469. Everyone today who is inwardly wise is capable of perceiving or divining that what is written [in Scripture] about Adam and his wife involves spiritual details, which no one has known until now because the spiritual meaning of the Word has not been disclosed before. Who cannot see, even from a great distance, that Jehovah would not have placed two trees in the garden, one of which was a stumbling block, if doing so did not have some spiritual significance? [The same goes for the fact that Adam and Eve] were cursed because they both ate from a particular tree; and that that curse remains in effect for every human being after them, which means that the whole human race was damned for the misdeed of a single individual - and a misdeed in which there was no evil from a craving of the flesh or a wickedness of the heart. Does this square with divine justice? Why indeed did Jehovah, who was present and watching this happen, not distract Adam from eating? And why did he not throw the snake into the underworld before it exercised its persuasive powers?

[2] But, my friend, the reason God did not do all this is that he would have taken away human free choice by so doing, and yet freedom is what makes a human a human and not an animal. Once this is known, it becomes obvious that the two trees, one for life and the other for death, represent human free choice in spiritual matters.

For another thing, hereditary evil is not from this source; it is from our parents instead. Parents pass on to their children a weakness for the evil they themselves have been involved in. Anyone can see that this is the case by carefully examining the behavior, the minds, and the faces of children, and indeed of extended families, descended from the same ancestor. Nevertheless, it is up to each individual in the family whether he or she wishes to move toward that evil or away from it, since each one has his or her own free choice.

As for what the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil mean in detail, see the memorable occurrence related above in , where this has been fully explained.