Sündenfall

The Genesis Two story presents a reasonable illustration of how God has guided us. This story potentially addresses other philosophies: that we should be like gods ourselves, and contrariwise that superhuman guidance has already harmed us. Genesis Two provides some nuance against both.

Genesis Two introduces into hunter-gatherer Eden, other animals with some sentience. Among these was a tetrapod serpent. This ancestral dragon - in the myth - believed that he had become wiser than man, although Genesis does not detail how he had come by his wisdom. Out of whatever motive, this yuan-ti advised man - rather, woman - how she might exit the Lower Palaeolithic.

Well... so we did. And the yuan-ti changed too: his seed were doomed to crawl on their bellies, forever. So the myth teaches.

Genesis Two (and the Bible generally) plays loose with this world's chronology, and there never was a talking ophidian race outside Clark Ashton Smith books. The Bible did, however, get a lot right. It even intuited that snakes were upon-a-time more like lizards and crocodiles, with four feet.

Genesis Two introduces that degeneracy is possible. For that, the dragon (besides its other uses for this tale) is an object lesson: the tetrapodophis might have evolved into a reptile with usable hands or even wings, like certain dinosaurs did; but it didn't. In our world, the Australian Aborigine started out in Sahul as not so different from the cunning New Guineans beloved by Jared Diamond. What shipcraft the aborigine had used to settle Sahul, he lost in the Southland. The Tasmanians, they tell us, were worse; they even lost fire and had to institute taboo to share fire to their veriest enemies. And all Europe remembers at least one Dark Age and, in the Balkans, perhaps intuits two more.

Genesis Two at the same time, if not calling us degenerate, is of two minds about the direction of our progress. It moots that progress isn't good for its own sake.

To that, our ethnography proposes other directions of progress. To return to New Holland, the Aborigines might have developed a certain agriculture, like their cousins in the New World: through turning the landscape into a game-park. In effect: the Aborigines, Amazonians, and many North Americans re-created Eden as Dreamtime. In our day Richard Manning has argued we had been better off to stay in such environments and to have left harsher climes to the Neanders.

As for which side the Bible takes: Genesis Two belongs to that larger Book. However we subdivide (or re-edit) this overarching book, as the Christian Bible, as the Samaritan Bible, or even as "J": we have in Genesis Two but Ephrem's foretaste of a world like those in which gods live. Our Eden was metastable; it could not survive much scrutiny. As Tasman and Van Diemen found the Australians, so the serpent found us.

But the Bible gives us hope. Its god didn't choose the Aborigines to guide mankind. He chose Israel. Who was already wandering an urban, Neolithic world. In fact, a literate Bronze Age world: through Moses, later, was divulged Israel's Law.

In Genesis Two the serpent had no interest in bettering us. The Torah, as a whole, presents a better Guide for us, who desires our betterment.