What Was the Forbidden Fruit on the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?

 

Answer:  This is a complex and involved question and the answer is likewise.  The conclusion as to what the Forbidden Fruit was is not hard to give but the pathway that leads to the answer is steep, winding, and thorny.  I am sorry, my friend, but it you want the real answer to this question you will have to read all of this article and read it carefully.

 

Gen. 3:7   And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

 

Adam and Eve tried to cover their nakedness—and thus their guilt—by making garments of fig leaves.  I want to explore with you a little about leaves, figs, and the fig tree.  I think you may be interested, and perhaps a little surprised, at what we will discover.

The Hebrew word for leaves is aleh (aw-leh’)[1] and it means a coming upon, presumably, in this case, as a leaf comes upon a tree, and then by implication it means collectively, foliage or branches.  It rises from a primitive root word, alah (aw-law')[2] which means many things, among which are: to offer to pay, to leap as high as one can, to lift one’s self up, to recover, and to restore.  This is the only time it is translated as leaves.  Yet leaves, by other Hebrew words are found many times in the Old Testament.  This gives it a very singular and particular meaning here In Genesis 3:7, as we shall discuss in a moment.

The Hebrew word for fig is taen (teh-ane’)[3].  It is in the singular, feminine form and gender.  It is elusive as to its origin and it means: the fig, the tree or the fruit. 

The Hebrew word for sew, or sewed is the Hebrew word taphar (ta-far’)[4].  It, too, is a primitive root word, but unlike alah, it is a very simple and one-dimensional word.  It means, for a woman, or women to put together by sewing.

It seems certain to me, based on these and other Scriptures which we shall now look at, that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil was a fig tree.  We know that there was a literal tree, according to Historic Orthodox Christianity, and it had literal fruit on it.  It was the physical act of taking that fruit and eating it that constituted the disobedience to God that brought about the fall of the race.  But we have also found that there were spiritual, moral, and philosophical over and undertones to this account that comprise the most important substance of what happened in the Garden that day, and why.  The fruit was beautiful and alluring and it provided a very real and nagging temptation.  But a major feature of the error that Eve made was in thinking that there was something poisonous about the fruit and that the issue was simply one of the physical act of eating the fruit and the biological reaction of her body to that fruit.  Eve did not die physically when she ate the fruit, though it set in motion the process that resulted in her physical dying much later.

The War of Independence

The wrong was in yielding to the desire to know good and evil.  Implicit in this was finding maturity, wisdom, and the meaning of life through autonomy and by way of humanism rather than from God's revealed truth. 

 

She would experience life.  She would know both sides.  She would rationalize her experiences and decide, through synthesis—in other words, existentialism, experientialism, empiricism, and pragmatism.  She would be independent of God and, in that sense, she would be equal with God.  She, like God, would know good and evil and she, like God, would decide what was right and do that which was right arbitrarily and autonomously.

 

The Fig Tree

Before we discuss the matter of the fig leaves, what they tried to do, why God rejected it, and what He did instead, I want to look at the Biblical use, as to symbolism and metaphor, of the fig tree.

There are about forty references to figs and the fig tree, in the Bible.  I am not going to deal with them all, but rather the ones which most graphically make the point that we are looking for at this time.

In Deuteronomy 8:8, the fig tree, along with the vine and the fruit of the open field, represents natural blessings and achievements in the realm of mortality.  In Zechariah 3:10, Micah 4:4, Amos 4:9 and Joel 1:7-12, the olive tree with its oil and the pomegranate are added to those symbols.  There is a pretty consistent conformity in these Scriptures to the following format.  The vine and its fruit represents gladness; the olive and its fruit represents healing and restoration; the pomegranate and its fruit represents redemption; and the fig and its fruit represents goodness and wisdom.

In Judges 9:10, the fruit of the fig tree is said to be sweet and good, answering to Eve's temptations: it was pleasing to the eye, pleasant to the taste, and desirable to make one wise.  This concept is supported in Jeremiah 24:2, Hosea 9:10 and Micah 7:1.

