Spaz

I always saw adam and eve as a long drawn out story to illustrate "ignorance is bliss" .

hinduwoman

I read that the whole Fall of Man is actually a representation of man switiching to agricultural life from a nomadic life.
During nomadic life men had a lot less rules, while agricultural life brought a settled society and a whole bunch of problems, not the least of which was working hard to get food ('sweat of one's brows stuff).

Probably women were the first to introduce agriculture, and hence the blame is given to Eve.

Dylan

Whys that?

hinduwoman

agriculture = private proerty, class, hard work.
So blame the person who dreamt it up.

Amaleq13

hinduwoman,



I thought Dylan was asking why you suspect women were the first to introduce agriculture.

Is it because they tended to stay home while the men went out hunting?

capnkirk

For many years, the only allegorical interpretation that I had heard (and thought reasonable) was that it symbolized the birth of sentience. It is sentience that (until recently) was considered to be digital (i.e. either you were a sentient species, or you weren't), and that humans were unique in all nature as the only sentient creatures.

Sentience is symbolized as "the knowledge of good and evil", and is definitely a prerequisite for such knowledge.

The "Garden of Eden" was he symbolic representation of the "harmony of nature", so the simple translation of the allegory was that "The sentience that gives us dominion over all other species also separates us from the harmony of Nature" that they live in.

In later years as I began to delve much more deeply into the evolution of religious thought and the evolution of human cultures, I came to understand that it is much more likely that the present form of the A&E myth was a defense against the assimilation of Jews into the worship of Ishtar (Ironically, this was a problem in Babylon during the Exile at a time when Judaism was trying to reestablish its Mosaic roots, but was being assailed on all sides by the prevailing regional religions.). I don't think that it is coincidental that the (female) priests of Ishtar utilized (the venom of) serpents (considered to be the keepers/bearers of esoteric knowledge) to read oracles while sitting under the sacred tree of knowledge.

Eve was thus cast as the metaphoric representation of the Priests of Ishtar, who with their Sacred Tree and serpents claimed the ability to read oracles. She was depicted as gullible and foolish, just as the Jewish Elders desired that the priests be seen so as to discourage further defections (from Judaism, cast as the metaphoric representation of the "Garden") to the worship of the Goddess Ishtar.

After the Exile, the threat diminished and was forgotten, but the myth remained...awaiting new interpretations.

Babylon Sister

Just guessing, but it's probably more because women were, for the most part, the plant gatherers. They were probably more likely to notice more about how plants grow, when they grow and where they grow.

It's not a big leap to go from gathering plant foods and materials to cultivating plant foods and materials.

capnkirk

Sorry, but all this discussion fails to address the chronological relationship between the agricultural revolution(AR) >10,000 years ago, the emigration of Abraham from Ur (4000 years ago), the "Garden of Eden" myth recorded in Gilgamesh (5-6000 years ago), the birth of Judaism (32-3300 years ago), and the biblical version that can be traced back only so far as the Exile (2600 years ago).

IMHO, the agricultural revolution allegory theme is much more likely to be a contemporary attempt to make sense of the myth than for it to have been first written with that in mind. Since the AR preceded Abraham by 6000 years, and the Gilgamesh epic (containing the reference to a "Garden of Eden" and probably known to Abraham) contained nothing of Eve nor of temptation, nor of God's prohibition of the eating the fruit of some tree, it is not realistic to think that Abraham or even the post-Exodus Jews posessed the A&E story in anything like its present form. Through the first half of the OT era, the Hebrews were primarily nomadic shepherds in a society that had long-since become agricultural-based. The first Jewish 'cities' (the most definitive artifact of conversion to agriculture) didn't appear until Saul's time at the earliest, or more reasonably, King David's. Such is not fertile ground for the creation of an allegorical myth blaming woman for being cast out of the hunter-gatherer "Eden". I think one must look elsewhere to find reasonable context.