Knowledge of Good and Evil

In the deeply-ingrained popular imagination, the 'knowledge of good and evil', that is the topic of Genesis 3, means 'sexual intercourse'. Many of the chronic consequences of that equivalence are familiar--vilification of sexuality, demonization of women, existence regarded as a tribulation, and the fundamental content of 'morality' conceived as genital activity. A significant promoter of this reading of the text is Augustine, who brings both his acquaintance with Platonism and his personal incontinent experiences to his project. However, aside from brief allusions to 'nakedness' and 'labor pains', there is no clear textual grounding to that traditional equivalence. To the contrary, 3:22, where God says, "Behold man is become as one of us, to know good and evil", in the absence of an explanation of how God engages in accursed sexual intercourse, presents a powerful obstacle to the standard reading. So, a sounder interpretation might be that which takes 'knowledge of good and evil' at face value, i. e. as an 'understanding of what is beneficial and of what is harmful', an asset to beings which are in the process of outgrowing a sedentary existence, as they enter a more nomadic phase of development.