Change in plans. I think I have to just blurt this out.
The world is created in Genesis. The turmoil is made light, the heavens are raised, dry land appears--nothing about this is really more edifying than would be the experience of a person (if someone had existed) who had viewed the bewildering spectacle.
Then the earth is ordered to produce vegetation--though it is really the seed-containing growth potential of the plants that is emphasized, and (as the reader might surmise) I will note that it is only "later"--if the "second Story of Creation" can be kept at hand--that above-ground vegetation is focused upon.
Then the lights in the "vault of heaven" appear, followed by creatures of the sea and by birds--birds that, as the KJV has it--"fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven." This is the end of the fifth day, and only one day of making remains.
What is important to note here is that nothing so far created would be anything but a distant puzzle to the hypothetical person I mentioned before. The sky, the heavenly bodies, the creatures of the sea, and the birds (which might have inhabited distant surrounding shores and appeared only as high-flung apparitions against the "vault of heaven"), as well as seeds of vegetation hiding their potential under the soil, need not have been accessible to examination.
In this one last day--the sixth day--God creates the animals and humanity (and it is only the marking of days that denotes the progression, not "this happened, and then this happened.") On this last day, if the two "Stories of Creation" are melded, animals and people are created. God puts the man against the setting of distant and inaccessible phenomena I described (though apparently with plenty of featureless mud) and plants a garden for him, it being particularly noted that God brought forth for the man plants "out of the ground," in which their seeds might have lain in waiting.
The man needs the plants to survive, and he is being given knowledge about them to further that cause. Unfortunately (in a manner that we might never hope to really understand) the closeness of God in that verdant setting is not enough for the man. The man's dissatisfaction certainly seems like sin, and we must note that it is a dissatisfaction that occurs in the only world he knows, with the only knowledge-horizon he knows. God grants the man further companionship, but of course that companionship will come along with further knowledge--knowledge to be perhaps improperly assimilated.
And so on this sixth day (as I fancy it), with the progression of creation formally denoted only by the passing of days, the animals (and perhaps only the more terrestrial) birds are formed out of the ground, to be named by Adam (quite possibly prejudicing the light in which each creature will be "known" by humanity) and to be examined to see if any of the creatures are "an help meet" for Adam. None of them are.
And so the woman is created out of man, in a manner not to be repeated. She is brought to the man, and he delights in how she is "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" (though, as I have noted before, it might have been more seemly for Adam to have delighted in the woman's individual nature.) What is most important here is the additional fact that Adam seems to take no delight in how the woman's "flesh" might accompany him in intimacy. Only after "the Fall" does the text relate how he named her "Eve" because she was the mother of all the living, and only after "the Fall" is childbirth described or sexual intercourse related (wherein a man "knows" his mate, in some translations.) (The "shall cleave unto his wife" narration immediately after Adam describes the woman as "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" is best understood as attributed to God, not to a sexually-awakened Adam, and Jesus indeed treats the "cleaving" as being a divine imposition.)
What is going on throughout the Creation narrative is a step-wise broadening of humanity's knowledge-horizon--and it does not seem to be a good thing (even if we just consider what centuries of "cleaving" have done to the moral history of our species.) In the beginning, Adam and his Maker did not discuss political philosophy or the various theories of a "salvation economy"--or so it would seem. The very fact of being surrounded by the vista of Creation while in the company of God would be enough for anyone--or would it? Is this not perhaps the rub of our imperfection--the "genesis" of our sin-separation from God?
And then there is the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Here I will have to toss out some scriptural references--in full awareness of the latent folly of proceeding so as a layman. The standard notion of the fateful "knowledge of good and evil" is the notion that Adam and Eve were morally innocent beforehand (and we are all aware of the rejoinder to the effect that they--and we--were punished for a transgression that by definition cannot have been a transgression because they had to sinfully decide to eat from the tree that brought them sinfulness.) In the standard notion, Adam and Eve came to know what good and evil were, and became thereby morally responsible creatures.
However, the matter is not so simple. In the "Fall" verse (2:9) of Genesis, the tree of the knowledge of "good" and "evil" uses words in Hebrew that are typically used as adjectives ("good," "better," "best," "well," and "evil," "wicked," "bad," "wrong.") In contrast, Genesis 44:4, detailing Joseph's manipulation of his brothers, has him telling his steward to say to them, "Wherefore have ye rewarded evil for good?" Here the words for "good" and "evil" are those typically rendered as nouns ("good," "prosperity," "good things," "favor," and "disaster," "evil," "wickedness," "harm.") (The predominant variant meanings are taken from the NIV concordance.)
In 1 Samuel 25 David complains of Nabal that "he hath requited me evil for good," and the words for "good" and "evil" are the noun forms I described above, while yet in the rest of 1 Samuel it is usually the case that the typically adjective forms are used in phrases translated such as "good report" or "evil spirit."
The argument for the respective uses of these terms is far from clear-cut, and there is much overlap in the usages (though I would note that both the Psalms and Jeremiah render the quite distinctive notion of "good" for "evil"--probably the most solid "noun" uses of the words--with the Hebrew "noun" rather than "adjective" forms as I have described.)
