Illumination and Investiture

In a 2006 article in the Westminster Theological Journal , William Wilder offers a sharp interpretation of the significance of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil” and the clothing of Adam and Eve with animal skins in Genesis 3.

He makes the striking point that “the most important clues to the significance of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil come from the mouth of the serpent,” since he links the tree to wisdom, opened eyes, God-likeness. He explores the use of the phrase elsewhere in the Old Testament, and concludes that the tree is a “tree of wisdom,” that would enable Adam and Eve to “attain the kind of savoir-faire which the rest of the OT associates with adults and kings and which she simply (and simplistically) associated with God. Eve understood enough of the serpent’s predictions to see in the tree a promise of wisdom which would make her and Adam like God.” Knowledge of good and evil was not wrong, but rather the fulfillment of Adam and Eve as images of God, “God’s vice regents over the earth.”

The eventual investiture of Adam and Eve fits neatly in this context.

In the Ancient Near East and Bible, investiture was understood into “more complete likeness to God” and elevation to a position of rule. Wilder thinks that “the reason for mentioning Adam and Eve’s nakedness at the end of Gen 2 is to arouse in the reader an expectation of royal investiture in keeping with man’s Gen 1 status as the ruling ‘image of God’ on earth.”

What they get is a “sad caricature” of investiture. Immediately after they eat they clothe themselves in leaves. Their eyes are opened, and they are clothed in garments, but instead of resembling God they “resemble instead a tree or a bush. Having idolized themselves, they now resemble the wood from which such idols are carved.” God doesn’t leave things there, though. He elevates them by giving animal skins for their plant garment, and He graciously sends them from the garden with ‘some token of their proper inheritance.” Genesis puns on the Hebrew word for “light” ( ‘or ) and the word for “skin” ( ‘or ): The pun evokes “the alternative image of light,” and points to an eventual glorification in robes of light.