ABSTRACT
The myth of the creation of human beings – of Adam and Eve – their sin and their banishment from the garden of Eden explains the human condition in terms of a series of transformations. Most of these transformations are indicated in God’s speech to the serpent and to the first human couple:
The story serves to describe the world as we actually experience it: the snake is a creeping creature without limbs; the Woman has to submit to patriarchal authority and to months of child-bearing, culminating often painfully in giving birth; the
Man has to do the hard labour of cultivating the soil; men and women wear clothes – in this case, these are imagined to have been made from furs (a fine example of how an ancient people imagined the life of their remote ancestors); no one has access to the abode of God which is thought of as a pleasant garden (garden of Eden translates as garden of Pleasure). This is how the world is – how our world is. However, how different it must have been at an earlier stage, ‘in the beginning’! Men and women did not wear clothes, but were naked; the snake was no bad animal and not poisonous; the simple gathering of food was not hard and tiresome, and so on.
