Adam and Eve: Part 2

In Part 1 of my thorough breakdown of Adam and Eve, I reasoned through my main points that the Lord God controls His creations with fear, His forbiddance of knowledge is only censorship, and Adam and Eve were set up for failure as victims to the serpent’s deceit. If you did not read part 1, you may read it here: Adam and Eve: Part 1.

I will now continue where I left off, where the Lord approaches His experimental humans after they have disobeyed His command.

Confession

The Lord is heard strolling through the garden as if He is unaware of what had just occurred. He asks, “Where are you?” – Genesis 3:9 and “Have you eaten from the tree that I have commanded you not to eat from?” – Genesis 3:11. First of all, why would God need to ask them anything if He is all-knowing? I will assume He was not being sarcastic, as this is a serious matter. If He was testing their honesty, then I would say they passed His test; Adam replied, “The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it” – Genesis 3:12 and Eve admitted, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate” – Genesis 3:13. One could say they faithfully confessed their sins with guilt. Yet, the Lord shows no compassion for their honesty, as you can see in His succeeding convictions.    

Now, this seems like an ideal situation where God could show us His virtue of forgiveness; if He listens to Adam and Eve and gives them a ‘fair trial’, then He would acknowledge that it was not Eve’s conscious fault that she ate from the tree, but rather the serpent’s manipulation and her unawareness of this serpent’s manipulation. Eve was told a reasonable argument that would have had me sold if I did not know good from evil. Punishing Adam and Eve along with the serpent would be like punishing a store clerk along with a thief who had held him at gunpoint. God must have also inferred this understanding, being omniscient of course. But instead, God is quite prompt in announcing His convictions for the serpent, Eve, and Adam. 

The serpent’s condemnation

Toward the serpent, presumably a snake, the Lord God states, “You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:14). First of all, what type of snake was this if it did not already crawl on its belly? Did it previously walk on legs? Furthermore, I am sure that serpents are perfectly content with crawling on their bellies as one of the most efficient predators in the animal kingdom; it is hardly a punishment. God then further states toward the serpent: “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” – Genesis 3:15. I had to look up the meaning of ‘enmity’, which means hatred or animosity. Okay, let’s go through the three possibilities of what God’s condemnation of ‘enmity’ could mean:

1.             If God is referring to the serpent as a talking snake, then this is still hardly a punishment; most animals contain some level of disapproval toward human beings interfering with their natural habitats anyway. And like most predators, snakes do not go out of their way to attack humans, but rather attack only when humans intervene in their habitat or while they are hunting for food in general. There has never been an uprising of snakes that I am aware of, other than the movie Snakes on a Plane, of course.

2.             If God is referring to the serpent as Satan, then He is the one who put enmity between Satan and mankind and gave him the role as a Devil. This punishment then still seems to serve little purpose; Satan must have already contained some level of enmity toward the woman if he deceived her to go against the will of God. And again, Satan still seems to have very significant power over us if he is still swaying at least 2/3 of mankind in the twenty-first century to go against the will of the Holy Trinity (link, link).

3.             If God is referring to the serpent as being possessed or influenced by Satan (link), then there is still no viable punishment given to either of them, and the serpent itself should then be viewed as innocent anyway. 

The point: there is no actual punishment given to the true perpetrator, the serpent, whether it was simply a talking snake or a representation of Satan. No matter what the case, snakes are more than happy to be highly efficient predators and Satan is more than happy to receive the heavy majority of mankind in his eternal realm. And either way, the Lord God is the one who established enmity between His own creations.

Eve’s condemnation

God’s punishment for Eve came as a shock to me; I do not remember hearing of this cruelty in church: “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” – Genesis 3:16. First of all, I wonder what Eve’s anatomy was before receiving an increase in childbearing pains; were her legs previously further apart?? Maybe, but I sincerely doubt it. Mammals of all species undergo incredible pains upon giving birth, so it cannot be claimed that it is a result of sinful disobedience. 

