ABSTRACT
The story of mankind’s temptation, seduction, and Fall in the Garden of Eden is puzzling: Yahweh creates a paradise for His children and then adds something that can be best characterized as a time bomb: the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Along with the Tree we find, for good measure, an animal ‘more cunning than the other animals’ (Genesis 3, 1), which will make sure the bomb goes off. The inevitable explosion leaves mankind homeless and mortal; yet at least two major contemporary religions count this story among their basic myths.
