The 🌳 Tree of Discernment
What Actually Happened in Eden
Here's what didn't happen in the Garden: nothing magical. No spell was cast, no supernatural threshold was crossed, no cosmic switch was flipped. They ate a piece of fruit. And they got exactly what the serpent promised — exactly what God warned about — and those two things turn out to be the same thing.
We've been calling it the wrong thing for a long time. The "Tree of Knowledge" is a translation that carries a lot of baggage. In the modern West, knowledge — episteme — means propositional content, data, verifiable fact. You know things or you don't. Before the fruit: ignorant. After: informed. But that's not what the Hebrew is doing, and it's not what the Greek is doing either.
The Hebrew is da'at, from the verb yada — the same word used for intimate knowledge, for the kind of knowing that happens between people in relationship, the kind that changes you. And when the Greek translators rendered the serpent's character in Genesis 3:1, they chose phronimos — not "cunning" in a sneaky sense, but the word for practical wisdom, the Aristotelian virtue of right deliberation. The LXX didn't make the serpent into a demon. It made the serpent into the most discerning creature in the garden.
So maybe a better name for that tree is the Tree of Discernment. Diakrisis, in the Greek spiritual tradition, is the capacity to distinguish — between spirits, between impulses, between genuine goods and their counterfeits. It's what desert fathers called the hardest and most essential virtue. It's what the fruit confers. And it's a burden, not a gift.
She Was Already Doing It
Look at what happens before anyone eats anything.
"And the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasing to the eyes to look at, and desirable for the understanding — and she took of its fruit and ate."
The Greek word translated "to understand" here is katanonein — sustained, deliberate, analytical apprehension. This isn't a daydream. She is reasoning toward a conclusion. She's evaluating the tree on multiple registers simultaneously: nutritional, aesthetic, intellectual. She is, in this moment, the most phronimos character in the scene. Before she eats a single bite.
Which raises a hard question: what exactly does the eating do, if discernment is already operative?
Here's one answer: eating doesn't create the capacity. It makes the capacity unavoidable. It seals the deal. The dianoichthēsontai of 3:5 — "will be opened" — is a strong passive. Something is going to be done to them. The I-sense, the self-awareness, the ego that can now stand outside itself and evaluate its own nature — it was latent all along. What the fruit confirms is that there is no going back to not-knowing. Innocence wasn't purity. It was deniability.
The Serpent's Loneliness
We've spent centuries making the serpent into Satan, into a cosmic tempter, into evil incarnate. But read it again without that baggage. The serpent in Genesis 3 is phronimos — discerning — and appears to be the only creature in the garden that is. And it is alone in that.
The temptation isn't seduction toward destruction. It's a serpentine appeal from a feeling of isolation. The serpent has been carrying the burden of discernment without anyone to share it with, and here are these creatures who might, if they would only eat, finally understand. The serpent isn't trying to corrupt humanity. The serpent is trying to not be alone.
That's a more tragic reading, and I think it's closer to the text. The serpent doesn't lie. God confirms it: "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil" (3:22). The serpent told the truth. The serpent's sin, if we want to call it that, wasn't deception — it was being unable to bear its own (apparent) singularity. Standing out is not the same as being alone, even if it feels that way. The problem is the snake wanted to drag someone else into its own feelings through the “Intrigue” type of narcissistic baiting.
The curse in 3:14-15 lands differently in that light. God doesn't curse the serpent for being, or knowing, evil. The serpent is cursed for reaching toward what it can't have. The enmity between the serpent and the woman isn't punishment for corruption; it's the tragic consequence of the gambit failing. She eats. She understands. And then the distance between them widens rather than closes, because now she carries the same burden and, eventually, resents the one who handed it to her.
Obligate Predators v. Omnivores
Here's where the dietary laws enter the picture, and they enter more forcefully than most commentaries acknowledge.