More importantly, to the Christian ladies reading this, are you aware of this condemnation? Are you willing to accept men to ‘rule over you’, despite the modern advocacy of women’s rights and gender equality? According to your Heavenly Father, you are meant to be inferior to men. I would expect you to find that unnerving, especially when He tells Adam he is to be punished because: “you listened to your wife and ate from the tree” – Genesis 3:17. Should not Adam have trusted his wife after seeing that there was no harm in eating the fruit? That is only worth prosecution in the Lord’s cruel judgment.

Adam’s condemnation

God’s punishment for Adam appears not to be the punishment that He warned of initially; He first told Adam that “for when you eat of [the fruit] you will surely die” – Genesis 3:17. Even more intriguing is the wording of the same line as written in the King James Version: “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” – Genesis 3:17. He even said ‘surely’. So once Adam and Eve do ‘eatest thereof’, God instead tells them, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life… until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” – Genesis 3:18-19 (those are some very harsh words coming from an all-loving God.) As the penalty, instead of dying the day that Adam ate of the fruit, he somehow lives on to be 930 years old (Genesis 5:4) (I won’t even begin to question his longevity as it would stray from the point). 

The question is whether God meant that Adam would ‘die’ in the physical sense or the spiritual sense? Christians will claim that the penalty of sin is a spiritual separation from God, not the traditional separation from the physical body. After writing extensively and researching other topics as well, I have accepted this claim of spiritual death, rather than physical death, as it is relatively consistent throughout the Bible. So, when God warned Adam that he would ‘surely die’, He meant that he would be dead in the spiritual sense as a separation from Him (being banished from the garden), not in the traditional physical sense, so I’ll let it slide in this case.

Ignorance is bliss

Anyway, then the Lord God pronounced, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever” – Genesis 3:22. First of all, did not Adam already eat from the tree of life? God never told him not to, only to not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The tree of life is not even mentioned since Genesis 2:9.

On a more important note, I do not understand why God thinks it is so terrible that Adam and Eve now know the difference between good and evil. That does not seem sinful to me whatsoever; education should only be encouraged. According to God, ignorance is bliss. His forbiddance of information and knowledge is no better than the oppressive media and information censorship of the People’s Republic of China (link).

Christians claim that the main issue with Adam and Eve’s disobedience is because of their “attempt to be a law unto themselves, to live apart from the word that God himself has given them” (as explained in the NIV introductory section Reading the Bible as the Drama of God, Humanity, and the World under ‘Act II: Exile’). However, the law that Adam and Eve learned from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is still the law of God (refer back to Genesis 3:22). And, again, their disobedient choice was made based on the convincing argument of the serpent. And I further question why God put these trees into the garden in the first place if they were forbidden?

Source of free will

One of the primary reasons Christians feel that their God’s love is so superior is because He was so gracious as to grant us the choice of His worship; we could not fully love God without having the free will to resist sin and to follow His Word. Otherwise, we would simply be His robots or puppets. However, according to the story of our creation, the credit should be given to the deceit of the talking serpent and the sinful decision of Adam and Eve; worshipping the ‘good’ God only became a choice once they learned the knowledge of both good and evil. Covering themselves up with fig leaves only became a choice once they understood that being naked is a shameful/evil/sinful condition (Genesis 3:7). God was clearly advocating the treatment of mankind as His own puppets when He punished us for gaining this open-minded wisdom that he labels as sin. God’s initial intent was for man to comply with His Word without question, since all they knew was His goodness. I reiterate that the Lord God never told Adam and Eve why they were not allowed to eat the forbidden fruit, but only told them that they would be punished, and that is the definition of controlling others with fear. Without the sway of the serpent, we would still be God’s puppets or robots. Yet, Christians hold to the claim that the Lord God is the grantor of free will. 

Conclusion

I cannot come up with a logical reason as to how our planet’s claimed first pair of humans could have been convicted of a crime that did absolutely no harm to anyone or anything, and only gave them the benefit of God’s own wisdom. It is nothing short of manipulative for the Lord God to punish His own creations for their inevitable compliance to temptation. And Him being just and merciful, He then punishes the entire rest of humanity with the inheritance of this ‘sin’. I think it is now safe to say this deduction according to this story: the Lord God is the true creator of sin. Adam and Eve, and the rest of humanity, can only be viewed as victims.