Refrigerator logic, or a shower thought:
According to Genesis, God forbids Adam and Eve from eating fruit of the tree of wisdom, specifically of knowledge of good and evil.
Serpent talks to Eve, calling out God’s lie: God said they will die from eating the fruit (as in die quickly, as if the fruit were poisonous). They won’t die from the fruit, Serpent tells them. Instead, their eyes will open and they will understand good and evil.
And Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of wisdom, learning good and evil (right and wrong, or social mores). And then God evicts them from paradise for disobedience.
But if the eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil, this belies they did not know good and evil in the first place. They couldn’t know what forbidden means, or that eating from the tree was wrong. They were incapable of obedience.
Adam and Eve were too unintelligent (immature? unwise?) to understand, much like telling a toddler not to eat cookies from the cookie jar on the counter.
Putting the tree unguarded and easily accessible in the Garden of Eden was totally a setup
Am I reading this right?
Terms like Elohist are not used anymore by scholars. The documentary hypothesis collapsed in the 70s…
It stems from how God is referenced in Hebrew in the two chapters. Genesis 1 is Elohim. Genesis 2 is Yahweh.
I know that, but the idea that behind these different names of God are different authors/schools is not accepted by mainstream historians nowadays.
In this particular case, it seems evident that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have different authors, but not the Elohist and the Jahvist, in that you can’t necessarily link this two passages to others in the Bible which would use the same names for God.
I tend to see in Genesis 1, with the emphasis on the fact that the man and the woman are created as the same time (verse 27) an answer to Genesis 2, which in that case would have been older. In the Bible, a lot of texts are answers to other texts. It totally breaks the idea of inerrancy, but it makes the Bible a very interesting polyphony.