The first 3 chapters of Genesis

The problem here is that you're approching Genesis as if it was a historical incident. We know it didn't happen - there was never a time when there were only two homo sapiens on earth - so we have to look at it as literature.The first question would be: Did the authors believe they were recording a historical incident or were they just trying to explain the status quo?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

What does that have to do with anything?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Then answer the question: Did the authors intend it as history or as an explanation?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

That's exactly what I have been doing all along. It wouldn't. Are you saying that Huck Finn isn't an allusion to life? What forces you to decide if a text is historical or fictional?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

I'm not interested in what the story claims to be. Treasure Island claims to be a historical narrative too.Once again ,the question is: What evidence do you have to indicate that the authors of Genesis intended the Adam and Eve story to be taken historically?Did they really believe in talking snakes? Did they really believe that two individuals can comprise a viable gene pool?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

That's just the point. If it's an explanation, then nothing "happened" in the story. If Adam and Eve were not real people, then they could not have been "punished". Their "punishment" would have to be an explantion for the status quo.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

From the first line:

quote:

---

SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17”, and go back to the time when my father kept the 'Admiral Benbow' inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

---

It's considerably more explicit than Genesis. Again I give you Tresure Island. It claims to be a historical narrative. The author intended it as a fictional entertainment.Hint: Part of the fiction is the claim of historicity.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

But it isn't a real "punishment". What does the "punishment" really mean?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Have you forgotten your own OP already?

quote:

---

I'm interested in interpretation generally and in what appear to me the bizarre interpretations I've been reading lately about what actually happens in this story.

---

How can we discuss interpretation unless we discuss meaning?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Then your criticism of the "bizarre interpretations" seems out of line, since those interpretations are based on meaning.If you want to take 1984 or The Brothers Karamazov as simple comic-book fare, you're welcome to do so, but it seems like a waste of a thread.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

I don't think anybody is "twisting" anything.I notice that Percy reads in a lot of "implications" that aren't really there, but you don't seem to have a problem with that. Yet I approach the story without preconceived "implications" and you call that a "bizarre interpretation".The facts of the story include:

1. Women have pain in childbirth.
2. People work hard for a living.
3. People don't like snakes.

None of those facts indicate a change in circumstances.Any pre-existing circumstances are not part of the story. They may be "implied" - i.e. part of some people's preconceived notions - but they are not among the facts of the story.Edited by Ringo, : Spellling.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Of course not.Eve hadn't had any children yet. How could pain in childbirth be a change? They had been placed in the garden for the express purpose of tending it. How could growing their own food be a change? That's just your preconceived notion.(And how come you get to talk about "the whole point" but I don't?)

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Eve had had no children. There can not be a "change" before the first child.
What part of that do you not understand?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

So you think God says, "Well, Eve, you would have delivered your baby without pain, but now...."Is that it?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

But that's just silly.What kind of a "punishment" was it if Eve had nothing to compare it to? It's like telling a three-year-old, "I was going to let you drive the car, but now you'll have to wait for years and years and years."Where's the punishment?I'm beginning to wonder if you only brought this up so you could make God look like an idiot.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC