Background: raised catholic for my first 16 or so years, never particularly believed in it, but have spent a fair amount of time thinking/learning about the bible in various settings. So, I have a lot of feelings on this story, though it is mainly just small details that I find interesting rather than an overarching opinion. I will probably just piggyback onto existing comments for that opinion. (Note: I am using my New Jerusalem Bible, so the text may be slightly different. It can be a bit clunky at times, but I find it to be the most readable, stripped back, and accurate version.) ------ 1. Gen 3:16, "Your yearning will be for your husband, and he will dominate you". So, obviously there is a lot to say about the "and he will dominate you" part of this, but I actually find "your yearning will be for your husband" more fraught and full of possible interpretations. Of particular interest to me is that this comes in the "doling out punishment" section, implying that this yearning is not only woman's new lot in life, but a punishment. I get that the intention is tying it to the preceding, so that the thought is "childbearing will hurt, but you are going to keep wanting to fuck anyway", but I think it is still contextually interesting, especially if you look at the parable of the serpent/temptation as one of sexual exploration. Of note also is that the hebrew word for "dominate" used here is typically related to animals and the like, IIRC. (Sidenote: a professor I had in college - biblical scholar, translated it from the original hebrew himself, etc etc - is convinced that the author of Genesis is female. Not sure I wholly agree, but it definitely does have some interesting gender dynamics) 2. Gen 3:21 "Yahweh God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them". This is a very minor moment, but one that has always struck me. Notably, this is the first instance of death in the bible (unless these animals were skinned alive), and I find it almost nurturing that God goes to the trouble of making tunics before sending these folks into the wild. This is, to me, God at his most parental and arguably most human. 3. Gen 3:6 "...She also gave some of it to her husband who was with her, and he ate it". I like that the marriage of Adam and Eve is so ambiguous - were they created married? Was their marriage ceremony deemed too uninteresting for inclusion in Genesis? Also that marriage exists before the knowledge of good and evil, or mortality. Something I never really considered the implications of before. ----- Extra reading for anyone interested: Cain by Jose Saramago is a beautiful retelling of much of the book of Genesis (and others), and has my favorite representation of OT God in it. Queering Genesis, an insightful alternative interpretation of the creation narrative (only focuses on books 1 and 2 though, so the fall isn't really mentioned). A good site in general. EDIT: Will keep adding as ideas come to me.
A teacher once told me his only rule for reading the Bible is don't ask why God does what he does, in part because there is no decent/definitive answer (except arguably the end of the Book of Job and/or "because I am the Lord, your God"), and more importantly, because it isn't a very interesting question. Of more interest are things like "why did the authors choose to portray God this way?" or "how did the humans react to this?". I think even if you just consider Yahweh as a literary character, one of his few consistent character traits is that he just does stuff and is inscrutable, and attempting to divine (ha) intention is impossible by His very nature. I also side with Leibniz in thinking that one of God's characteristics is that he is perfect. So what does this story tell us? 1. That God, a perfect being, created us without the knowledge of good and evil built in. 2. That God, a perfect being, presumably felt that this was the preferable state of existence. 3. That Adam and Eve seem to have eaten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil BEFORE the Tree of Life I am inferring this from Gen 3:22, "Now that man has become like one of us in knowing good from evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick from the tree of life too, and eat and live forever!" Which leads me to the more interesting question, and one that nobody seems to ask: What is the purpose and the meaning of the tree of Life? I don't think it is explicitly stated that Adam and Eve are mortal before the fall, but why would there be a tree that makes them immortal if they weren't? And why are they allowed this tree (Gen 2:16), but not knowledge of good and evil? The implication being that eternal life is being Godlike in an acceptable way, but being knowledgeable of good and evil isn't. These are all questions I don't have answers to, and would love to talk about.
I don't think it is explicitly stated that Adam and Eve are mortal before the fall, but why would there be a tree that makes them immortal if they weren't? And why are they allowed this tree (Gen 2:16), but not knowledge of good and evil? The implication being that eternal life is being Godlike in an acceptable way, but being knowledgeable of good and evil isn't. I'm not very knowledgeable about the Bible, so you can correct me when my theory doesn't match the text. My understanding was that God had created the angels, probably before he created the Earth. The angels had many of the same properties as God, so they knew good and evil and were immortal. At that time, Lucifer turned against God. The angels were immortal, so Lucifer was also immortal. God would be battling Lucifer for eternity. God didn't want to duplicate that with humans, so he didn't make humans immortal but allowed for them to be immortal by eating from the tree of life. When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of good and evil, they now had the possibility of turning into another Lucifer, so God took away their ability to become immortal by taking away their access to the tree of life. I'm not sure how I'd answer that if I couldn't ask why God did something in any coherent fashion. I don't think I agree with your teacher that asking why God does something should be disallowed. If God is completely random with no coherence or logic, God would be not just incomprehensible but also unrelatable. God would be like an alien doing random actions for no reason whatsoever. I do agree with your teacher at the edges where there are incomprehensible human issues. Why did God create free will? Why did God allow evil in the world? Those are questions that can't be answered by looking for God logic because those are the questions that are beyond comprehension. However, I think there must be some questions where people are allowed to ask why God did something or the Bible would be completely illogical. Edit: I thought about this for a bit and think I can answer it from the writer's viewpoint also. I'm wondering if I'm misunderstanding your question. From the writer's view, polytheism was prevalent at the time. The Bible was an attempt to push monotheism. The placement of angels in the story explained what was going on with the many gods and why there were good and bad gods, which they already believed in at that time. The garden story explained why humans didn't have the same powers as the gods. The creation part pushed the idea of one God above all the other angels (gods). The tree of life was written in to explain why humans die and gods don't.What is the purpose and the meaning of the tree of Life?
Maybe it's not so much the Tree of Life as a theme on its own, but rather the Tree of Life in combination with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? I'm not 100% sure how to answer the question, but it is a really great question. I mean in terms of why it was written that way maybe to reiterate the point that the lives we live here, with the knowledge we gained, was never meant to be permanent, so much so that God cast man out of Eden before they could become immortal.