Prohibition on Eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge

The Prohibition on Eating the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is a divine command in the preacher’s account of Eden, forbidding the first man and woman to eat from—or even touch—the tree in the garden’s midst lest they die. In Bigger Thomas’s hearing, the rule is more than a limit on one act: it becomes the threshold between a life imagined as innocent and a human world marked by knowledge, suffering, and struggle.

The Command and the Fall

The preacher’s creation story places the prohibition within a garden where the first man and woman live together without pain, longing, time, or death. The command concerning the tree stands against that state of life. The preacher explains the fall through humanity’s desire to know why: the wish to understand carries the man and woman from light toward darkness and from blessedness toward shame. Their expulsion makes the consequences concrete. They must face cold, tears, pain, and death; the man must earn bread by labor, and the woman must bear children in sorrow.

The rule therefore links knowledge to a changed condition of existence. The preacher’s account does not present the command as an isolated detail: it anchors a larger explanation of why life entails hardship and why humanity struggles against the world. The man and woman’s departure from the garden is followed by their attempt to seek forgiveness, as they burn food and send its smoke upward.

The Preacher’s Recollection

As Reverend Hammond speaks, Bigger listens without being able to repeat the sermon’s words, yet senses their force. The images call up the religious pictures his mother had given him as a child, once explanations of the world that he later suppressed and pushed away. The creation story thus reaches him not as unfamiliar doctrine but as a return of a belief he had tried to remove from his life.

The remembered command also gives shape to Bigger’s guilt. He feels that he had destroyed the preacher’s vision within himself before he killed Mary Dalton; in his own reckoning, that inward destruction was his first murder. The religious story, restored by Reverend Hammond’s telling, makes him confront not only his crime but the loss of a picture of life that had once offered meaning.

Meaning for Bigger

Bigger connects the Eden story to his sense that he has been excluded from the humanity represented in the account of creation. He believes that those who want him dead do not regard him as part of that human picture. He had pressed the image down beneath fear and hate, and describes creating a new world for himself in order to live; now that choice appears bound to his impending death.

Reverend Hammond’s interpretation points toward love, forgiveness, and a way back to God through Jesus. It presents nonresistance as the religious answer to a world in which life itself is suffering. The episode sets that teaching beside Bigger’s own history of suppression and self-preservation: the command and the fall are not merely an origin story but the frame through which he feels his estrangement, guilt, and approaching end.