The Name of the Forbidden Tree was the Knowledge That Preceded the Fall
Abstract
The dominant reading of Genesis 3 puts the epistemological event of the Fall in the act of eating—as though knowledge of good and evil were a territory entered by transgression, and only by transgression. This paper argues that such a reading overlooks a prior and under-examined feature of the text: the name of the tree itself constitutes an anterior epistemology. The prohibition of Genesis 2:17 is only intelligible if the epistemology encoded in the tree’s name was already accessible before the act. Drawing on phenomenological observations from Paul Brockelman, the epistemological critique of Søren Kierkegaard, and the ontological rupture described by Karl Jaspers, this paper proposes that Genesis 2–3 narrates not the origin of moral knowledge but its transformation—from propositional knowing-about to participatory knowing-through-doing. The implications for pastoral theology, and in particular for any account of volitional agency, are significant.
1. The Phenomenological Lag and Its Theological Consequence
Paul Brockelman, in Existential Phenomenology and the World of Ordinary Experience, observes that existential thought is “fated to always come puffing up after existence as a reflection upon it.”¹ The image is arresting: thought is seen as the wheezing latecomer to a party that existence has already thrown. Reflection is structurally retrospective. It does not precede or ground being; it reports on being, after the fact.
This observation delivers an indirect but decisive blow to the Cartesian cogito. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” posits thought as the ground of existence—the one indubitable foundation from which all else might be reconstructed. But if thought always arrives after existence, the arrow of dependency runs the other way: I am, therefore I think. Existence precedes reflection, not the reverse. See my paper Cogito Ergo Tu Es²
Karl Jaspers sharpens the diagnosis. “Through them [the existentialists] we have become aware that for us there is no longer any self-evident foundation. There is no longer any secure background to our thought.”³ The Cartesian project—and the rationalist tradition from Plato through Hegel that Brockelman describes as “omnivorous” in its ambition to reduce all of reality to an intelligible, universal system—flounders on this recognition. Something real remains outside of philosophical assertion, presupposed by every system yet exceeding all of them.
This is not merely a philosophical problem. It becomes a theological one the moment we ask: how was Eden epistemologically structured? What precisely did Adam and Eve know, and when did they know it?
2. The Name as Prior Epistemic Act
The standard reading of Genesis 3 treats the eating as the epistemological event. Knowledge of good and evil is a new territory entered by transgression; the fruit is its doorway. On this reading, Adam and Eve emerge from the encounter knowing something they could not have known before.
But this reading requires that we overlook—or under-examine—the name of the tree. In Genesis 2:9, two trees are introduced: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The second tree carries its effect within its name. This is not incidental. In the Hebrew naming tradition—in which Adam’s naming of the animals is an act of recognition and relational ordering—the name is epistemically significant. To receive the name of a thing is to receive information about it.
The prohibition of Genesis 2:17 confirms this. God says: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” The prohibition is coherent even if Adam did not understand what the tree would do—God can meaningfully forbid what is unintelligible—yet, in this case, He chose to include knowledge in the name. The command, in this case, presupposes some kind of comprehension. The name of the tree had already performed an anterior epistemic function: it told them what eating would produce before they had acted.
Notice the asymmetry with the Tree of Life. It is named in Genesis 2:9, but it is not called the Tree of the Knowledge of Life. Life does not require a propositional announcement of its own effect—and yet there are clear epistemic consequences to eating from it, as God’s prohibition after the Fall makes plain (Genesis 3:22). Given His warning about the consequences of the forbidden tree, God could simply have named it the Tree of Death instead of The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That He did not is significant: the name is informative rather than merely cautionary. It encodes the epistemological content of the act in advance.
The name God chose is therefore more measured than it is completely legible: it reveals something real, but propositional not experiential. The warning of death is added on and not intrinsic.
The two trees represent two different epistemological structures: one has its meaning encoded in its name, announcing what participation will produce; the other simply offers itself, without epistemic preamble, despite there being clear epistemic consequences. This asymmetry maps the boundary between conceptual knowledge and the kind of knowing that only existence and experience can provide.
