What Adam and Eve did was transgress, or break, a commandment, but that action was not imputed to them as sin. President Joseph Fielding Smith explained: “What did Adam do? The very thing the Lord wanted him to do. I hate to hear anybody call it a sin, for it wasn’t a sin… . Now this is the way I interpret that: The Lord said to Adam, ‘Here is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If you want to stay here, then you cannot eat of that fruit. If you want to stay here, I forbid you to eat it. But you may act for yourself and you may eat if you want to. And if you do eat it, you will die.” 2
President Smith also wrote: “I never speak of the part Eve took in this fall as a sin, nor do I accuse Adam of a sin… . It is not always a sin to transgress a law… . This was a transgression of the law, but not a sin in the strict sense, for it was something that Adam and Eve had to do!” 3
The 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language defines transgression as “the act of passing over or beyond any law or rule of moral duty.”