Good vs. Truth

The heart of the narrative is the divine command not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil – a tree that has no obvious parallel in any ancient Near-Eastern literature –  a command that marks out a limit. Two motifs are immediately apparent in the serpent's subsequent deception. First, the inherent attractiveness of the fruit itself, which appeals to the senses, described as "attractive," אוָהתּ‬ taʾavah, which in Hebrew actually means “desirable" or even "greedily lustful." The term appears in Deuteronomy 5:21 in the prohibition against coveting, as such strong desires usually lead to the impulse of taking. But the core enticement to transgress seems not merely to be heightened sensual pleasure but the prospect of new, previously excluded dimensions of life. By focusing their attention on the forbidden the serpent presents himself as a Prometheus – who aided humanity in gifting stolen fire from the gods – but by making it mysteriously attractive, his temptation takes advantage of humanity's desire to transcend limits by self-willed autonomy in pursuit of wisdom. This intellectual and moral discernment was possessed by King David and Solomon, enabling them to judge wisely and discern between good and evil, right and wrong. Such knowledge is described as quasi-divine, "like an angel of God," as wisdom is the ability to discern Order. 

In this sense, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil could, amongst other possibilities, be seen as representing the choice to trust God’s definition of good and evil or to define it for oneself. The connection of the serpent with wisdom or knowledge was common among early Christian Gnostics, who characterized anything forbidden as being, so to speak, contaminated with a Chaos⇆Dragon of portentous possibility, which ensured a potentially profitable attraction of attention. Like scientists searching for anomalies to disconfirm hypotheses, some medieval alchemists adopted this Gnostic interpretation, and some even associated the Chaos⇆Dragon’s head with that of Christ's! who in some Gnostic traditions took on the form of the serpent in Paradise to teach Adam and Eve the faculty of discrimination in order to discover the world's imperfections and thus work to perfect it. 

But in fact Adam and Eve were called to focus their attentions on caring for a particular place in time that God considered complete, and to accept its limitations. So it is also possible to interpret the serpent’s temptation as not simply about becoming like God, but about attempting to escape the constraints of authentic relationship that avoid responsibility (their jobs in the Garden) for the structure of relational reality (covenant). 

Adam and Eve fell prey to the temptation of technique. They attempt to avoid the limits of their bodily finitude and the constraints of the place God had called them. Later in the evening, when God comes calling, their strategy reverses. In the first situation they pretended to be like God, without the limitations of body and context. Now, feeling the shame of demanding transcendence, they don’t even want to accept the responsibility of being human. In these original deceptions there is an avoidance of reality, a fleeing from the truth of what God is communicating to them through their context. On the one side they deny their bodily limitations, and on the other side they avoid their contextual responsibilities. In the end, they break their faithful presence, and it results in broken relationships to God, creation and each other. God's punishments are similar to their transgression, as if to say: your disobedience took the form of defying limits, so you will be punished with more limits on the nearly infinite freedom – which depended on the limit – that you had before.