I left off talking about the "blame game," where Adam blames Eve for his disobedience, Eve blames the serpent for her disobedience, and God begins to dish out the curses.
In Genesis 3:14-24, God begins by cursing the serpent, the serpent is "cursed...above all livestock." The serpent will now have to crawl on its belly, women and snakes will apparently hate one another, and the offspring of the woman will crush the snake's head - while the serpent will strike the woman's offspring's heel.
This curse seems to go from literal to metaphor. We all know that snakes crawl around on their bellies (which doesn't seem like much of a punishment compared to what humans got), so that seems kind of literal. However, not all women hate snakes - so that can't be literal. And there is not literal way to interpret the woman's offspring crushing the snake's head, while the snake strikes his heel. Unless we are merely talking about the fact that men kill snakes all the time.
My assumption has always been that Satan entered a serpent and got him to trick Eve. But why are all snakes punished to crawl because of the demon-possession of one snake, hundreds of thousands of years ago? Why did Satan choose a snake, when He could have chosen any other animal?
And this brings me to another point - we always assume that Satan has possessed this snake and caused it to tempt Eve, but the Bible never actually says that. In fact, the Bible says that "the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made (Gen 3:1)." So, according to the Bible - Satan was not Eve's tempter. A wild animal was.
How did this snake become evil? How was an evil snake able to enter a (presumably) perfect garden? Does any of this give weight to the idea that sin and evil existed in the earth before Adam and Eve disobeyed?
To Eve, God cursed her so that she will have pains in childbearing -again, how does the punishment fit the crime? And does this curse mean that she'd already had easy deliveries? If so, who were her other children? How many of them did she have? God's other punishment was that Eve's desire would be for her husband, and that her husband should rule over her. Is it possible that, because of this, God views men and women as unequal? Or does this have more to do with sexual and romantic desire, where it seems that women are always searching for a man and doing whatever they can to appear more beautiful and arousing, while men can (it seems, sometimes) non-chalantly begin and end relationships with no emotional, social, or physical consequences?
And Adam will only be able to eat through hard labor. This punishment is the only one that seems to fit, because it has to do with eating what comes from the earth and how that food is provided. Before this, God allowed the earth to just grow food and Adam could eat any of it. Now that Adam has eaten the one thing God told him not to eat, it is as if God is saying, "Fine then. Grow your own food." God also curses Adam with death, which somehow transfers over to Eve and all of creation, as well.
Adam names his wife Eve, saying that she would become the mother of all the living. This implies not only that Adam and Eve had no children yet, but that God was not making other people elsewhere, either.
God makes clothes for Adam and Eve - because the leaves they'd sewn together clearly were not good enough. God makes clothes out of animal skins. Could this be the first time in the Bible where one of God's creations dies? Obviously, we can get the skin of the animal without killing it (think of shearing a sheep?) But we do not know how God came by this animal skin.
Finally, God desires to keep Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of life and becoming immortal. There is no mention here that humans will now be inherently sinful, nor are Adam and Eve ever reported to have repented. They are, however, forced to leave the garden and that will be where we enter into the psuedopigraphia entitled "The Forgotten Books of Adam and Eve."
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