The serpent is what it is. It is a predator. It cannot be otherwise, and it cannot be judged by the standards we apply to creatures who have a choice about what they consume. Obligate carnivores kill because they are made to kill and cannot survive any other way. They are not moral agents in this regard. Creation's judgment falls on them differently — or rather, not at all. They simply are. A crocodile’s tears may be sincere, but there’s nothing creation can do about it…
Humans are omnivores. What we eat is, to an unusual degree, a choice. And Torah seems to know this. The kashrut laws aren't arbitrary hygiene codes. They are formation in a particular habit of attention: what kind of creature are you imitating in this act? The prohibited animals aren't unclean because they're disgusting. They are markers of a category. The scavenger, the pure predator — these creatures exist within their niche and cannot step outside it. The dietary laws essentially say: you can step outside yours, so pay attention to which direction you step.
The ruminant converts what it consumes through a long patient process. The predator only takes. The crown of creation has the capacity to model moderation, or to imitate predation. Torah keeps asking: which will it be?
The Noahic covenant in Genesis 9 complicates this — God grants meat-eating after the flood, and that grant is real and shouldn't be explained away. But it lands as accommodation to a fallen tendency, not as the original design. The eschatological vision in Isaiah 11 — the wolf lying down with the lamb — is the horizon toward which all of this points: a creation where the 👑 crown no longer models predation, because it has finally learned what it is. (📐)
Innocence Was Never Purity
We've inherited a doctrine of original sin that implies humanity began in a state of moral perfection and then broke it. But the text doesn't quite say that. What it says is that before the eating, they were naked and not ashamed. Innocence, in this reading, is an epistemological state — not the absence of the capacity for violence and ego and cunning, but the absence of awareness of those capacities as categories requiring navigation.
From birth, humans are capable of extraordinary cruelty. Every parent knows this. Every soldier knows this doubly. The training that prepares a person to close with and destroy the enemy doesn't manufacture something foreign and insert it into a previously innocent body. It removes the inhibition that was doing the work innocence used to do. The capacity for violence was always there. What changes is the relationship to it.
The so-called “fall” is not about a nature that changed but about an awareness that became unavoidable. We are not corrupted creatures who used to be pure. We are (corruptible but) discerning creatures who used to have the luxury of not having to choose.
That is a harder anthropology. It doesn't allow us to locate evil somewhere outside ourselves — in the serpent, in the fall, in the other guy who made you do that thing you regret. It says “the serpent recognized something in us that was already there, and we saw ourselves in the serpent’s eyes.”
“Adam” Didn't Earn It
One last thing the text does that gets overlooked: Adam, the primordial human unmarked by gender, just eats. No deliberation, no katanonein, no record of weighing the choice. The woman reasons her way to the fruit across multiple registers of evaluation. The man receives it from the woman’s hand and eats.
He inherits the burden without making the wager, but that doesn’t negate his responsibility.
Which may explain everything about 3:12. "The woman whom you gave to be with me — she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." He's not entirely lying. He didn't choose this. He realized discernment secondhand, and he's furious about what it costs without having fully decided it was worth it. There is something very human — and something very recognizable from any veteran's account of moral injury — in being handed a weight you didn't consent to carry and then being told you're responsible for it anyway.
What Jesus Does With All of This
Matthew 4 is not incidentally placed at the beginning of Lent alongside Genesis 3. It is its structural response.
The temptations Jesus faces in the wilderness are precisely the temptations of misused discernment: turn stones to bread (use your insight to meet your own needs), throw yourself from the temple (use your understanding of God's promises to test them), receive all the kingdoms of the world (use your wisdom to shortcut the long work). Each one is the serpent's gambit in a different register — an appeal to the discerning creature to use its discernment for the wrong ends, to step out of its category toward an easier kind of power.
Jesus refuses not because he lacks the capacity but because he knows exactly what it costs and who pays. The second Adam typology has always been in this passage. But the specific content of what's being corrected is not mere disobedience — it's the category confusion that began in Genesis 3. The serpent wanted to rise above its nature. Humanity stooped to meet it. Jesus does neither. He occupies creatureliness correctly — with full discernment, without the ego-inflation that discernment makes available.
That is the pattern Lent is trying to teach us. Not the suppression of discernment but its discipline. Not ignorance recovered but diakrisis rightly ordered.
The tree was always going to be eaten. The question was never whether we'd become discerning. The question is what we do with it once we can't give it back.
Logan M. Isaac is the author of God is a Grunt (Hachette, 2022) and the founder of Grunt Works veteran advocacy. He leads The Chapter House bookstore in Albany, Oregon and the Hospitallers of Saint Martin religious community.
