Page 250 - Coincidences in the Bible and in Biblical Hebrew

CHAPTER 17 BIBLICAL KNOWLEDGE, GOOD AND

BAD

CHAPTER 17

Biblical Knowledge, Good and Bad

17.1 Introduction

The Bible refers to the concept of knowledge thus:

“And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleas-
ant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the
garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9).

This seems bizarre. Why is knowledge defined in terms of good and evil
instead of truth and falsehood? This is contradictory to our modern—perhaps
intuitive—notion of knowledge. It is commonly accepted that the latter implies
acquaintance with truth, telling the real from the unreal, discrimination between
that which is fact and that which is fantasy. So why is it that the biblical notion of
knowledge is founded on moralistic grounds, on good versus evil?
The answer to that question may be surprising. The above quote from Genesis,
commonly accepted in English translations, is based on an interpretation of what
the Bible intends to say in this verse. It is not based on that which is indeed
written in the original Hebrew. Let us read the Hebrew verse carefully. It states:
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2
“The tree of knowledge, good [tov ] and bad [va-ra ].” That is all. Both are given
as adjectives, implying that the tree of knowledge allows one to tell the good from
the bad. There is no necessary moral aspect to this tree … or the moral aspect may
be only one of many, embodied in the general concepts of good and bad.
As we shall realize shortly, this interpretation is appreciably more compliant
with how we intuitively perceive knowledge—but also, and more importantly,
with the way biblical Hebrew relates to the concepts of good, bad, knowledge,
and knowing anywhere else in the Bible.

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