Decoding the Story of Adam & Eve

I once asked an older, wiser man and furthermore a very religious one if he believed the Bible was literally true.  His response was ‘yes, everything besides Genesis and Revelations’.  Indeed, when you look at the first and especially last books of the Bible, it's obvious that they’re largely symbolic in nature.  Revelations is the recounting of a divinely-inspired hallucination.  Meanwhile, Genesis harps back to a time when detailed information was relayed orally rather than being written down.

The Bible is a complex collection of books, and ultimately I would agree that the New Testament is more pertinent on the Old.  As perennial sinners, knowing how to rectify our relationship with the Lord is of greater importance than being versed in the religious/spiritual history of Ancient Israel.  But at the same time, the Bible is so long and complex that it’s easy for readers to get ahead of themselves.

For example, the story Adam & Eve is loaded with innuendos when it comes to the nature of male/female relationships (amongst other things).  One thing virtually all of us have in common is the experience of marriage, whether formal, informal or what have you.  Adam & Eve never walked down an aisle or signed licenses, yet they were still very much married.

I’m not a victim of naturalistic fallacy.  But I do believe, logically speaking, that early man was closer to the source, if you will, then we are.  According to Genesis, God interacted with Adam & Eve directly,  which is a privilege that most of us will never even come to close to experiencing in the natural world.

The media likes to portray our earliest ancestor as living in caves and being animal-like, which they probably were if they were Neanderthals.  But most human beings weren’t on it like that.  Or earliest ancestors were hunter/gatherers, not cave dwellers.  Nor were they running around in the wild, grunting like apes.

I’m not convinced, at all, that modern man is more intelligent than our earliest ancestors.  Wiser, more technologically advanced?  Sure.  More intelligent?  I strongly doubt it.

It’s more like different groups of people, in one respect or another, lost their way.  That’s an idea also touched upon in the story of Adam & Eve.  Even if you begin in the presence of the Lord Himself, that doesn’t mean you’re going to end there.

WHY DID SATAN TARGET EVE INSTEAD OF ADAM?

It’s obvious that the goal of the Serpent was to get both Adam and Eve to eat the fruit, against the order of the Most High.  Lucifierians may argue that he did so in the name of enlightening mankind.  But it’s more likely he wanted to just piss God off and cause us to slip up.  Even though man left the encounter more aware, there’s no indicate that we became more intelligent in the process.

ADAM & EVE - THE ONLY PEOPLE EVER TO LIVE UNDER A SINGLE LAW

Lucifierians believe that “the knowledge of good and evil” made us more liberated, which all factors considered doesn’t really make sense.  According to Genesis it was God, not the devil, who gave us free will.  Adam & Eve were told not to eat the fruit, but it wasn't like He actually prevented them from doing so.

Indeed, Adam and Eve were freer than any of us will ever be.  How?  They were the only people in the history of the world who lived under just one single law, which was not to eat the fruit.  “The knowledge of good and evil”, i.e. us resultantly knowing right and wrong, contributed to the legal systems that have been developed since.

Mosaic law, which came about approximately 3,000 years after Adam, consists of over 600 commandments.  That’s besides other minutiae which for instance led the Apostle Paul to contend that it's impossible to keep the entirety of the (Mosaic) Law.

In the modern world, in the United States for example, we live under so many laws that the amount of statutes can be considered literally innumerable, with new restrictions being added all the time.  It has been “suggested that our laws have become so complex and unknowable that pretty much everyone unintentionally commits…” “several federal crimes [a] day”.  There are “2 million to 3 million words of new federal law each year”, besides those we have to observe at the state and local levels.

Even the Code of Hammurabi, a well-known set of statutes that preceded the days of Moses, consisted of nearly 300 laws.  Possessing “the knowledge of good and evil” has been an ever-increasing burden on mankind, one in which Adam & Eve ended up basically being tricked into enslaving us all, in a manner of speaking.

To say that they somehow became more liberated after eating the fruit, all things considered, doesn’t make logical sense.  They instantly realized they were naked, besides being cast out of the Garden of Eden.  That doesn’t sound like liberation or the increased exercising of free will.  Taking everything into consideration, it rather sounds like we became more limited.

SATAN TARGETS EVE INSTEAD OF ADAM

I find it interesting that the serpent chose to tempt Eve, rather than going to Adam.  If this concept of ‘the man being the head of the woman’ is or was actually true, then you would think Satan should have rather gone after Adam to subsequently convince Eve.

