Babylonian and Phœnician art; or in the fabled garden of the Hesperides, with its golden fruit guarded by a dragon, always figured in artistic representations as a huge snake coiled round the trunk of the tree (cf. Lenormant, Origines, i. 93 f.: see the illustrations in Roscher, Lex. 2599 f.). How the various elements were combined in the particular myth which lies immediately behind the biblical narrative, it is impossible to say; but the myth of Adapa suggests at least some elements of a possible construction, which cannot be very far from the truth. Obviously we have to do with a polytheistic legend, in which rivalries and jealousies between the different deities are almost a matter of course. The serpent is himself a demon; and his readiness to initiate man in the knowledge of the mysterious virtue of the forbidden tree means that he is at variance with the other gods, or at least with the particular god who had imposed the prohibition. The intention of the command was to prevent man from sharing the life of the gods; and the serpent-demon, posing as the good genius of man, defeats that intention by revealing to man the truth (similarly Gu. 30). To the original heathen myth we may also attribute the idea of the envy of the gods, which the biblical narrator hardly avoids, and the note of weariness and melancholy, the sombre view of life,—the 'scheue heidnische Stimmung,'—which is the ground-tone of the passage.
It is impossible to determine what, in the original myth, was the
nature of the tree (or trees) which man was forbidden to eat. Gres.
(l.c. 351 ff.) finds in the passage traces of three primitive conceptions:
(1) the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, whose fruit imparts the
knowledge of magic,—the only knowledge of which it can be said that
it makes man at once the equal and the rival of the deity; (2) the tree of
knowledge, whose fruit excites the sexual appetite and destroys childlike
innocence (37); (3) the tree of life, whose fruit confers immortality
(322). The question is immensely complicated by the existence of two
recensions, which do not seem so hopelessly inseparable as Gres. thinks.
In the main recension we have the tree of knowledge, of which man eats
to his hurt, but no hint of a tree of life. In the secondary recension
there is the tree of life (of which man does not eat), and apparently the
tree of knowledge of which he had eaten; but this depends on the word
(
Hebrew characters) in 322, which is wanting in G, and may be an interpolation. Again,
the statement that knowledge of good and evil really amounts to equality
with God, is found only in the second recension; in the other it is doubtful
if the actual effect of eating the fruit was not a cruel disappointment
of the hope held out by the serpent. How far we are entitled to read
the ideas of the one into the other is a question we cannot answer.
Eerdmans' ingenious but improbable theory (ThT, xxxix. 504 ff.) need
not here be discussed. What is meant by knowledge of good and evil
in the final form of the narrative will be considered under the next head.
3. The religious ideas of the passage.—Out of such crude and seemingly unpromising material the religion of revelation has fashioned the immortal allegory before us. We have now to inquire what are the religious and moral truths under the influence of which the narrative assumed its present form, distinguishing as far as possible the ideas
