To touch it was to die. The serpent denies that will be their fate, they eat, and they are sent from the garden into the normalcy of human life. That would have been a minimal Israelite adaptation of Mesopotamian options. But instead, Genesis introduces that second tree: Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
