Adamah brought up in another thread an issue I wasn't aware of, and I thought it merged well with something I've been pondering about. It revolves around the deeper reasons why Satan was successful in persuading Eve to eat from the forbidden fruit. Why was Eve persuaded to disobey God?
On this weekend's WT study, on paragraph 11, the GB claims that a prominent reason was pride: "Satan thus suggested that Eve could gain independence from Jehovah. Pride was apparently a factor that caused her to accept the lie." Was it really a question of pride?
Consider how Satan challenged Eve: "No! You will not die", the serpent said to the woman. In fact, God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil". (Genesis 3:4, 5 Holman Christian Standard Bible)
Now, we are usually focused on the portion of the argument "you will be like God, knowing good and evil." But, was Eve so naive that she believed that she could really be like God by simply eating a fruit? I don't think so. Therefore, I started thinking about the other portion of the argument: "Your eyes will be opened". How would Eve perceive this claim? After all, she wasn't phisically blind, was she? How come the promise of having her eyes opened made a compelling argument for disobeying God's command?
Consider this hypothesis:
Jehovah regularly communicated with Adam and Eve before their fall. It was no surprise, then, that they "heard the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day", looking for them. (Gen. 3:8) Since the Bible clearly states that "no one has ever seen God" (John 1:18), we can conclude that Adam and Eve never saw Jehovah, nor even a material representation of him. He was invisible to them. They probably felt his presence, and heard his voice, but no visual sight of him. Hence, Adam and Eve were aware that there was a spiritual world, but they were blind to this spiritual world that obviously existed around them. It was plausible that Eve developed a curiosity as to what was this world about. After all, God was from that invisible, spiritual world, and he was the source of wisdom and power. To access that spiritual world would mean access a higher level of wisdom and power.
In other passages, the Bible uses the term "open eyes" to denote the impartation of power to perceive objects not otherwise discernible. (Genesis 21:19; 2 Kings 6:17, 18; Isaiah 35:5) So, the ambiguous statement of the Devil was perceived by Eve as a promise of not being blind anymore to the same spiritual world from where Jehovah originated from. By eating the fruit Eve would finally see into the spiritual world, as if stepping into the realm of Jehovah, and therefore be "like God", or "like the gods". (literally, 'like Elohim'). What does it mean to be "like God", in Satan's proposition? To 'know good and evil'. Satan was offering Eve a chance to access divinity status, with a super-human level of understanding and knowledge and decision-making power about moral rules. However, in typical Satan style, his oracle was ambiguous. He deceived Eve by letting her believe that the outcome for her would be to become god-like.
This is why Eve started to look to the tree from a different prespective. "Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom.So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it". (Genesis 3:6 Holman Christian Standard Bible).
Now, interestingly, the NWT omits a portion of this text. "Consequently, the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was something desirable to the eyes, yes, the tree was pleasing to look at." Notice the omission in the NWT of the reason why the tree was desireable: For obtaining wisdom. In the hebrew text, the word "le-ha´s-kîl" is present,and it means "to consider, to instruct, to give skillful, to teach" (Strong's). That I'm aware of, only the Douay-Rheims Translation chooses to omit this notion as the NWT does. Every other translation imparts the notion that Eve considered that eating the fruit would be means to "obtain wisdom". If this is simply incompetent translation or a deliberate attempt to obscure the motivations of Eve to eat the fruit, I can't tell.
Now, why would God plant such a tree in Eden and then gave a command for the man and woman to not eat it? Was God purposedly putting a stumbling block in front of them? I'm personally persuaded that wasn't the case. (James 1:13) I think that at some point, Jehovah would allow the couple to eat the fruit of said tree, which meant to enter the spiritual realm. But this was to happen only when God decided it was time - not for humans to make that call. By doing so in disobediance to God, Adam and Eve sinned and fell from grace.
After eating from the fruit, Satan's oracle did get a fulfillment, but in an unexpected way for the couple: "The eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked". (Gen. 3:7) They realized they have sinned, and their eyes were now opened to the reallity of evil, something they were previously unaware of. Indeed, Jehovah acknowledged that change: "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil". (Gen. 3:22) Jehovah and the other creatures in the spiritual realm were aware of "good and evil", namely, aware of the consequences of a sinful condition, poor moral choices. If evil didn't exist in heavens, how could the heavenly beings know about it? I'm persuaded that it was because they could see what the other Homo Sapiens that already pre-existed outside the Garden of Eden were doing. They could observe them, and know "good and evil" through them. Eve thought that she would get access to divinity status. Instead, what she got was to become just like the other human beings outside Eden that had evolved over millions of years and were not created directly by God in the same fashion as she and Adam were.
Eden