sabalseed

Id think much older than the bible if i take the allegory correctly.

Zeichman

Most scholars identify the Adam and Eve story as part of the "J" source and thus put it usually in the 10th century, though there has been a tendency to date J later as of late. Non-radical critics, from what I understand, date J to immediately after the fall of Israel at the latest, though consensus places it well before then.

What's the allegory you have in mind, if I might ask?

Jack the Bodiless

There is a Sumerian prototype, described here.

FreezBee

I would say that the answer depends on, what you are actually asking about

There are certainly old elements in the story, and it's difficult to assign a definite time to its current form. In Genesis 3:20, "Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all living." This is usually the epithet of the goddess Asherah, who was worshipped in the shape of a live tree or a woodden rod in stone basement. Since the text claims Eve to be the wife of Adam, we might also note that "baal" is Hebrew for "husbond". All in all we might be dealing with a historicised myth, originally about Baal and Asherah, but here converted to a story about the first humans. This insicates to me a somewhat late composition, but a specific time is hard to supply. I don't recall the story to be referred to anywhere else in the OT, so probably a very late composition. Note here that Genesis 1:26-28 simply mentions humans in general with no indication of a specific beginning pair, and the blessing in v. 28 carries easily over to Genesis 9:1, which may well the original continuation, again indicating a very late composition of the Adam and Eve story.

Yes, if we knew what allegory you are hinting at, then we might be able to better say whether that indicates the time of composition or not, so please do inform us :grin:


- FreezBee

sabalseed

My allegory is this,that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil means human intelligence.Once we had these concepts we werent just apes following instincts.We could understand what we did.Hitting your companion over the head till he quit moving was no longer just aggressive behavior,it was murder.Humans realizing that actions have consequence and that everything is not automatically fine.This changed man and made him aware that evil existed,so he felt separatedfrom the natural world(god) and thats what sin is.Id think this idea,in different forms,would show up in the earliest stories of many cultures.