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I think that you are reading it right. And while I personally wouldn't associate obedience with moral "good", whoever wrote this myth clearly did.
In fact the whole myth feels like Yahweh creating a successful trap for the couple - the tree is in the garden, but they aren't supposed to eat from it; the snake was in the garden, but they weren't supposed to listen to it; and the serpent speaking the truth while Yahweh was being a liar ("you'll die"... except they didn't.)
while I personally wouldn't associate obedience with moral "good", whoever wrote this myth clearly did.
The merest accident of microgeography had meant that the first man to hear the voice of Om, and who gave Om his view of humans, was a shepherd and not a goatherd. They have quite different ways of looking at the world, and the whole of history might have been different. For sheep are stupid, and have to be driven. But goats are intelligent, and need to be led.
— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (Discworld, #13)
Adam and Eve were too unintelligent (immature? unwise?) to understand, much like telling a toddler not to eat cookies from the cookie jar on the counter.
This is literally what 'ignorant' means.
I like to... adapt the story, where god is a dog owner, and adam and steve are golden retrievers. It's not Adam and Steve's fault that the human left the squeaky toy out for them to play with... any one older than a toddler is going to realize that, of course, they're going to find it and play with it. they're dogs. it's a squeaky toy. it's meant to be played with. Only an asshole kicks their dogs out because they got into the squeaky toys.
Now, couple that with a being that's supposedly omniscient, all knowing. Of everything- past and future included. If this is all to believed, then it was all god's intent that Adam and Eve eat the damned fruit.
Which means the asshole set them up, just so he could kick them out. And, ultimately, just so he could LARP as a white-knight savior.
Yeah basically.
Without knowledge of good and evil how can you avoid evil acts? You can’t.
That is how I have always read it too. God tells them not to do something but they don't know it's wrong to disobey him, so they do it anyway and then he gets mad even though he created them that way.
Not to mention he's omniscient and knew they would do it anyway.
Maybe he just needed an excuse to kick them out
I always thought that this myth was Yahweh testing whether their free will (which he had given them) was actually working or not. It was totally a set-up.
You want a better plot hole?
Ask yourself one, really easy, simple question:
"Which came first? People? Or animals?"
Then read Genesis 1. Think you have the answer? Then read Genesis 2. ;)
According to Dan McClellen, Genesis 2 is a retelling of Genesis 1 revised according to the sensibilities of a later century, according to scholarly consensus. Of course, also according to scholarly consensus (and revealed to students in seminary) the bible is not univocal, not divinely inspired and not inerrant, even though many denominations assert these by fiat. (Otherwise they wouldn't give ministries authority to tell their flock not to be gay.)
It's not though. Genesis 1 is the Elohist creation myth, Genesis 2 is the Jahwist creation myth. They both just got jammed together.
This is why Genesis 1 has animals created first, and man and woman created at the same time, while Genesis 2 has man created first, then animals, then woman.
Two different mythologies.
it's also important to note that Gen 1 was pretty much intended as propaganda. it was riffing off other mythologies; except trying to one up them. "OUR god is so STRONG that he created the world ALONE. In SIX DAYS. and he NAPPED on the SEVENTH!!!"
It gave justification for a few of the earlier genocides, because their god was stronger than the other peoples, so it's all cool.
Which is interesting, because the very first line... Gods is plural. That carried over into Latin, then was singularized after that.
Which makes sense if you consider the commandments:
Exodus 20:2-3
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me."
It's acknowledging the existence of other Gods, but I am YOUR God.
Oh. That’s another thing.
The exodus didn’t happen. Or, rather, the Israelites were always there. What most scholars think is that refugees came up from Egypt and their story was adopted as they assimilated into the broader culture .
Yup, yup. There's no evidence the Jews were enslaved in Egypt and the Sunday school stories about slave labor for the pyramids is equally nonsense.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/who-built-the-egyptian-pyramids-not-slaves
https://historum.com/t/egypt-knew-no-moses-evidence-on-why-exodus-never-happened.194987/
these days my favorite sunday school lessons include cute, featherless dinosaurs.
i know. I know. but who doesn't want to live in a world with cute featherless dinos?
to be fair, I did specific "featherless".
