Genesis: Chapter Three (The Fall of Man)

In which humans learn right from wrong and God hates them for it.

The first verse of this chapter says, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made." This verse leads into an entire chapter which suggests to me that God is not infallible as many Christians would have you believe. Follow my logic here. God created serpents, right? And if so, God must have made them crafty.

So in 3:2, the serpent tries to convince the unnamed woman to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The woman makes an all-too-common argument to the serpent: "God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.'" This tree is supposed to be a Tree of Knowledge, yet she acts like it's actually the Tree of Smallpox. After all, God did tell them that they "will surely die" if they eat the fruit. She is rightfully afraid.

But she reasons, and in 3:6, the woman sees three benefits to eating the fruit: it's food, it looks good, and it will bring her knowledge. So she eats it, and so does Adam, apparently without putting up a fight. This is another case of a person just doing what someone else tells them to do without thinking about it. The woman barely even argues with the serpent, only acknowledging that God said, "No," which reminds me of a great album.

After chowing down, Adam and the unnamed woman see that they are nude (3:7), something which they apparently couldn't figure out before, and fashion fig leaf clothing for themselves to avoid further embarrassment.

By the time we reach 3:11, God has discovered that Adam and his woman are no longer naked, and complains: "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?" So the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil gave humans the knowledge of simple opposite relationships, and God thinks it's the end of paradise. Actually, God makes it the end of paradise to appropriately match his immediate reaction.

Throughout verses 3:14-19, God rages and punishes both serpents and humans alike with the following stipulations:

• Serpents are cursed more than all other livestock and animals.
• Serpents are now destined to "crawl on [their] belly" and "eat dust" forever more.
• Serpents and humans no longer get along, and humans will "crush [serpents'] head" and serpents will "strike [man's] heel".
• Human childbirth is now more painful.
• Women are now subservient to men.
• Man must now toil all day in the sun to produce vegetation to eat, but the ground will produce thorny plants that are difficult to kill and dispose of, like thistles, and things which man cannot eat.
• Man will now eat food until he dies ("By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.")

That's quite a list, and it logically follows that the following statements are true:

• Serpents were not cursed before this incident.
• Before this incident, serpents did not crawl on their bellies. They had legs or something, which seems unlikely.
• Human childbirth was not going to be painful, but we can't prove that since Adam's woman had never conceived or birthed a child beforehand. The skeptic in me thinks God probably made childbirth painful from the get-go, but just never mentioned it.
• Women were not subservient to men beforehand, but we have other evidence from the Bible saying that they really were (see Chapter Two). God really likes to say things that aren't true and tell people they're the truth.
• God had not created things like thistles and weeds before now. Before, plants just grew, but now they need help from humans to survive. Tell that to things like wild strawberries and rosemary and banana trees (which I can't seem to ever kill no matter how hard I try and no matter how many machetes I swing at them).
• Man didn't eat food before, which is a contradiction to previous passages where God tells them to eat of all the plants in the garden. Really, this statement isn't so untruthful, though. I mean, men always eat. So do women. We eat two to five times a day. Sometimes more.

Adam finally gives his wife a name in 3:20, "Eve," since "she would become the mother of all the living." The Internet tells me that Eve is derived from one of two Hebrew words, one meaning "to breathe" and the other meaning "to live." So this makes a certain amount of etymological sense.

Finally, in 3:23-24, God banishes the humans from the Garden of Eden and prevents them from ever coming back by putting angels with flaming swords a-swingin' in front of it. He's not kidding around this time.

The anger and retaliation that God shows here sounds a lot like 'roid rage or alcoholic meanness. But I can't really blame Adam and Eve for this. Let's go back to my argument at the beginning of this post:

This verse leads into an entire chapter which suggests to me that God is not infallible as many Christians would have you believe. Follow my logic here. God created serpents, right? And if so, God must have made them crafty.

God created the Tree in question. God created man in such a way that man was easily convinced by talking serpents, since God knowingly removed knowledge from them and then put that knowledge directly in man's face, dangling it like a carrot before a horse. God also created talking serpents that would try to convince man to do things. So it seems like God set himself up for failure. He created everything that led to human disobedience. So why is he so angry with Adam and Eve and the serpent? A psychologist might say that God was really angry at himself, but unwilling to punish himself out of a false belief that he is infallible. In other words, God was projecting. Something tells me this isn't the last time we'll see this kind of activity. I look forward to reading about Babel and the Great Flood.

What staggers me most about this tale is that God lied to man. He told Adam and Eve that the fruit would kill them, but it didn't. Instead, it was God who made men mortal. Neither Adam nor Eve died from eating the fruit. They die in later chapters because God made them mortal. Why should anybody trust God when one of the first things he does to human beings is tell them a very big lie?

God shows a great desire for punishment here. Disobedience leads him to curl his fists up into balls, jump up and down, stamp his feet, and then punish humans and serpents in a method where the punishment hardly fits the crime. You ate fruit? Everyone who ever lives after you will be in unbearable pain when they reproduce! That's not smart. That leaves very little incentive to be fruitful and multiply. It's almost as if, lost in the throes of a temper tantrum, God has forgotten to be logical.

Something tells me this will not be the last time God overreacts.

Chapter Four