Page:A critical and exegetical commentary on Genesis (1910).djvu/198



implies equality with God, (b) was forbidden to man, (c) is actually secured by man. In the leading narrative (b) certainly holds good (2$17$), but (a) and (c) are doubtful. Did the serpent speak truth when he said that knowledge of good and evil would make man like God? Did man actually attain such knowledge? Was the perception of nakedness a first flash of the new divine insight which man had coveted, or was it a bitter disenchantment and mockery of the hopes inspired by the serpent's words? It is only the habit of reading the ideas of 3$22$ into the story of the temptation which makes these questions seem superfluous. Let us consider how far the various interpretations enable us to answer them.—i. The suggestion that magical knowledge is meant may be set aside as inadequate to either form of the biblical narrative: magic is not god-*like knowledge, nor is it the universal property of humanity.—ii. The usual explanation identifies the knowledge of good and evil with the moral sense, the faculty of discerning between right and wrong. This view is ably defended by Bu. (Urg. 69 ff.), and is not to be lightly dismissed, but yet raises serious difficulties. Could it be said that God meant to withhold from man the power of moral discernment? Does not the prohibition itself presuppose that man already knew that obedience was right and disobedience sinful? We have no right to say that the restriction was only temporary, and that God would in other ways have bestowed on man the gift of conscience; the narrative suggests nothing of the sort.—iii. We. (Prol.$6$ 299 ff.) holds that the knowledge in question is insight into the secrets of nature, and intelligence to manipulate them for human ends; and this as a quality not so much of the individual as of the race,—the knowledge which is the principle of human civilisation. It is the faculty which we see at work in the invention of clothing (3$21$?), in the founding of cities (4$17$), in the discovery of the arts and crafts (4$19ff.$), and in the building of the tower (11$1ff.$). The undertone of condemnation of the cultural achievements of humanity which runs through the Yahwistic sections of chs. 1-11 makes it probable that the writer traced their root to the knowledge acquired by the first transgression; and of such knowledge it might be said that it made man like God, and that God willed to withhold it permanently from His creatures.—iv. Against this view Gu. (11 f., 25 f.) urges somewhat ineptly that the myth does not speak of arts and aptitudes which are learned by education, but of a kind of knowledge which comes by nature, of which the instinct of sex is a typical illustration. Knowledge of good and evil is simply the enlargement of capacity and experience which belongs to mature age,—ripeness of judgment, reason,—including moral discernment, but not identical with it.—The difference between the last two explanations is not great; and possibly both are true. We.'s seems to me the only view that does justice to the thought of 3$22$; and if 4$16ff.$ and 11$1-9$ be the continuation of this version of the Fall, the theory has much to recommend it. On the other hand, Gu.'s acceptation may be truer to the teaching of 3$1ff.$. Man's primitive state was one of childlike innocence and purity; and the knowledge which he obtained by disobedience is the knowledge of life and of the world which distinguishes the grown man from the child. If it be objected that such