Cheryl Schatz

Mark,

First, she exaggerates the prohibition. God never commanded that they not touch the fruit (3:3). Second, she omits the name of the tree, that is, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

This is tradition. Just as God spoke additional things to Adam and Eve in chapter 1, God also identified the tree in a different way to Adam and Eve. He identified the specific tree to them by location. When God spoke to Adam, He did not identify the trees location. However just as pinklight has said, there is no contradiction at all in what God said. He said it in different ways and at different times, but the things that He said in chapter 1 and the things that He said to Adam and Eve that Eve quotes in chapter 3 do not contradict what God said to Adam in chapter 2.

Fourth, the woman minimizes the penalty by saying “lest you die”, when in fact God had said “you shall surely die” (there is a double verb in Hebrew not present in the woman’s statement).

The penalty is not minimized by God telling them both that they will die if they eat the fruit and not giving the double verb. Die is die whether it is said twice or once. This is faulty reasoning and I am surprised that those who understand logical fallacies would not be able to pick this up right away. Sometimes I wonder if intelligent men may be wanting to hear that Eve had all these faults and was not a good witness. It surely must make them feel that only men can represent God since a woman representing God will only get it wrong. But those who may feel this way have not thought about how these serious sins that they are charging Eve with are a serious misrepresentation of God’s that He must rebuke. The fact that God did not rebuke Eve and no apostle or Biblical writer mentioned these “sins” seems to bypass them. Is it possible that there are a lot of men who are inherently prejudiced against women without consciously knowing that they are inwardly prejudiced?