Even in naming, at the beginning, the Word of God was “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).
3. Kierkegaard’s Diagnosis and the Doing/Knowing Distinction
Søren Kierkegaard’s famous confession—“What I really lack is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I am to know”—is often read as a rejection of the theoretical in favor of the personal. But in light of the Genesis narrative, it reads as something more precise: a diagnosis of the post-Fall confusion between two kinds of knowledge that Eden held in proper tension.
Before the Fall, propositional knowledge and participatory knowledge were related but distinct. Adam and Eve knew the name of the tree; they had a concept of what it would do—articulated clearly as an advantage by Eve—yet they did not know what it was like to have eaten from it. These are categorically different forms of knowing. The first is available to anyone who hears the name. The second is available only to those who have acted. There is no instruction from God against the first; there is against the second.
Read alongside his aphorism that “life can only be explained after it has been lived,” Kierkegaard’s category difference—what I am to do versus what I am to know—points to a structural feature of human existence: explanation is always retrospective, always a reflection upon what has already occurred. This is Brockelman’s phenomenological lag—between existential thought and existence—applied to ethics. The moral meaning of an act—what it is like to have done it, what it produces in the one who does it—cannot be fully known in advance. If it is to be known at all, it must be committed, inhabited.
The Fall was not a leap into the unknown—it was calculated. The woman “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6). This is deliberate, eyes-open deliberation. The tragedy is not that she acted in ignorance; it is that she transgressed a known boundary with full, albeit propositional, awareness of the consequence. She possessed anterior knowledge—the name, the prohibition, the announced effect—and ate anyway. It is worth noting that she does not list God’s warning of death among what she knows. It may have been a more helpful addition to the contra side of her internal deliberation; it certainly would have been a more honest assessment.
What she could not possess in advance was participatory knowledge: what it would be like, in the deepest existential sense, to be a creature who had done this. “Oh, so this is what God meant by knowledge of good and evil”—this realization is available only afterward, only from inside the experience. As Kierkegaard observed, existence must be lived before it can be explained.
4. Volitional Agency and the Structure of Moral Knowledge
The distinction between propositional and participatory knowledge has immediate consequences for any account of moral agency. If anterior knowledge—the name, the prohibition, the announced consequence—constitutes the epistemic precondition for the act being morally meaningful, then volition operates in the space between these two kinds of knowing. The human will is the hinge. Jesus’ “not my will but yours be done” also becomes a kind of participatory knowledge—but one chosen by obedience, reversing the Fall for all.
This is what makes the Fall a moral event rather than merely a cognitive one. Adam and Eve did not stumble into new knowledge; they chose, in full possession of anterior knowledge, to acquire participatory knowledge of what they had been told to refuse. The Verbal had done its work: the name had been given, the prohibition had been spoken. The volitional act transformed their relationship to that knowledge from the outside to the inside of the experience.
Brockelman identifies the existentialist critique of rationalist metaphysics precisely here: “there is something real outside our philosophical assertions and systems which cannot be contained within them and yet which is presupposed by them.”⁴ I propose, for example: ‘I think, therefore Thou art.’ Participatory knowledge—the lived relation to the Thou that exceeds every system—is precisely the ‘something real’ Brockelman says cannot be contained within our philosophical assertions yet is presupposed by them. You can name the tree—but you cannot name what it is like to have eaten from it, except afterward.
This also illuminates the pattern of biblical epistemology more broadly. The naming of the animals in Genesis 2 follows encounter—Adam names after meeting, not before. And Eve is introduced and named after the fruitless search for Adam’s helper amongst the creatures. God tells Abraham to go to a land he will be shown—destination disclosed in transit, not in advance. The disciples understand the resurrection only after the fact: “Did not our hearts burn within us?” (Luke 24:32). The biblical epistemological pattern is consistently one of participation preceding full comprehension.
