© 2025 The Interpreter Foundation. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

All content by The Interpreter Foundation, unless otherwise specified, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
Interpreter Foundation is not owned, controlled by or affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All research and opinions provided on this site are the sole responsibility of their respective authors, and should not be interpreted as the opinions of the Board, nor as official statements of LDS doctrine, belief or practice.
It is hard to agree that “Far from being based on clear, precise, unidirectional, and congruent messages between the actors in the Garden of Eden, God’s intent is to stay clear of influencing our first parents in a given direction.” When He found that they had partaken, He reminded them they had done the very thing He had “commanded” them not to do (Moses 4:23, emphasis added), and imposed all the consequences of their conduct. At some point after their expulsion, “the Lord said unto Adam: Behold I have forgiven thee thy transgression in the Garden of Eden” (Moses 6:53), suggesting that they had done something wrongful, something that did not please God, and had repented of it. Their need and ability to repent distinguishes them from little children, for as Mormon taught, “[l]ittle children cannot repent” (Moroni 8:19). In sum, if as appears in our narratives Adam and Eve were given knowledge and agency (Moses 7:32), were subject to temptation, were accountable for succumbing to it, had need of repentance, and were forgiven, then by definition they cannot have been as little children, at least by the time of Lucifer’s arrival on the scene. There is much more to say, but I’ll leave it at that for now.