There is an interesting contrast between the Biblical and Quranic accounts of the fall of Adam and Eve. In the first, Adam and Eve were warned against eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; and when they did, the concern in Heaven was about how dangerous the couple have become because of their newly acquired knowledge. They had to be expelled from Heaven and the Garden of Eden, not just as punishment, but to cut them down to size. In Genesis 3:22, God is reported to have said: ‘Behold, the man has become as one of Us, to know good and evil’, and he must now be expelled from the Garden of Eden, ‘lest he put forth his hand and also take of the tree of life and eat and live everlasting.’ It is not clear what ‘Us’ refers to here, to who the proclamation was addressed, since there is but one God in the end. This is a suspicious portrayal of the Biblical Jehovah as rather insecure, and worried about competition from His own creatures, in particular of their acquisition of knowledge that could make them more powerful.
This problematic outlook is also reflected in another Biblical story, that of the ‘Tower of Babel’ (Genesis 11:1–9,) where humans have allegedly posed another threat to Heavenly power and authority through an attempt by Babylonians to build a tower that reaches up to the heavens, after the Deluge. According to the biblical story, God intervened to foil the plan by so confusing the language of the workers, thus disrupting their ability to communicate and coordinate their work. According to extra-biblical sources (in this case, the first century Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus), one of the aims of the human plot was to be as powerful as God Himself and deter the Almighty from ever sending another Deluge to drown the world. The tower in the mighty city would be too high for the waters to submerge it. This is also described as a revenge against God for destroying the Babylonians’ forefathers.
We will only in passing point out some gaping hole in this story. Since the story describes the Babylonians as descendants of Noah, it is incongruous to accuse God of drowning their ancestors, since Noah has been saved, not drowned. This would be like the Jews holding a grudge against God for drowning the Pharaoh. Even more congruous, given that the story of the Deluge was alive in the rhetoric of the offending Babylonians, where the Almighty has demonstrated his absolute ability to completely destroy a community to the last individual, would Heaven be at all worried about such a prank by the apparently ignorant Babylonians?
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