What I am getting at in my clunky progression (if the reader has not already guessed it) is the notion that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was not a source primarily of "wisdom" about what is good and what is evil. In other words, it is not of paramount importance to view the story as showing Adam and Eve coming to know "good" and "evil" as nouns. What the story is really telling us is that the plethora of knowledge (or what passes for knowledge) possessed by human beings in our present state is a mixed blessing. Adam and Eve set themselves to pursuing knowledge that can be good or evil in its effects on us (or in how we let it affect us.)
Humanity was in a step-wise decline throughout the Genesis narrative, and our fascination with the supposedly pristine moral state of Adam and Eve has blinded us to implications of the story that we cannot afford to miss. Adam was surrounded by more wonders than an eternity could hold--or that he could hope to comprehend in an eternity. He was not satisfied with the wonders of God's Creation and of fellowship with God. Even the trees of Eden were an infinite knowledge-horizon, and indeed no notions of any level of intricacy or elevation can compare with God. To have sought diversion in what God had not provided, rather than in what God had provided, was asking for trouble--an "asking" from the morally-competent Adam and Eve that stands in incomparable distinction from the cartoonish notion of the first couple suddenly coming to an understanding of "good" and "evil." Rather, the first couple attained knowledge that was good and evil from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
It is the importance of questions about knowledge that is probably the most-overlooked aspect of the teachings of Jesus. We tend to do this over-looking because we focus disproportionately on the question of belief. That is to say, we look to belief without considering adequately what tends to underlie belief, and what tends to dictate most potently the manifestations of our beliefs. This missing factor is the simple notion of a knowledge-base, of a carefully-tended set of observations and ruminations on the state of our existence. Our lack of care in this regard can certainly place us in the jeopardy that Jesus describes in speaking about "careless" words. We tend to think of this as having to do with cursing, blasphemy, scatology, or simply idle talk. We do not consider often enough that simply making unwarranted assumptions about our existence can be such "careless" talk--with all the dire implications.
We do not believe enough, it is true, but it is also true that we cannot really cease to believe. Those two poles, however, do not reliably describe our predicament. Jesus already tells us that our belief is always too small to measure, while simultaneously he tells us that even in our evil state we can scarcely forsake the entirety of the positive aspects of our nature. The true realm of our battle for "belief" is not in those moments when we aspire to belief or, alternately, when we are caught short in the realization that we are not acting as though we believe. The true realm of our battle for belief is in the larger middle ground, wherein we must face the relentless reality that we swim in--we drown in--what we know and what we think we know and what we know deep-down that we have accepted as "knowledge" merely out of habit or convenience. This is the good-old Adam-and-Eve realm of good and evil.
An apt parallel of this argument is to be found in our horrible struggle with racism. In its worst aspects in the history of the West, white people tried to believe that black people were not human. For a while it was fashionable for educated white people to believe that they were nearer cousins to chimpanzees than to the gorilla-imaged Blacks. No notion was too ridiculous to hold, as long as the prospect of rendering Blacks non-human was in play (such as the import of the Dred Scott decision.) In short, the paramount "belief" of racism in the West was the black person as an animal (if even reckoned that nobly), though the undeniable reality of black-white progeny put the lie to the whole business (and often made plain the business of racism being used for privileged or positioned whites to make sexual objects of Blacks.)
In short, the paramount "belief" of racism in the West was not "believed," anymore than any of us can "believe" in God or Jesus as we ought. I do not mean the parallel to be ridiculous (though of course it is) but rather to place both issues under the withering light that Jesus employs in challenging us to accept that fact that "belief" in the simple terms we would like to use is essentially ridiculous. Belief is what we think we can base on what we claim to know, but (Eden-like) to "know" something is to embrace the good and evil of our claims to knowledge.
And, of course, what we really know is not all bad. Jesus did not tell us to think of ourselves as all bad, and indeed there have been few times and places in which people have been all bad. There is goodness admixed with evil, and in many times and places the residue of good has shown itself to be crucial. It is of course somewhat sickening to think that there were and are mitigating factors in the racial horrors that were and are abroad in our culture, that is, mitigating factors that can be extracted with some pains from less-than-noble constructions we can have of our situations. However, one might think of patronizing and simplistic sentiments about "good Blacks" that would (sometimes) temper the cruelty of actions and institutions.
And so I have described an analogy to attempted overarching religious beliefs in overarching racial beliefs, and I have described an analogy to moral residues about religion in moral residues in communal behavior. What remains, though, in constructing the analogy-scheme resides in that cavernous middle-ground that constitutes the bulk of our lives. The most potent element (or at least the most potently-addressable element) lies in the questioning of what we believe, and in hard reality that involves questioning what we think we know. Any moment of any day can be a trap we allow to spring upon us. In racial attitudes, any moment of any day can be a moment of confirmation bias, or of slights delivered (and often at no personal experiential cost) so that bad habits are reinforced, or of unthinking ratification of one's "heritage" that is no more determinative of personal reality than inheriting someone's hair color.
Again, this is something that I thought I had to blurt out, and some of it is almost too bewildering or to disconcerting to comprehend.
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