The Art of Listening. What exactly was the first sin? What was the tree of knowledge of good and evil?

Is this kind of knowledge a bad thing such that it had to be forbidden and was only acquired through

sin? Isn't knowing the difference between good and evil essential to being human. Isn't it one of the highest forms of

knowledge? Surely God would want people to have it. Why then did he forbid the fruit that produced it?

In any case, didn't Adam and Eve already have this knowledge before eating the fruit?

Precisely, in virtue of being in the image of likeness of God.

Surely this was implied in the very fact that they were commanded by God, be fruitful and

multiply, have dominion over nature, don't eat from the tree. For someone to understand a command,

they must know it's good to obey and bad to disobey, so they already had at least potentially the good

knowledge of good and evil. What then changed when they ate the fruit? These questions go so

deep that they threaten to make the entire story incomprehensible. Maimonides understood this.

That's why he turned to this episode almost at the very beginning of the Guide for the Perplexed.

But his answer is perplexing. Before eating the fruit, he says, the first humans knew the difference between truth and falsehood.

What they acquired by eating the fruit was knowledge of things generally accepted.

But what does Maimonides mean by things generally accepted?

It's generally accepted that murder is evil and honestly good.

Does Maimonides mean that morality is mere convention?

Surely not.

What he means is that after eating the fruit, the man and woman were

embarrassed that they were naked. And that is a matter of social convention because not everyone is

embarrassed by nudity. But how can we equate being embarrassed that you are naked with knowledge of good

and evil? It doesn't seem to be that sort of thing

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