Was Adam given every tree for food, or was one tree forbidden?

Genesis 1:29 tells what kind of food God gave mankind, and Genesis 2:16–17 makes one exception to it. A general grant followed by a stated exception is not a contradiction; Genesis 2:16–17 itself has both in one breath: “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat”, and then, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it”. Genesis 9 follows the same pattern after the flood. God says “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you”, and at once adds, “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat” (9:3–4).

The two passages also do different jobs. Genesis 1:29–30 sets out food for all living things: for people, seed-bearing plants and fruit; for the animals, “every green herb”. Genesis 2:17 is a single command given to the man in the garden as a test of obedience, not a rule about what is fit to eat; Eve later saw that the forbidden tree “was good for food” (3:6). If chapter 2 tells the events of the sixth day in detail, God spoke this command to the man before the woman was made (2:16–22), and spoke the blessing of 1:28–30 to them both, so the general grant was given after the prohibition and plainly did not cancel it. Eve herself held the two together: “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden”, but not of the tree “in the midst of the garden” (3:2–3). Gill takes 1:29 to mean every tree ‘but the tree of knowledge, of good and evil, afterwards excepted’.

Later instructions

Some, such as the Tektonics writers, note that the forbidden tree stood in a garden first described in 2:8, so 2:17 may give instructions for a later stage, after the general grant of 1:29.

The trees of the garden

Others point out that 2:16 speaks of “every tree of the garden”, a narrower group than the trees of 1:29, and that the tree of knowledge was set apart with the tree of life in the middle of the garden (2:9), so it was never simply one of the food trees.