Adam and Eve - my interpretation

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Most of us know the story of Adam and Eve. Both of them live in the garden of Eden, Eve eats forbiddn fruit, Adam copies her and does same, both get kicked out of Eden, both have kids that grow up to be farmers and shepherds.

Let's put aside for a second the fact that the story is basically telling the reader never to trust a woman and focus on another thing wrong about the story. In the story, humanity basically goes from magical garden to agriculture with no hunter-gatherer stage in between. The human species has been around for 200,000 years. We've been civilized for about 12,000 years at this point. The story takes approximately 190,000 years of human existance and pretends it never happened! I also remember reading somewhere that the first stories like the Adam and Eve story date back to around the beginning of civilization - which happened soon after the start of agriculture. See what I'm saying?

I think that part of the purpose of this story was to make people think that man had always been civilized and that hunter-gatherers have just turned away from god. Maybe the purpose of the story was to turn civilized people against the hunter-gatherers on the outside. One can imagine that the when the first civilizations were built there were hunter-gatherer populations on the outside and it was probably encouraged by authorities to hate these "barbarians" and regard them as unclean heathens. Also, did you know that the word "heathen" originally meant "living in wild, uncultivated heath"?

Think of it as an ancient form of soviet-style historical revision.

You are aware, I hope, that the Adam-Eve story is a myth.

ruveyn

DarthMetaKnight wrote (in part):...the story of Adam and Eve...The story takes approximately 190,000 years of human existance and pretends it never happened... - DarthMetaKnight - The story also says God, the giant potter in the universe, made everything in seven days, then rested (and played 18 rounds of golf on Sunday - those eight words were deleted later from the official texts - just kidding a little...).

It's my understanding that the current version of Adam and Eve is not the first version presented by Judaism on the topic but the one which was finally adopted.

I do not understand the complete meaning of the Adam and Eve story.

The story sounds like God handed Adam and Eve a paradise of sorts free of charge in exchange for absolute obedience to his will as God Almighty.

When Adam and Eve decided to think for themselves and sample a fruit on a tree which was against God's rule, both were harshly punished by God, kicked out of paradise, with an angel preventing Adam and Eve from reentering paradise.

In my view, part of Biblical thought is around the idea that obeying laws will have good outcomes; disobeying laws will have bad outcomes.

It's almost like part of the Bible is from the perspective of a wrathful king/a wrathful judge/a wrathful attorney who is kind to those who obey all the rules but harsh against those who break any of the rules.

It's almost a kind of forced love. Obey certain rules, prosper, and live in the kingdom of paradise. Disobey any rule, be severely punished, banned, perhaps even killed, and live outside the kingdom of paradise.

- Rules, laws, regulations, harsh standards, big brother, and so on...

- pgd.

civilization is responsible for the adam and eve story, once people start living in comunities with no tv lots of ficticious storys are told around the cave