I think we commonly get a couple things wrong about the temptation and fall of man in the garden of Eden. Namely the nature of Eve’s temptation and the validity of Adam & Eve’s confessions.
First, the temptation.
Note how Satan opens the conversation: “Yeah, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” Did God really say that? It is an attempt to call into question the veracity of what she has been told. Now, if he wants the woman to doubt that God actually forbade them that fruit, then he is trying to convince the woman that eating the fruit is not forbidden.
She replies that they may eat of all the other trees, but the fruit of this tree is forbidden, lest they die. “No,” says Satan, “you shall not surely die.” Why not? Because God knows that eating this fruit will make you wise like gods. Now, if the allure of eating the fruit is that it may exalt her to be a rival to God, does that make him more or less likely to kill her for disobedience? More, right? But if Satan is trying to convince her that God never said not to eat of that tree, the idea is that eating the fruit will make her more into God’s image, more into what God wants her to be. God would never kill her for that. “You won’t die,” he says, “This fruit will open your eyes so that you can grow in wisdom and godliness. God knows that.”
“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise….” What does “good for food” mean? The word for something that is good for food is ‘edible.’ Edible objects are non-toxic and nourishing. Fruit that kills you is not good for food. She sees that the fruit is edible, that it looks pretty and not dangerous, and that it imparts wisdom. She sees that it is safe and useful. She buys Satan’s lie, and she eats.
Now, when God confronts Adam in the garden, he asks him, “Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” The accusation is that he ate the thing that he was told not to eat. If I am right, Eve just ate of this fruit because Satan convinced her that God had never said that. But here is God, saying that he told Adam not to do that. She now knows she was wrong. Adam says that Eve gave him the fruit and he did, indeed, eat of it. God turns to Eve. “What is this thou hast done?” She replies, “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.”
This brings us to blame-shifting. Was first Adam, and then Eve, blame-shifting when God confronted them with their sin? I don’t think so. When one is trying to shift blame, one either makes a small admission of partial guilt at the beginning and then emphasizes the culpability of others, or else starts by talking about what others did, makes a mention of one’s own actions in a way that minimizes them, and then continues on to magnify the liability of others. Ending one’s statement with ownership of one’s own culpability is not a good strategy for shifting blame. So if Adam were trying to shift blame, I would think his statement would read more like one of the following:
“I took one bite of the fruit, but that was because of that woman. She ate it first and she gave some to me.” Or, “I did eat some fruit. The woman gave it to me. I was not going to eat any fruit but she thought it was a good idea and she took some first and ate it. It was all her idea, really.” Or even just, “I did eat. The woman you gave to be with me, she gave it to me,” would sound more like blame-shifting. To my ear, by ending their confession with their own culpability stated plainly, they sound like they are taking ownership of their sin.
But there is another reason I think they are not trying to shift blame. Eve says the serpent deceived her. Did he? In 1 Timothy 2, Paul takes that confession at face value: he states that the woman was deceived. And God accepts Eve’s testimony, turning to the serpent and cursing it without even asking the serpent for an explanation. And Adam says that the woman gave him the fruit. God takes that confession at face value, too, saying, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife….” When one is blame-shifting, one’s statements are inaccurate and are not to be trusted, but theirs are treated as factual.
If C.S. Lewis had written Genesis 3, God would say to Adam, “Did you really eat the fruit just because your wife gave it to you?” And Adam would hang his head and say, “No, actually I just wanted to eat the fruit and so I did. I could have said ‘no’ and knew I should but did not want to.” And then to Eve, God would have said: “Did Satan actually fool you?” And she would look down at the ground and shift her feet uncomfortably and at last confess, “No, not really. I just wanted to be god-like and show the world what a powerful, wise person I am and I just told myself that I believed what he said, but actually I knew better.” But this isn’t Narnia and God does not say that. He accepts Adam’s story and he believes Eve.
And if Eve is not lying or blame-shifting when she claims the serpent deceived her, then that deception is relevant to the question asked. The original question to Adam was, “Have you eaten of the fruit of the tree I commanded you not to eat from?” When the woman is asked what she did, she answers, “I was deceived and ate from it.” The question God is asking is if they have disobeyed him. If I ask my son if he did not clean up his room like I told him to, and he answers, “I forgot,” he is not saying that he forgot what the punishment for disobedience is or that obeying his father is important, he is saying that he forgot that I had given him that order. Here, having been asked if they have broken his command, to answer, “I was deceived,” is to claim that the disobedience was unintentional. She is claiming to have been tricked into breaking God’s command.
But 1 Timothy 2 is not the only place where Paul cites the deception of Eve. There is also 2 Corinthians 11. There, Paul is arguing his bona fides, making the case that whatever other so-called apostles are trying to bring the Corinthians under their sway, Paul is the real deal. He says, “But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.” So Paul is afraid that the same kind of thing that happened to Eve might happen to the Corinthians. What is that thing? “For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.”
Paul thinks that Eve was correctly told what the command of God was: don’t eat the fruit. Satan came along preaching another commandment, instead of the one she received. She believed him and ate the fruit. Paul has preached the true Jesus and the true gospel to the Corinthians and they received it. He is worried that another “apostle” will come along and preach a different, contradictory gospel to the one he preached, and the Corinthians will believe it instead.
I put “apostle” above in scare quotes for good reason. Paul is explicit about what kind of men he is warning of. “For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel: for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness: whose end shall be according to their works” (11:13-15) Paul is not worried about men coming along who provoke the Corinthians to intentional rebellion. He is worried about them being being tricked into departing from the true faith, the way Eve was.
Hat tip to Bnonn Tennant for suggesting the notion that Eve was tempted by Satan to disbelieve that the fruit was actually forbidden.