And when the woman saw that the tree [was] good for food, and that it [was] pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make [one] wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
Ver. 6. And when the woman saw.] At this portal the devil entered. How many thousand souls have died of the wound of the eye, and cried out, as Eve might here, "When I saw it, I died!" Ut vidi, ut perii! a If we do not let in sin at the window of the eye, or the door of the ear, it cannot enter into our hearts. "The way to our crimes is through the eyes in our mind." Quintilian said. Vitiis nobis in animum per oculos est via Wherefore, "if thine eye offend thee, pull it out." In Barbary, it is death for any man to see one of the Shereefs concubines; and for them too, if when they see a man, though but through a casement, they do not suddenly screech out. b
She took of the fruit thereof.] Whatever it were, whether an apple, as Bernard c and others gathered out of Song of Solomon 2:3, or a fig, as Theodoret; or a pomegranate, as Mohammed in his Alkoran; or a bad peach; malum Persicum or "fruit of Paradise," Pomum Paradisi, as the Syrians call a kind of fruit common among them. God created us of nothing, and we offended him for a matter of nothing. All the legions of the reprobate devils, said one, d entered into one beast, and, by the Pitho and Suada of that viperous tongue, crept into the bosom of Eve, as it were by all the topic places in logic, figures in rhetoric, and other engines of guile and deceit, till they had brought her into a fool's paradise, with the loss of the earthly, and hazard of the heavenly.
And gave it also to her husband.] It is probable, saith the same author, that Adam stood by all the time of the disputation; therefore his sin was the greater, that he rebuked not the serpent, &c. And again, I cannot believe, said he, but that the devils in the serpent did as well tempt Adam as Eve, though first they began with her, as a further means of enticing him. Others e are of another mind, as that the tempter set upon the woman alone and apart from her husband, as she was curiously prying into the pleasures of the garden; that the serpent crept into Paradise unseen of Adam, who was to keep beasts out of it; that he remained there without being seen by him, and crept out again when he had done his feat; that when she gave him the fruit, she gave him also a relation of the serpent's promise concerning the force of that fruit, that it would make them wise as God, knowing good and evil, &c., whence he is said to have hearkened to her voice. Gen 3:17 And surely, every Adam hath still his Eve, every David his Bathsheba, a tempter in his own bosom, his own flesh, whereby he is so soon "drawn away, and enticed" as a fish by the bait, - beauty f is a hook without a bait, g as one saith, - till "when lust hath conceived," as here it did in Eve, "it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death". Jam 1:14-15 Satan hath only a persuasive sleight, not an enforcing might. It is our own concupiscence that carrieth the greatest stroke.
a Ovid.
b Heyl. Geog., p.]96.
c Porrexit pomum et surripuit paradisum. - Bern.
d Yates's Model.
e Paraeus. Cartw. Catech.
f Dελεξομενος; James 1:14
g Dελεαρ ανευ αλκστου