It's clear to me that the problem of “hamartia,” which I have described in my previous writing, began with the events of Genesis 3. This may surprise some who think me too liberal in my theology, but it is true. There are two popular interpretations of the events of Genesis 3. The first is that the text is absolutely literal with one man and one woman, two trees, and a snake, and that it happened about 6-7,000 years ago. The second is that it is, at best, a metaphor, if not an outright myth or fable in the same sense as other creation myths and with the same accuracy. I, however, believe that it is actually an amalgam of events, highlighting certain points, which Moses saw and wrote about. What fits the data, to me, is that in reality a specific family group of homo sapiens was placed by God, either through migration (more likely) or directly transported, into a gardenesque grove roughly near what is now Tabriz, Iran where the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Uizhon, and the Gihun-Abraxis converge, or at least used to.
Were there two trees with one of them off limits? I believe it highly likely, one as a primary food source and one which was off limits because it was damagingly toxic to human beings. But more than this, I think it is more likely that there were two different kinds of trees in the area, possibly in their own groves or interspersed throughout.
The first kind which which Scripture and tradition identifies as the tree of life was placed there as the primary food source of this specific group of homo sapiens which made them distinct from other species of hominids and animals. The fruit from this tree had a combination of compounds and substances which prevented mutation and degeneration caused by aging at the cellular level, scrubbing and repairing the DNA and cellular structures thus preventing physical aging once the human in question had reached a fully mature state. This isn’t as difficult to believe as one might think. There are many exampled of human beings, even today, who have certain sets of genetics adopt certain kinds of diets and lifestyles who live well past the average lifespan and appearance-wise don’t appear to age, or at least age very slowly. What is interesting is that such “trees of life” appear in many ancient mythologies such as the trees of the Hesperides in Greek mythology, and so it would not be a stretch to say that, like a flood event, it tends to be a part of the human cultural memory.
The second kind of tree which we know as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was likely placed there as a food source for a different kind of animal which could metabolize the compounds within without issue. This is also not a difficult thing to accept as there are many different metabolic variations even among mammals where something which is toxic to one is perfectly harmless to another. Dogs with chocolate or onions is a good example. It is my opinion that this was likely a stonefruit of some kind like a peach or almond which contained cyanogenic compounds. Obviously, most stonefruit today is generally harmless for human beings to ingest in spite of the toxic compounds found within, and it was probably harmless to most hominids elsewhere in the world at the time, even other homo sapiens. So why would this be the culprit?
The difference lie in the other food source in Eden which they were told they were free to eat. The compounds found in the fruit of the “tree of life.” This is why those human beings in Eden were warned against eating fruit from the other tree. When the compounds from these two fruits were combined, because the fruit from the tree of life affected the human body so thoroughly, they caused neurological and genetic damage which became hereditary. This damage caused the enlargement of the amygdala in the human brain (while the brains of humans and chimpanzees, with whom we share 98.5% DNA, are nearly identical, proportionately speaking, the human amygdala is far larger in proportion to the chimpanzee amygdala). The amygdala governs or filters emotional information being fed to the hypothalamus which governs survival threat responses such as fear, aggression, feeding, and so on. Thus the amygdala began to treat things as requiring a threat response that didn’t, such as being naked when this is the natural state of all animals.
This is why the humans in Eden had to be relocated after this event. While the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil couldn't do any more damage on its own, and was fairly common outside of Eden, the first tree was only found in that one location. Further consumption of both types of fruit may have caused further damage. Physical death was the only real cure for the damage which had taken place, and so they were removed and allowed to die naturally, albeit with greatly increased lifespans in comparison to their non-Edenic counterparts in the rest of the world due to the effects of their previous food source.
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