Tree of Knowledge

The Tree of Knowledge is the forbidden tree in Reverend Hammond’s retelling of the biblical creation story, where it marks the boundary between life in the garden and humanity’s painful existence beyond it. As the sermon revives images Bigger Thomas had tried to suppress, the tree becomes more than a religious emblem: it concentrates the conflict between innocence and understanding, belonging and exclusion, and the life Bigger has rejected and the world he has made for himself.

The Tree in the Creation Story

Reverend Hammond’s account begins with dark, formless waters and a voice that brings light, sky, dry land, plants, stars, animals, and finally a man and a woman into being. In the garden, the first human pair live together without pain, longing, time, or death. The command concerning the tree interrupts that condition: they must not eat its fruit or touch it, lest they die. The tree thus stands within a world that is initially abundant and ordered, but whose peace depends on obedience to a limit.

The sermon’s imagery gives that boundary a concrete consequence. After the prohibition is broken, the man and woman cover their nakedness and are driven from the garden by an angel with a flaming sword. They enter a world of cold, tears, pain, and death, where food must be earned and life requires struggle. Their first act beyond the garden is to burn food as an offering, seeking forgiveness from the sky. The tree’s significance therefore unfolds through a sequence: command, transgression, exposure, exile, labor, and the continuing appeal for mercy.

Knowledge and the Fall

Reverend Hammond identifies the tree as the Tree of Knowledge and interprets the first humans’ transgression as a desire to know why, rather than to live as children within the world God made. In the sermon’s account, the wish to become like God and understand the reason for things marks the passage from light to darkness, love to damnation, and blessedness to shame. Knowledge is presented here not as a neutral acquisition but as the turning point in a theological story about disobedience and its cost.

That interpretation connects intellectual desire to the hardships that follow. The man must obtain bread through the sweat of his brow; the woman must bear children in pain and sorrow. The world turns against them, and they must fight it to live. The tree consequently serves as the hinge between an imagined condition of effortless unity and a mortal life defined by work, pain, and estrangement. The sermon’s emphasis is on the loss that follows the forbidden choice, not on any later recovery of the garden’s original ease.

The Image Before Bigger

The sermon reaches Bigger through images he remembers from childhood, first given to him by his mother. He cannot later repeat the preacher’s words, yet their meaning takes hold of him: the creation story’s familiar images return with force, along with feelings and impulses he had long suppressed. The Tree of Knowledge belongs to this larger recalled vision of life, one that had once helped explain the world and supplied a reason for living.

Its return confronts Bigger with a guilt that feels deeper even than his guilt over Mary’s murder. He recognizes that he had already killed the preacher’s vision of life within himself before killing Mary. The contrast gives the tree’s story a personal edge: the sermon describes expulsion from a garden, while Bigger feels excluded from the very picture of creation and human belonging that the story once offered him.

The Tree and Exclusion

Bigger understands the people who want to kill him as refusing to regard him as human or to include him in the creation story’s account of humanity. In response, he had made a new world for himself in order to live; he now sees that this act of self-making has helped lead him toward death. The forbidden tree’s narrative therefore does not simply supply a general lesson about sin. In the moment of the sermon, it gives religious form to Bigger’s awareness that he has lost a sustaining account of life and stands outside the community that account promises.

The episode preserves a tension rather than resolving it. Reverend Hammond presents Jesus’s way of love and forgiveness as the route back to God, urging Bigger not to resist and to accept the suffering of earthly life. But the tree’s story has already awakened Bigger’s sense of exclusion, and his stillness at the sermon’s end leaves that encounter unresolved. The image holds together the promise of restored belonging and the painful recognition that Bigger has felt himself denied belonging in the first place.