Eve's Legalism In Eden

The very first seeming legalist presented in the Bible is not a Pharisee.  It is Eve herself.  God tells Adam to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:15-17), and whether Adam told her of this after her own creation or God repeated the command to her, Eve shares this with the scheming serpent in Eden.  However, she tells the serpent that God said not to eat from that tree or touch its fruit, lest she die (Genesis 3:2-3).  Yahweh never said to not touch the fruit, or to never do other things like gaze at it.  Eve wanes here into legalism, the rejection of God's actual commands or the addition of personal preference or slippery slope "precautions" to them.

She appears to have already stooped to irrationality before eating the fruit in question, just not yet specifically the violation of the direct command from God to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God does not say in the text that touching the fruit must not be done, just as he never said later on to not touch a living non-kosher animal in addition to not eating it.  Like the Jews who think that consuming any combination of meat or dairy is what is really being condemned in Exodus 23:19, Eve added to Yahweh's commands out of stupidity and sin.

Again, the Genesis account never says that God instructed Adam and Eve to not touch the fruit at all.  The serpent's denial of God's honesty (Genesis 3:4-5) is often focused on, but Eve has already distorted what God told the first humans at the first opportunity to respond to the serpent's question of "Did God really say . . . ?"  She has already fallen into the irrationality of legalism, of misunderstanding Yahweh's commands and then adding to them (Deuteronomy 4:2, 12:32, Proverbs 30:5-6).  That one thing is immoral necessarily requires that other things also are in certain cases.  For example, if eating from the forbidden tree is sinful, so is encouraging someone else to eat from it: though the latter is not what God said, if what he did say is true, this would also have to be the case.

It is not so with touching the fruit or looking at it or thinking about it, or with finding it aesthetically appealing as Eve does (Genesis 3:6).  It does not follow from eating the fruit being immoral that the same must be true of any of these additional things.  Similarly, it does not follow from murder being sinful that anger is (Jesus only condemns anger without cause in Matthew 5), or from drunkenness being sinful that merely drinking alcohol is.  Eve, and possibly Adam, was already a legalist before God specifically touched upon how it is itself immoral to add to his commands in Mosaic Law, as if his moral nature is incomplete or as if he intentionally withheld revelation of moral prescriptions from humans.