(also, that video now just made the rounds to all three other people working in my office.... Eh. it's friday. we mostly bullshit and wait for something to go wrong.)
I get it, but the idea of a pack of raptors singing "Let the bodies hit the floor" made me giggle.
Monotheism (as opposed to monolatrism) is a much more recent thing than the scripture itself, an invention of the middle ages at earliest.
Also, plants come before the sun in Genesis 1, which just sounds like bad planning on God's part.
Terms like Elohist are not used anymore by scholars. The documentary hypothesis collapsed in the 70s…
It stems from how God is referenced in Hebrew in the two chapters. Genesis 1 is Elohim. Genesis 2 is Yahweh.
I know that, but the idea that behind these different names of God are different authors/schools is not accepted by mainstream historians nowadays.
In this particular case, it seems evident that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have different authors, but not the Elohist and the Jahvist, in that you can't necessarily link this two passages to others in the Bible which would use the same names for God.
I tend to see in Genesis 1, with the emphasis on the fact that the man and the woman are created as the same time (verse 27) an answer to Genesis 2, which in that case would have been older. In the Bible, a lot of texts are answers to other texts. It totally breaks the idea of inerrancy, but it makes the Bible a very interesting polyphony.
My favourite is when god says “let there be light” a couple of days before he creates the sun and stars.
Those are the Generation 3 stars. You know the big ones that made everything else. He got around to making Sol about 8 billion years later.
I'm pretty sure stars then were pinpricks in the firmament in the sky, so a huge lightbox.
While we have archeological data suggesting that the Hellenics and the Egyptians had strong models of the planets (they were both big into astrology, so there was a drive to develop enough math to predict where the planets would be next week or next year), there's also a difference between what the intelligentsia knew about nature and what the laity believed. Socrates' death sentence was for impiety, that is, challenging the temples. (See also Galileo)
But Egyptian history is deep, and I don't know how Egyptian cosmology intersects with Hebrew cosmology on the timeline. Nor Hellenic cosmology, for that matter. Also, depending on the time, esoteric knowledge might be disseminated or kept secret. Astrologists were far less likely to be burned for witchcraft if the high lords couldn't easily replace them. Sometimes the sun was a big orb that guided the motions of the planets, and sometimes it was a chariot driven by Helios or Apollo across the heavenly firmament resting on the shoulders of Atlas (or Hercules, for a day).
Curiously, circa 14th and 15th centuries, as the Islamic Golden Age was dusking, there was a surge of religious prosecutions and astronomers and algebraists were accused and executed for sorcery in Araby and Persia. (This golden age is why a lot of our night-sky stars have Arabic names, like Aldebaran, Deneb, Betelgeuse, Mizar, and Rigel -- List on Wikipedia ).
It tells us while our best cosmological model might have improved with time, the common notions of the size and shape of the universe fluctuated with social movements, sometimes looking more like Carl Sagan's model, and sometimes looking like a toddler's imagining of the night sky.
God wanted them unaware they were naked. He got all pissy and threw a huge tantrum after Satan told them the truth, basically damning humanity for not going along with his voyeur garden.
You shouldn't be wasting neuron power on something that didn't happen.
The thing is, I waste neuron power on things that didn't happen all the time. The long term decline of House Frey after the Red Wedding given that all the other houses ceased to trust them. I ponder Merry and Pippen captured and carried by the Uruks. I think about Opheus petitioning Hades for the return of Eurydice, and the rape of Medusa by Poseidon. Prometheus taking pity on his clay apes and teaching them fire, knowing that they would eventually reach for the stars and create life from raw materials, displacing the Olympians. And then their response, offering the newer, sleeker, curvier model, Pandora, comes with free jar of mysteries!
Just because the Eden story is mythical doesn't mean it has no use, and ultimately it will, like most of our mythology, succumb to the death of the author, its meaning changing from any long, lost original intent (or what we imagine their intent to be) to what it means to us.