The Fall (Part 3)

I often think about what Adam must have felt like when he saw that Eve had eaten from that tree. I wonder what he saw in her. I wonder if he recognized that she had changed. Maybe she seemed the same, enough of the same to convince Adam that eating from that tree wasn't that bad of an idea. But then, I wonder if there was a tree at all.

For Eve, the tree may just have been a symbol for power. Maybe the thing she wanted to know was what it was like to be powerful. And the knowledge of power was just as good as the knowledge of evil, for to desire power is to be corrupted by it. And for Adam, the tree may have been a metaphor for his desire to reconfigure his knowledge of his own wife, Eve. Maybe he wanted to control her and tame her. Maybe he wanted to know her as his possession rather than as his wife. Maybe the point isn't knowledge as such, but a kind of knowledge and a way of knowing.

The serpent speaking is an obvious symbol in Jewish thought of something horribly wrong in the world. The serpent was probably not a literal serpent, but a symbol of the ways that Eve and Adam had allowed their own thinking to be skewed. I don't know. The whole thing seems pretty weird to me. I know I can't read the story as literally true, but I'm not sure just how far to take the symbolism without corrupting the essence of what the story is trying to say.

Taking all of my doubts into account, so far I'm convinced of this: that the story didn't just happen to two people at a particular time, but is something that happens to all of us all the time. Maybe it started with two people – I can live with that. But the story isn't just about them. It's about you and me and everyone else.

I'm also convinced that the Fall isn't just a one-off, but a daily thing that happens in ways that shock us and bring us to tears. I'm certain that whatever the Fall is, it means that we are more vulnerable to having our knowledge corrupted and our faith eroded. It means that we feel further from God more often than is right.

Whatever the Fall means, it means that we are in need of redemption.