![]() ![]() Similarly, when Solomon became king upon David’s death, he prays for wisdom. She associates this “knowledge” to the activity of God himself, or the “Angel of God.” It is the kind of judgment that is associated with rulership. The woman is here seeking for the king to issue a judgment in her behalf. “For the king will hear and deliver his maidservant from the hand of the man who would destroy both me and my son from the inheritance of God.” Then your maidservant said, “Please let the word of my lord the king be comforting, for as the angel of God, so is my lord the king to discern good and evil” (2 Samuel 14:16-17). It is an active phrase, and refers to discernment between good and evil, or more simply, making judgments.Ĭompare for example the woman of Tekoa’s words to King David, when she was looking for him to correct a wrong: The first thing to say is that “knowing good and evil” does not refer to the possession of information, like one would “know” the capital of Belgium or the chemical components of a cell membrane. “Knowing Good and Evil” Means Making Judgments I do not know to what extent Stuart’s view represents a majority opinion, but I think there is a better explanation available. Stuart seems to take it that the fruit literally imparts informational knowledge in some way, like a download. Part of the human dilemma as a consequence of the fall is that humans have enormous knowledge of how to do bad things as well as how to do good things. That is the point of what is emphasized here in this story. The idea is that we now have more knowledge than we can morally handle. The actual effect, Stuart thinks, is that after eating the fruit: So Stuart suggests that what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents, and what the serpent tempted Adam and Eve with, was omniscience. ![]() For example, if we say that a piece of news has spread “to the four corners of the earth,” we mean that the news has spread everywhere. Old Testament scholar Douglas Stuart has a short article on in which he attempts to explain the meaning of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In short, Stuart argues that the term is a merism-a figure of speech in which two extremes are named in order to encompass everything in between.
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