0120 Proposition thirteen?

The account of the Fall is shaped by the broader cognitive environment of which Israel is part.

Israel’s account is full of profound differences and quizzical similarities to the origin stories of the ancient Near East.

0121 Walton considers the motif of trees in sacred spaces in Genesis 2.4-4 and in extrabiblical stories of the ancient Near East.  He wrestles with the literary nature of the texts, the theological significance of the stories, as well as the civilizational background, which ties back to the Ubaid of southern Mesopotamia.

Walton does not know of the hypothesis of the first singularity.  Walton is not aware that the Ubaid is the first culture to practice speech-alone talk.  He does not know that spoken words form systems of differences, so words may be regarded as placeholders in a symbolic order.  

0122 As noted earlier, the Greimas square is one way to tease out the system of differences holding any particular word in place.

The Greimas square suggests that there should be four trees, as shown below.

0123 Two trees are missing, the tree of death (B) and the tree of innocence (C).

This is not a new idea, consider Looking at Mark Smith’s Book (2019) “The Genesis of Good and Evil”, appearing in January 2022 in the blog at www.raziemah.com.

0124 Walton calls the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “the tree of wisdom”.

If that is so, why not call the tree, “the tree of wisdom”, in the first place?

Clearly, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not wisdom.

It is humiliation.