How did Eve know?
This blog, like my book The Naked Portfolio Manager, is designed to help readers think better and make better decisions. I thought to myself "What could be a better blog topic than to study the first great decision that mankind ever made?"I am referring, of course, to the decision Eve made in the Garden of Eden when she chose to eat the forbidden fruit. When Eve ate the fruit she disobeyed God. We have been taught this was the original sign and was the cause of all of mankind's hardships. Having read the story many times, let me say I believe almost every biblical scholar has interpreted this event incorrectly and the original sin was not Eve's disobedience to God. Her act of sharing the fruit with Adam was the original sin. Examining the story critically without the constraints of religious dogma yields a much different interpretation of the acts in the garden than we have been taught. And it can lead us to important lessons and decision-making rules we can apply today.
Consider that Eve may have lived in the garden for a relatively short time when she encountered the talking serpent. The Bible tells us that Eve was very beautiful and she and Adam wore no clothes and Adam loved Eve very much. The implication is that Adam and Eve were having normal marital relations, but she had not yet had time to conceive a child when she encountered the serpent. So perhaps she was only a few months old when this occurred. The Bible does not make it clear how old Eve was, but it is clear that the serpent had been in the garden longer since God had created the animals before he had created Eve. So Eve encounters a talking serpent; this must have been an extraordinary event since other than God, Eve, and Adam, no other personages speak in the garden. The talking serpent suggests she eat from the tree of life. Eve says no, since God has told her she will die if she eats from the tree. The serpent says God is not correct and she will be omnipotent if she eats from the tree. Eve now becomes the first human to make a decision under uncertainty. Clearly, both God and the serpent cannot be correct. She must decide if she should risk death in order to have the chance to become omnipotent.
Eve, carried away by the dream of becoming God-like, ignores the risk and eats the forbidden fruit. We know the rest of the story.
Many scholars, parents, and school children have been critical of Eve's decision, but I think they are unfair to her. The normal ways that people make decisions under uncertainty today were not available to her then. Let's remember, Eve never took a course on logic. Neither probability theory nor utility theory had been developed yet either so there was no way to analyze the risk/reward relationship. She could not consult her Bible to see what had happened to people in the past who had disobeyed God. It simply hadn't been written yet. How was she to make this decision?
What is more, it seems almost impossible to believe she fully understood the risks, since no one had ever died in the Garden of Eden. Eve's concept of death had to be fairly abstract. I have asked Biblical scholars this question and I always get the same answer: Eve should have known to obey God. But how was she to know this? She really had no basis for making this decision.
Eve's decision had bad consequences for her as it meant she had to leave the garden and ultimately die, but we cannot call it a bad decision. Rather it was a decision with bad results. Given what she knew at the time, she simply gambled and lost. The original sin was to give the fruit to her husband. She gave it to him knowing full well it would cause his death and she did this because she did not want to face this by herself.
So what are the lessons from this story for today's decision-makers? Decision-Making Best Practices #11-15:
#11 - Challenge dogma. We are told thousands of things in life and many of them prove to be untrue.
#12 - Assign appropriate weight to obscure or poorly understood risks. Eve, like many decision-makers today, clearly underweighed the risks of dying when she made her choice.
#13 - Be careful when criticizing the decision-making of others, especially if you have the benefit of information that those people did not have at the time they made their decision.
#14 - Remember the difference between decisions and results and evaluate decisions on the quality of the thinking employed rather than the result of the decision.
#15 - Delay a critical decision if you can, especially if you will likely be able to get more information later that will allow you to make a better choice.