In I Kings 4:25, to sit under one’s own vine and fig tree was the metaphor for peace, prosperity, and the goodness and blessing of life.  This is supported in Micah 4:4.  In Zechariah this symbol is used for the day when the new creation shall come and the eternal wisdom and goodness of God will belong to His children.  Yet while contrasts between the earthly and the heavenly are sometimes made, the basic use of the symbol of the fig tree is earthly and temporal goodness and wisdom.  Quite often this resorting to earthly wisdom and goodness represents a defection from faith in God and His truth, as in the Garden.  One such account is in II Kings 18-20, where Hezekiah became so frightened of Rab-Shakeh, the General of the Armies of Sennacherib the Assyrian, that he abandoned his confidence in the assurances of God and sent emissaries to Rab-Shakeh to try to make peace.  Rab-Shakeh belittled the thought that an absent and hypothetical God could do any thing for them and promised them goodness, wisdom, and protection if they would swear allegiance to him instead of to the God of Israel.  Every man would sit under his own vine and fig tree, and drink waters from his own cistern, he told the Israelites in chapter 18, verse 31.

When Hezekiah spread out his hands and prayed, God was furious at him for such an insult and humiliation.  He told him that He would not help him.  Further, God sent Isaiah the Prophet to tell Hezekiah to put his house in order because he was immediately going to die.  But Hezekiah prevailed in repentance and prayer and God relented.  He sent the prophet again to put a cake of figs upon Hezekiah's sore so that he would be healed and not die.  The Symbolism here, amplified in the promise of Rab-Shakeh as opposed to the cake of figs of Isaiah, is that the goodness and the wisdom of the world brings death, but the goodness and the wisdom of God recovers from death and gives life.

In Jeremiah, chapter 24, the basket of good figs represents the heart of true wisdom and knowledge that God would put in them by the Holy Ghost in the new dispensation. The basket of Evil Figs represented the goodness they thought they were getting from the world by unsanctified alliances, which goodness was false. 

In Jeremiah 29:15-19, their religious humanism, their false wisdom, their false sense of values and of good, and their refusal to listen to the words of God, would result in their becoming like vile figs that could not be eaten.

Proverbs 27:18 connects the fig tree with its fruits, and the caring for the same, with getting and keeping wisdom.  This became a tradition with men and particularly Israel.  If one wanted to meditate and to acquire wisdom about life and particularly about God, he went to sit under the fig tree.  This had been handed down from the Garden of Eden and its association with the acquiring of wisdom.  This is where Nathaniel was and what he was doing just before Jesus met him, in John 1:48-50.

In Nahum, chapter 3, God chides Nineveh for their false good and false wisdom.  They have sought joy and security from the heathen and their gods.  To symbolize their judgment and dilemma God uses the metaphor of the fig tree and its untimely dropping of its fruit into hungry but disappointed mouths.

In Revelation chapter 19, this same symbol is used to dramatize the evil that is done in the name of good, and particularly as it relates to false wisdom or the lack of wisdom.  The stars of heaven, here symbolizing those in this world who are supposed to be providing light and direction, are falling to the ground like figs, that have never matured and sweetened, fall from the tree when the great wind shakes it.  This picture shows the lie of human wisdom (either secular as the beast, or religious as the false prophet) when confronted by the operation of the Church—the Kingdom of God in this world—as the Holy Ghost, symbolized by the wind, ministers the contents of the Book through the Church.  Here in the end of the Bible the original error in the Garden of Eden—where it all started at the Fig Tree, its fruit and its leaves—is revisited. 

One of the most profound lessons from the fig tree and its referring back to the Garden of Eden is found in several of the Gospels.  Jesus had just made His triumphal entry into Jerusalem as King of the Jews.  Two days after that He would come back and cleanse the temple of the religious humanists and phonies.  A few days later (the fourth day after coming down from Bethany on the Ass’s Colt), as recorded in Matthew 23:37 and 38, Jesus would make the house of Israel desolate for their overspreading abominations.  He would take the Kingdom away from them forever and give it to the Church.  He would officially discard anything that was of the Old Creation—the societies and governments of men, the religion of humanism with its synagogues, temples and cathedrals, and the physical earth itself—as having any value or meaning again forever.  “My kingdom is, from this time on, no longer of this world,” He said.  He would not send His servants out to fight in order to defend even His own life.  The reason was that His Kingdom was no longer a part of this world.  From that time on anyone desiring to be a part of His Kingdom must undergo death, burial, resurrection, and new birth and new life—life and birth that was of the Second Adam and the New Man in Christ.  This Heavenly Kingdom would have its own heavenly Jerusalem, according to Hebrews 12:22; new men who were comprised of new spirits, new souls, and new bodies, according to John 3:3, Ephesians 2, and 1 Corinthians 15:42-44; its own new animal kingdom delivered from death and corruption, according to Romans 8:19-21; and its own new heavens and earth, which also are the products of death, burial, and resurrection according to Isaiah 65:17, 11 Peter 3:10-13, and Revelation 21:1 and 2.  God climaxed this thought and process by saying, in verse 5, “Behold, I make all things new!”

