101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

yth #21:
Adam would die if he ate from the Tree of Knowledge.
The Myth: 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 thou shalt surely die. (Gen. 2:17)
The Reality: The purpose of this story is to condemn the Egyptian idea that
knowledge of moral order would lead to Eternal Life, which conflicted with Hebrew
monotheistic teachings.
In the previous myth, we saw that Egyptian ideas about the relationship between
moral order and eternal life lay behind the biblical story about the Tree of Knowledge
of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. Yet, despite the close parallels between the
two descriptions, there is one glaring conflict. In the Egyptian text, Nun (the personification
of the Great flood) urged Atum (the Heliopolitan Creator) to eat of his
daughter Tefnut, giving him access to knowledge of moral order. In Genesis, God forbade
Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, denying him access
to moral knowledge.
This inconsistency appears in the face of a moral conundrum in the biblical
account. It would seem that God lied and the serpent told the truth. Initially, God
ordered Adam not to eat from The Tree of Knowledge, telling him that he would die
on the very day that he did so. Yet, later, after eating from the fruit of this tree, Adam
not only lived (for about another nine hundred years), but God feared that he would
obtain eternal life if he ate from the Tree of Life and it became necessary to expel him
from the Garden.
If Genesis draws upon the Egyptian doctrine, why does the biblical story take such
a radical turn when it comes to eating from the Tree of Knowledge? The divergence in
the two stories results from fundamental differences between Egyptian and Hebrew
beliefs about the afterlife.
The Egyptians believed that if you lived a life of moral order, the god Osiris, who
ruled over the afterlife, would award you eternal life. That was the philosophical link
51