"The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and placed there the man that He had formed. And from the ground, the Lord God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad." Gn 2:8-9 JPS
What you plant, you reap. Is that so? Or do you reap what you sow? Whichever way, something was planted in the Garden before man. Two trees were potted in the center of the hallway before he took his initial animal-naming tour. Obviously, the creation of life preceded man, but most people like to believe that man created evil. Did he? To have knowledge of something infers that the thing prevously exists.
Yup, the Pandora's Box question. What if she had never opened the lid? The myth which Hesiod presents, tells us that there would be no hope in the world, as hope only came packaged with all those other sorrows. The potentiality of evil was there.
Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto writes: "When Adam was first formed, he was precisely in the state that we have discussed until now, composed of two equal opposites, the body and the soul. His environment contained both good and evil, and he was balanced between the two to choose whichever he wished ... If Adam had not sinned, he would have been able to attain this [perfection] without restraint. His soul would have purified his body step-by-step, until he reached the level required to permanently partake of everlasting bliss..." (Derech Hashem 1:3:6-8)
(from Rabbi Pinchas Winston, Torah.org, Perceptions, Bereishis Eating from the Tree: A Deeper Look )
But Adam reached for the enticing fruit, thus moving a step to the wrong side of the law, getting himself expelled from the Garden.
But, isn't it written that,
"When no shrub of the field was yet on the earth, and no grasses of the field had yet sprouted; because the Lord God had not yet sent rain upon the earth and there was no man to till the soil, but a flow would well up from the ground and water the whole surface of the earth..." Gn 2:5 JPS
What was Adam's purpose in the Garden? Was he just there to eat the berries off the brambles and the grapes off the vine all year round? Is there something missing in this scenario?
