Free to eat, free to be

In case you want to read it for yourself, you can find the story in the second chapter of the very first book of the Bible. Like any good story it has characters, a plot, tension, and as we're so used to today, an unsatisfactory ending. You see, that was nothing that Hollywood thought up, even if they like to think they did.

It's a relatively simple story. There are only four characters: the creator of the universe (more specifically, the garden in which the story takes place), a serpent-like creature (who can, however, walk and talk), and a unsuspecting heroine/hero pair, Adam & Eve. The plot is rather simple as well. The one in charge of the garden is very pleased with both the garden and its new tenants and he gives them the absolute run of the place ... except, well, for one particular tree in the middle of the garden, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: if they eat from that, the one in charge says, they'll die.

The conflict in the story is not long in coming. Before you know it, one day while out and about, the snake-like character tells Eve that they can eat the fruit from the forbidden tree; they had been fed a line of BS. They could eat it and they wouldn't die. Well, to make a short story shorter, Eve eats, passes the fruit to Adam who eats, and lo, and behold, nobody drops dead. We've now got a bit of a dilemma.

Adam & Eve are, we should know, different after eating than before. We're told they're ashamed they're naked and hide themselves, and when the one in charge comes around and finds out what they've been up to, there's a lot of yelling, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, for the snake-like guy gets his feet (and voice) taken away, and everybody is thrown out of the garden. Poor Adam & Eve are now forced to work for a living. (I told you it ended poorly.)

The question for me is: what's this story about? We all know that it has been used in any number of unsatisfactory ways: as the source of Original Sin (a theological interpretation), the justification for the suppression of women (a sociological interpretation), and for the rebellious and aggressive nature of human beings (a psychological interpretation). It is all those, and all the others we've dreamed up in the meantime, that I'd like to ignore for now, and just go back to the story itself.