Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
Pretty strong meat from the Lord there. Let’s back up.
The serpent (not, I would like to point out, the Devil, who appears in Paradise Lost) talks Eve into eating from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. She, in turn, tells Adam to eat. Bam. The Fall.
I’m not here to justify this passage. Sure, it’s all allegory and myth. But seriously, fuck God. Ephraim, who has since been to some Lib meetings, is pretty ashamed of how the whole thing plays out. “Sure, we could have said that because Adam and Eve ate the fruit they were cursed, Eve to suffer the pain of birth, Adam to suffer the pain of working for his food. Sexist, but not that sexist. But no, we had to include this part:”
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.
At its heart, the whole thing is about adulthood. Adam and Eve are children, eating for free, roaming around shamelessly naked, cared for by their awesome Father figure. Then they grow up, gain knowledge than cannot be ungained, and have to deal with the fact that it’s not all Eden in life. Why? Because this story. Just so.
But there are problems. The Fall is portrayed as being humanity’s fault, like perpetual childhood is something in which God would want humans to stay. Not much free will there, amiright? I guess God gave them free will to listen to the serpent.
From a mythical standpoint, it’s perfectly fine to have forbidden knowledge: Pandora (not the streaming music service) anyone? But usually either the knowledge is the curse or there’s some positive part of the knowledge or both. Pandora keeps hope in the box. What do Adam and Eve get?
See, legalism again: break God’s rules and get a good smiting. Never mind that knowing good and evil is a bit of a curse in and of itself; without knowledge of good and evil, everything is good.
And why couldn’t the serpent have tricked Eve into eating the fruit from the tree of life? God would be pissed but we’d all live forever.
This part doesn’t sit well with me. I want a rewrite, more progressive, and less with God cursing and more with God being disappointed that God can’t keep God’s children safe and children forever.
And that’s all you’re getting on the Fall.
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