had to face a moral future, one where bringing goodness, true and authentic goodness, was possible.