Cheryl Schatz

Don,
You asked:

If she cannot touch it and the seed in the fruit is hidden, how would she know whether it had seed or not?

This is the one of the key points that I received insight about.  This is and always has been an issue of faith.  You see she would be required to believe God by faith that there was no seed in the fruit.  Everything in scripture has always been about having faith in God.  Yet the account in Genesis only seemed to be about one thing – obedience.  Where was the faith aspect?  But when one understands that they were given complete freedom to eat from every single tree that had fruit with seed but they were forbidden to inspect the fruit on the one tree that they were also forbidden to eat from, then we can understand that God was calling both the man and the woman to have faith in him.  They were to believe him that he was not keeping away from them something that he had already given them permission to partake of.  They couldn’t test what he said because they weren’t allowed to touch the fruit.  It was a matter of faith.  I will be posting my conclusions based on the subject of the permission by God and the issue of the prohibition and faith in my next post (when I have time to tear myself away from my editing to get my thoughts together).