The Weaker Sex?

We've pondered the ability of animals to speak in the past Garden of Eden (you did notice that the woman does not appear startled that the serpent is speaking to her). Now let's look at what the serpent said to the woman and her responses to it.

In verse 1 the serpent says to Eve: "Hath God said. Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" A careful comparison of this statement to the one that God actually spoke might be helpful, for God actually said this instead: "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof ye shall surely die." (Genesis 2:16-17)

It appears the serpent has taken what began as a positive statement from God "You can eat EVERYTHING…except this specific tree" (paraphrased) and turned it into a negative: "You can't eat of every tree?" Can you see the subtlety of the change in wording? We begin to see in this very first statement of the serpent his motivation of presenting the Creator, God, as not being as good as He appears to be. This is not a true statement. This is a lie, and the beginning of many to follow. Let's go on.

The woman's reply was: "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die."
Here, we have another misstatement of what God actually said; this time coming from the woman. Is she also a liar?

Actually, if we look at Genesis 2:16, we see that God spoke the command concerning the eating of trees to the man alone; woman wasn't even created yet. Thus, the woman had to have heard about it from the man. Did the man not relay it properly to her? Was she not listening as carefully as she might have been if God Himself were speaking to her? We could debate that all day long, but not really ever know for sure, because the Bible doesn't explain that to us. We can only determine what happened according to the information we have been given. What we see is that the woman has missed a few key points here.

First, she doesn't call the tree by its name: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Instead she seems to be giving the approximate location of the tree, but doesn't seem to know what it's about.

Secondly, she says that God said not to touch it, yet He did not say that at all.

Thirdly, she said "lest ye die" which has the connotation of "don't eat, don't touch, because if you do you might die." But God's statement was explicit: "in the day that thou eatest thereof ye shall surely die."
 It is so clear from this that the woman was ill-informed, whether this is her own fault or the man's is not as important (perhaps) as the fact that the serpent somehow determined that she was the weakest link and the one to be approached in order to help him accomplish the rebellion in the garden that he clearly had in mind, as we shall see as we continue in tomorrow's posting.