The exception that proves the rule is divine speech itself. “Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3)—here naming produces existence rather than following it. God’s creative speech is ontologically generative; human knowing is ontologically responsive. The asymmetry between God’s naming and Adam’s naming is not a peripheral detail. It is the Creator-creature distinction enacted epistemologically.
5. The Heart as Foundation
Brockelman, following Pascal and the existentialist tradition, argues that “the deepest reasons of the heart are not so much ‘against’ reason as they are the ‘foundations’ and ‘completions’ of it.”⁵ This is the epistemological corollary of the argument this paper has been tracing. Reason operates within a field of meaning it did not create and cannot fully justify from within itself. The name of the tree was already meaningful to Adam and Eve—that meaning was the heart-foundation that made the rational prohibition comprehensible.
Anterior epistemology is not irrational. It is the condition of rational moral deliberation—and a privilege accorded only to those made in the image of God, out of all in the natural created order. This, it might be noted, is agreed upon by theist and atheist alike: responsibility for humane and moral behavior is never assumed of any creature other than humankind.
The name of the forbidden tree gives propositional content; the prohibition establishes a boundary; the heart is the seat of the volitional response that stands between them and the act. When the heart capitulates—when the woman saw that the tree was desirable—it was not because reason failed, but because the will chose to cross a boundary that both reason and the name had already marked. It's also worth noting that Eve capitulated intillectually by justifying what she was about to do, before she ate the fruit.
Kierkegaard’s complaint is, finally, a diagnosis of the post-Fall condition: the collapse of the healthy tension between propositional and participatory knowledge into an endless loop of knowing about doing, without the nerve for the act of genuine transformation. The Cartesian project upon which the Enlightenment was built—thought as ontological foundation, system as salvation—is the intellectual form of this collapse.
The phenomenological tradition, for all its secularity, has recovered something the Genesis narrative already knew: that existence always precedes reflection, that the name is not the thing experienced, and that the most significant knowledge is the kind that can only be inhabited from the inside. This is true in the positive as well as the negative. Philippians 2:8–9 stands as the phenomenological reversal of the Fall: “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.”
Epistemologically, Adam and Eve learned the knowledge of good and evil by what they did—in the same way Christ “learned obedience through what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8), despite both having anterior, propositional knowledge of those events.
The forbidden tree was named before its fruit was eaten. That name was not decorative. It was an act of anterior epistemic grace—giving the creature, in advance, enough propositional knowledge to make the choice a genuinely moral one. The tragedy of Genesis 3 is not ignorance. It is the first failure of the will in full possession of what it needed to know. Kenosis is the precise inverse and reversal of that.
Pastoral implication
If the Fall was a failure of will, not intellect, then temptation is not primarily a quiz and discipleship is not primarily a knowledge transformation. It is a test of heart allegiance. This reframes how we read Jesus’ confrontation in John 8: it is addressed “to the Jews who had believed him” (v31), yet ends in attempted murder.
The letters to the churches in Revelation 2–3 operate the same way: they expose the hearts of us believers, not outsiders. In both cases, anterior knowledge is assumed.
The divine concern is not “do they understand?” but “where does their love lie?” The name of the tree gave Adam and Eve enough propositional knowledge to make the choice genuinely moral. The name of Christ gives the church enough propositional knowledge to make discipleship genuinely costly.
The question, in Eden, in Ephesus, and in your local church, is identical: having been told, what will you now choose?
Of course the intellect is critically involved. Repentance and transformation start with a decision of the mind after being convinced of ulterior motives, but it is a decision of the mind to submit the heart to the Lordship of Christ.
Notes
1 Paul Brockelman, Existential Phenomenology and the World of Ordinary Experience (Washington: University Press of America, 1980), 15.
2 Alan R. Jones, “Cogito Ergo Tu Es,” Mesotopia, https://www.mesotopia.grouplands.com/cogito-ergo-tu-es.
3 Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 47.
4 Brockelman, Existential Phenomenology, 14.
5 Brockelman, Existential Phenomenology, 24.
© Alan R Jones