Interesting to note is that the well-known Greek myth of Pandora’s Box also credits “the first woman” with unintentionally unleashing evil onto the world.  And like Eve, Pandora was compelled to do so due to curiosity, though Eve was also tempted through by what may beloosely described as vanity and a thirst for power.

My argument is that women are more prone to entertain the devil to begin with.  The reason the Serpent didn’t go to Adam is because he would probably said “oh sh*t, a talking serpent” and smashed its head in.  I’m being humorous here, but I think you get the point.  Adam was obviously less inclined to disobey God than Eve was.  Satan likely knew this, which is why he went to Eve instead, to rather convince Adam.  Indeed, when they ended up getting busted, Adam blamed Eve (and indirectly God), not Satan for his transgression.

THERE’S NOTHING MORE APPEALING TO MEN THAN WOMEN

I had a wiser, older man once tell me that there’s only two things in the world that commonly destroy men.  Those two things, according to the homey, are drugs and women.  Within the context of this discussion, that latter observation is quite interesting, considering that women were rather created, according to story of Adam & Eve, to help men.

The wisdom of Satan supersedes that of men, even after us eating the apple.  He knew that Eve was Adam’s weakness - the one thing, more than any prospect of personal gain or other satisfaction, that could make him disobey God.  And those types of dynamics persist to this day.

There is nothing that can convince a man to sell his soul, i.e. go against what he personally believes in, more consistently than trying to please or keep a woman.  Many of us do this without even realizing it.  We may complain that, because of the woman, we are forced to do this or that, but it’s the same way that Eve forced Adam, if you will.  In other words, it’s not like anyone has a gun to our heads.  Rather, we consider having peace with and the loyalty of the woman we love as being so important that we will often sacrifice our souls, so to speak, in the name of maintaining romantic relationships.  And even these playas, those who profess 'money over b*tches', often adopt such dispositions in the name of attracting or sleeping with more women.

The goal here isn’t to bash women or to judge anybody.  I’m not a woman hater.  But the concept of ‘the man being the head of the woman’ is overrated and has been, to varying degrees, taken out of context.  If we were to go back to the story of Adam & Eve, women becoming the underlings of men was not by the original design of God.  Rather, it was another one of the aftereffects of eating from “the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”.

EVE WAS AT LEAST EQUAL TO ADAM

Genesis 3:16 clearly states that patriarchy, i.e. the worldwide system of male dominance over women, is the result of Eve being cursed, not any type of natural order originally ordained by God.  According to this decree, women were made subject to their husbands, besides being obsessed with them, so to speak.

If we were to loosely interpret Genesis 2, the implication, if anything, is that women are superior to men rather than vice versa.  God created man and saw that he did not have ‘a suitable helper’.  But as for woman, she didn’t need anything after being created.  It was after making Eve, not Adam, that Creation was actually completed.  And it’s interesting because, physical-strength factors aside, women actually appear to be more independent than men.  “A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife”, not the other way around.

I know that isn’t perfect logic in arguing that women may be naturally superior to men.  But the  main point being made, to reiterate, is that women being relegated to a secondary status is the result of a curse, not the intended will of God.  I bet Eve wasn’t anticipating that when she let Satan convince her to eat the apple.  And what is being strongly implied through the story of Adam & Eve is that they were very much akin to equals, or the woman being even more self-reliant than the man prior to the Fall.  Again, Satan approached Eve, not Adam.

CONCLUSION

The story of Adam & Eve and all that it entails is one of the most interesting and pertinent in the Bible.  With the arrival of subsequent characters like Abraham, Moses and Jesus, the significance of the Biblical progenitors of mankind has sorta been lost in the sauce.  But their tale is replete with innuendos to a much greater degree than the more literal stories that came later down the line.  And in the grand scheme of things, their actions have affected us all.

We’d be probably walking around naked, like small innocent children, if not for Adam & Eve partaking of the fruit.  I’m not being literal but trying to make a point.  We are now stuck in a cycle, both personally and collectively, of having to perpetually eat from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil”.  Meanwhile, it concurrently appears that human society, i.e. the way we treat each other, is getting progressively worse.

So one has to question the value of “the knowledge of good and evil”.  And again, I’m not being literal.  I’m not saying to conduct yourself like a dumbass who isn’t aware of right from wrong.  If you do, the innumerable laws that mankind now lives under will eventually slap you back into place anyway.  So perhaps the ultimate lesson to be derived from the story of Adam & Eve is it being eternally unwise to disobey the Most High to begin with.