Intimately connected with these two events was the situation involving the fig tree.  In these tense, pressure filled, and eternally consequential and significant days, nothing that Jesus said or did was trivial or ordinary.  The encounter between Jesus and the fig tree was carefully and purposefully planned and set up from the foundations of the world. 

On the evening of His triumphal entry, He went out of the city and returned to Bethany.  The next morning He was on His way back toward Jerusalem.  In Matthew 21:18:  “. . . when He saw a fig tree in the way, He came to it, and found nothing thereon.”  This rather casual and somewhat mystifying record is cleared up by closer examination.  In the Greek it says, “He saw one fig tree in the way.”  The Greek word for one is mia (mee'-ah) and it means the first, a certain one, it means certain + agreement, as the tree in the Garden and all the others exactly like it.  It means one x other, or the one and all the others.  There is a very specific way and context in which it is used.  Every time the first day of the week is mentioned in the Bible, the word mia (mee'-ah)[5] is used.  And then it means, actually, one.  It is the word used when the Bible talks about one body, one faith, one baptism.  It is the word used of marriage when it says that the two shall be one.  It is the word used when the Bible says that they were all together in one accord.  While this is not an attempt at translation we would be well within the rules of interpretation to say, “And Jesus saw that first—that one certain fig tree.” It is analogous of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and of Evil—that fig tree from which Adam and Eve tried to make a covering for their sins.  It was that tree which was representative of, and inclusive of, all humanism and carnal knowledge.  It represented every effort of man through his works, whether secular or religious, to find God, to know God, or to justify himself, or to restore and recover himself.

One of the puzzling and controversial passages in the Bible is in St. Mark's Gospel, where it says:  “And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find anything thereon: and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet.  And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter forever.” 

The question has been: “Why would Jesus, the just, the fair, the righteous and the all wise Son of God, curse the fig tree for not having figs when it could not have had because it was not the season for it to have?”  I want to go over these Greek words with you and show you what this passage really says, and how it fits perfectly into what we have been talking about.  There are six words here. The first is for which is the Greek gar (gar)[6] which means also, or no doubt, or indeed, or verily.  It means a reason, an argument, an explanation, an intensification.  The next is was.  It is the Greek en (ane)[7].  It means was, wast, were, agree, be, have, hold, use.  The next word is time which is the Greek kairos (kahee-ros’)[8].  It means a set, proper time, occasion, season, time.  There is fig which is suke (soo-kay’)[9] which means, a fig.  Then there is not which is ouch (ookh)[10].  It means an absolute negative: no or not.  And finally the word yet, which is eti (et’-ee)[11] and means yet, still, after, also, ever, or further. 

What this passage means is shown in this paraphrase:

“The tree was fully leafed out, giving the appearance of fruit and also there could be no question or argument but that it was fully the season, the set and proper time for the fig.  If there was no fruit on this fig tree now, there was never going to be.  But there was absolutely no fruit on it as yet.”

This makes it clear that Jesus did not curse a fig tree for not bearing figs out of season.  However, since Passover is in the spring, it is not likely that we are talking about a natural growing season.  A far greater issue than that one is involved here. 

This was that one, certain tree.  Jesus went to it if haply—or in other words, “if it might just have happened that it had finally borne something.”  If there was a possibility that the fig tree was ever going to produce fruit, now was the time.  The time had fully come.  There was no more time. 

This whole adventure and experiment of man trying to find the solution to the problem of sin and mortality and to find the way back to God had come to an historic climax in this particular entrance that Jesus was making into Jerusalem.  Remember that He was a man, tempted in all points like as we are.  He knew what it meant if He entered that City that day.  Agonizingly graphic in His mind was the physical suffering, the humiliation, the awfulness of rejection by those He loved, and the terrifying thought of separation from God.  Remember that Jesus prayed to the Father that if it was possible—if there was another way—to let this bitter cup pass him by.  The 5th chapter of Hebrews says that He prayed to the Father with strong crying and tears and that He was afraid.  So intense was the struggle going on within Him that He sweat blood through the pores of His skin.  And now that same Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil confronts Him to taunt and to undermine Him.  It was the same old line of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, with a little more complex and cultured face, but with the same basic points in the form of questions:

 

Is God right in this?  Are you sure?  You are the one who's hurt if He is wrong.  Is God really doing this to you?  Did God really say that?

 

In that He was God, He knew what was coming and what had to be.  But in that He was man, He had continued to hope, as every other man had hoped.  But no, there was nothing on the tree but leaves—those false and inadequate works of humanism that God had rejected in the Garden of Eden.

