Reasonable point. However, when God says something is good here, he means that it functions properly. There’s no real moral judgment. (In other words, it could be rendered “Yeah, that’ll work.”)
(What follows is very concise and oversimplified. Can’t be helped, though you can find longer versions by @bibleproject and “Walton lost world Genesis” on YT.)
So why create nasty stuff? We were told to “subdue the earth” (Gen 1:28), which implies a less-than-peaceable kingdom. God believes in challenging us as a learning experience (Judges 3:1-2). Ancient Near Eastern cultures like three-part structures (temples, palaces, etc.), and it has been proposed by the sources above that Gen 1 is a temple-consecration narrative with the earth as the temple, with increasing levels of holiness. I’ll adapt that to make it easier for modern people.
If you look at the world as a sim game, you would have a beginner/sandbox level (the Garden) with no real challenges or threats, where you learn how the game works. Notice that after being told to “subdue” the earth, Adam and Eve are told to “serve” or work it: to garden. That’s a sandbox.
Once they’ve mastered the sandbox, they go out to Eden, which is still a beginner area, though with actual challenges. We were dumped there after the Fall (which made even Eden less user-friendly—Gen 3:17-24), and eventually went out to the real game world and its even more serious problems. And we’ve turned off learner/hint mode.
God wants us to learn things, though he likes to let us figure them out for ourselves. But the Forbidden Fruit involved a specific kind of knowledge: the knowledge of Good and Evil. We decided we wanted to figure that out for ourselves, and our track record shows we aren’t good at distinguishing between them.
Who said he did? The Garden was a garden, not a comprehensive botanical extravaganza. (Poison ivy is North American, while the Garden of Eden was not.)
This is like the idea that Adam was supposed to name every animal on Earth, rather than just those in the Garden. Some putatively literate people don’t know how to read texts.
I just selected the string from “myth-” through “-ingredients”, right-clicked on the selected bit, and chose “Search ” from the options menu. But they do seem to have eased up on restrictions a bit.
Reasonable point. However, when God says something is good here, he means that it functions properly. There’s no real moral judgment. (In other words, it could be rendered “Yeah, that’ll work.”)
(What follows is very concise and oversimplified. Can’t be helped, though you can find longer versions by @bibleproject and “Walton lost world Genesis” on YT.)
So why create nasty stuff? We were told to “subdue the earth” (Gen 1:28), which implies a less-than-peaceable kingdom. God believes in challenging us as a learning experience (Judges 3:1-2). Ancient Near Eastern cultures like three-part structures (temples, palaces, etc.), and it has been proposed by the sources above that Gen 1 is a temple-consecration narrative with the earth as the temple, with increasing levels of holiness. I’ll adapt that to make it easier for modern people.
If you look at the world as a sim game, you would have a beginner/sandbox level (the Garden) with no real challenges or threats, where you learn how the game works. Notice that after being told to “subdue” the earth, Adam and Eve are told to “serve” or work it: to garden. That’s a sandbox.
Once they’ve mastered the sandbox, they go out to Eden, which is still a beginner area, though with actual challenges. We were dumped there after the Fall (which made even Eden less user-friendly—Gen 3:17-24), and eventually went out to the real game world and its even more serious problems. And we’ve turned off learner/hint mode.