The Serpent drew Eve into a discussion about the rightness of God’s instructions regarding the eating rights of humans in the garden of Eden. Her fist mistake was allowing the discussion to happen, because the next thing is that Satan, having an open ear, presented his great temptation and demeaned God’s good intentions for them and suggested that God was keeping something good from them. Eating of that forbidden fruit would make them like the rest of the heavenly beings including God himself, who knew good from evil. But it’s the lie “you will not surely die” that was the clincher. There will be no consequences and all your curiosity will be satisfied and you’ll no longer be naïve little children. By eating of the fruit, you will leave the estate to which you were intended with all the good things God wanted for you and step out into a new realm, a realm that will make you like all the other heavenly beings. The offer was to become like Angels! The reality is that they would become like demons, the fallen angels.
So, the woman began to look things over to decide for herself. The first thing that she noticed was recorded in Genesis 3:6a. It tells us that “…the woman saw that the tree was good for food…” Most children’s books on the Bible suggest that the fruit was an apple. A picture of an apple with a bite taken out of it is the illustration of Eve’s sin in the Garden. But we don’t know that it really was an apple. A blogger did a good job describing this. He said that the confusion of this fruit with the apple may be due to the similarity of the two words in the Latin translation of the Bible, known as the Vulgate. The word evil in Latin is Mali. The word for apple is Mala. But in the original Hebrew the words are not even close.
I’m not sure you can tell something is good for food by just looking at it. It seems like Eve saw something that convinced her it was edible. Several commentators observed this and suggested that the Serpent, Satan, took a bite of the apple to show her how good it was. Or maybe she saw animals eating it. One internet blogger said, “Keep in mind that mankind was not permitted to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but God did not give any warning to animals. It is possible that an animal, perhaps even the serpent, took some of the fruit and ate before Eve so that she could see that this fruit was good for food.” I can imagine Satan taking a big crisp bite from the fruit and smacking his lips and saying, “This is delicious!” Then not seeing any ill effects Eve was again moved to think about eating the fruit herself.