And so the time of the infamous experiment had come to an end.  It had written its final chapter, and the pages were blank.  In the past God had allowed the covenant of works for His purposes.  It was the process by which man would be lost as a creature and brought back as a born child.  It was an experiment to teach man—in the image of God and free in his moral agency—his need for a Redeemer.  But in the situations and events of those days, there was a final expression of the evil of the human heart and the satanic mind.  The wisdom, the religion, and the humanism of man would drive him to kill the Prince of Glory in order to cover for his own hypocrisy and self righteousness.

Jesus came and taught truth, but they failed abjectly to understand it, or to see God, or to receive the words of life to their good.  This was the grand opportunity for Eve's experiment to succeed.  History's brightest and most zealous and sincere religious minds were listening to truth being taught with perfect clarity and insight by history's greatest religious Teacher with His perfect intellect and moral character to give power and credibility to His words.  But the result was the most dismal, deliberate, and inexcusable failure in human history.  The sons of the first Adam had creaturely minds that were incapable of comprehending God and His truth—minds that were compounded in their vices by the Fall—a fall that came about as the result of a choice for autonomy and carnal knowledge.  Through the mortal mind and character, Adam’s children could not redeem themselves by the terms of the law.  Their own works were sired by the thoughts and powers of secular and religious humanism and were not only impotent but morbidly and maliciously evil.  In His cursing of the fig tree—which had its symbolic origin in the Garden of Eden—Jesus was declaring an end to the school-teaching phase of God's relationship with man.  The attempt by man to achieve maturity, immortality, and infinity through the knowledge of good and evil, and the efforts to cover their sins and guilt with the leaves of that tree, was a complete, final, and hopeless failure.  That effort, which was once allowed, was henceforth forbidden.  The time allotted to the experiment had run out.  Man was no longer allowed, by God, to try.  Any further endeavor would invoke a condemnation from which there was no future hope of deliverance.  It had failed every man who had ever put his confidence in it, but it would fail no more.  Jesus cursed the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to dry up at the roots and to be no more.  No man, from hence forth and forever more, would be deceived by that tree with God’s consent and for any good purpose that God had in mind.

A Desperate Try

Eve had been deceived by the fruit of the Tree and the carnal wisdom she had gained.  Now she tries, through that wisdom and its source—the fig tree—to make amends by covering their sins with its covering—the leaves which the woman sews into aprons.  Remember what we said about the meaning of leaves.  She felt guilty and responsible for what had happened to them.  Now she tries to undo the wrong.  She leaps and reaches as high as she can to grab the loftiest and prettiest leaves of the tree.  She tries to repay by her works of covering their guilt and shame.  She tries to recover her innocence and restore their guiltlessness.  But it is no use.  She cannot reach high enough.  The void that has opened between God and man cannot be breached by carnal wisdom, the works of men's hands, or the offering of anything that is of the old creation.

The Light of Hope

But God does not leave her hopeless.  Restoration and recovery will be made.  The gap will be closed and the answer will spring from the woman.  It will come from Him who will be lifted up upon a tree—an effort and an offering that will be high enough and holy enough to reach to God.

The Healing of the Gentiles (the Church)

The leaves of the Tree in the old Garden of Eden could not heal the sinful condition of fallen man because they came from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  But the leaves of the Tree in the New Eden can do so, according to Revelation chapter 22:2, because they are from the Tree of Life:

In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the Tree of Life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

We Have Gained More In Christ Than We Lost In Adam

God ordained, from before the foundations of the world, that the woman would be deceived and that they would eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  But He also ordained, from before the foundations of the world, that from the woman would come One who would be lifted up on a tree, high enough to reunite man and God.  And in the process we have gained more in Christ than we lost in Adam.

Many years ago Phillip Brooks penned inspired words that talk about a small, peaceful, little town where everything was remote from the fast moving events of life.  Men slept so peacefully they did not even dream.  Little did they know, as they went to sleep one fateful night, that in their dark and quiet streets would shine the everlasting light.   The hopes and the fears from the beginning of time came together in one event in that quiet little town that night.  It was the birth of the long-awaited Seed of the Woman.  And suddenly the grief, hopelessness, and despair of the daughters of Eve changed to hope and anticipation.  God had come down into the darkness of this world, identifying in the humblest and most profound of ways with His lost creation, in order to find them where they are huddling, guilty, naked, ashamed, frightened, and lost, behind the trees of mortality, religious humanism, and carnal wisdom, and to restore them to the Paradise of God.