Footnote

b Genesis 2:17 presents God’s command to Adam against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In a footnote on this, The New Jerusalem Bible (1985) comments on what this knowledge represented: “It is the power of deciding for himself what is good and what is evil and of acting accordingly, a claim to complete moral independence by which man refuses to recognise his status as a created being, see Is[aiah] 5:20. The first sin was an attack on God’s sovereignty.”