leaking pen wrote: > why would god create a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the > ability to tell the difference between, if evil did not yet exist?
Hmmm, interesting question! I'm glad you asked me that, young man! Next question, please! (Errr... Perhaps God's ability to foretell the future had already tipped him/her/it/them off that there was going to be trouble with Satan, who had already been created at that point...) > > Also, theres no good quote showing that satans fall DEFINATELY > happened after man was created, no? > Assuming that's a serious question, here's a serious answer... In the Bible there's essentially nothing on Satan's fall. So, within the bible, the answer is a clear "no". However, the Bible comes from a tradition which included additional material, both oral and written. The extrabiblical tradition regarding Satan's fall is, IIRC, written down in the Testament of Moses and the Story of Adam and Eve. It's in those (pseudepigraphic and/or apocryphal) books that the tradition of Satan's fall due to envy of Adam is documented. And I think it's pretty clear, in those books, that Satan's fall happened after the creation of Adam. The Nephilim are also a largely extra-biblical tradition. IIRC, within the Bible, there's a vague reference to them in Genesis, and there's a hint that Goliath was sort of a "left over" Nephilim, but that's about it. As I said, however, there's a lot more said about them in Enoch, which was once widely accepted as a holy book, before it was lost to Europe for several centuries. Interestingly, Enoch survived as a well-known and almost-canonical book in Ethiopia. All currently extant manuscripts of Enoch are in fact in Ethiopic, though the original book was written in Hebrew. And I have no idea where to find much of anything about Lilith. She's far, far extra-biblical -- she's not mentioned in any of the pseudepigrapha which I've read. (She makes an appearance in Valis, but I don't know anyone who considers that book "sacred".)
