[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by powderjunkie

Exactly. The lesson is that women are sub-human trash but it's their own damn fault.

Well, no. That is not the message.

Originally Posted by GreenLantern2814

That’s certainly one way you could interpret it. Though it’s not like Adam comes off any better in the story - as soon as God asks him if he ate the apple, he sells out his wife. He comes off as quite pathetic.

The moral of the story is, ultimately, that life isn’t a walled garden where you can fritter your days away naked without a care in the world. Life is dangerous and complicated in ways you can’t begin to comprehend, and it will get you if you don’t keep your eyes open and pay attention.

That is not really it either, although this reading is certainly more thoughtful and creative. In the first place, there was no "apple" in the story; it is the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and missing this detail really misses a substantial chunk of what this story is actually about. Moreover, Adam and Eve were never "frittering their days away naked without a care in the world." In Gen 2:15 the man is explicitly charged with "serving and keeping" the Garden that God had planted. In other words, Adam and Eve had vocations—they were set in the Garden with a purpose: to look after it, and to protect it. Also, the couple's nakedness is significant, but not as a demonstration of their complacency or ignorance, but rather as an indication that they were on some level divine. The serpent-creature also is divine, being "more clever (or naked) than all the animals" in the Garden (הָיָה עָרוּם מִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה; Gen 3:1) This aspect of the story is more clearly obvious when it is compared to the story of Enkidu and Gilgamesh. And I don't get what "paying attention" has anything at all to do with the story. While there is certainly a mortal change that occurs as a result of eating the fruit, and having their "eyes opened," this has to do with the acquisition of knowledge, insight and sexuality.

There’s a cost to paying attention too, of course; you’re no longer ensconced in blissful ignorance, you can’t pretend the world is harmless and there exclusively for your personal pleasure, you have to get up in the morning and go to work.

It sucks. And yet, it’s life.

Except that the Garden was never intended for Adam and Eve's personal pleasure. If anything Eden is God's garden, and Adam, Eve and the domesticated animals are there solely for the purpose of keeping and maintaining it. The garden itself is an urban landscape, more comparable to the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and within the story it is also an analogue for the Temple in Jerusalem—the message here is one of servitude in keeping God's house. Ultimately, it is a story of rebellion and ambition, and the grave consequences for pursuing outside one's divinely mandated station. It is a story of sexuality, and the complicated and mysterious roles for men and women in a gendered society.